Explosive Expansion in MOQ Agendas Shifts Next-Gen Streaming to Faster Track

Oracle, Akamai, Red5 Reveal Details Pointing to Strategic Coopetition

By Fred Dawson

As expected, last month’s IBC show in Amsterdam unveiled a wave of expanded commitments to the MOQ streaming platform from hyperscalers Oracle and Akamai as well as many other entities large and small.

But there were many surprises beyond what we reported in advance of the show, including the fact that one of the leading platform suppliers, Red5, and, on a separate track, the global streaming operator Globecast are planning commercial MOQ operations by year’s end, whether or not the foundational MOQ Transport (MOQT) specifications are frozen by that time as expected by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

“Right now we have support for version 18 of the IETF spec with several customized features in our beta,” said Red5 CEO and co-founder Chris Allen. “Since we designed our libraries to easily switch version implementations, we can add features and remove our custom implementations of things like ad insertion as they come out, and thus we will be in sync with the rest of the MOQ market as others move to commercialization. Because of this level of agility we figured there’s no reason to wait.”

That stance contrasts with other key players, most of whom are looking at early spring as the timeframe for commercial rollout as they continue building solutions that will cover all the bases, often in managed-service environments, to make implementation of MOQ streaming much easier than has been the case with conventional Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) streaming. Speaking on background ahead of an anticipated announcement slated for late October or early November, a top executive at Globecast agreed that, with the ability to leverage MOQ implementations based on the lasted MOQT versions, there’s no need to wait.

“What we’ve seen in tests with our CDN partner demonstrates that the efficiencies we’re going to be getting with MOQ streaming will be cutting 30% to 35% from our opex costs,” he said. “That’s all you need to know to make MOQ a go in the environment we’re currently in.”

And then there’s the functional flexibility, as noted by Damien Sterkers, vice president of products and solutions marketing at Broadpeak. “MOQ gives us one single protocol for streaming all video applications,” Sterkers said. “Imagine you have a streaming service where you can mix programs on the same transport platform, adding real-time for watch parties or to bring in commentary from influencers, while maintaining broadcast-level latency with the core content.”

Broadpeak is all in at this stage of MOQ experimentation with a highly flexible approach on its CDN infrastructure that will be productized as soon as one of its tire-kickers is ready to go public, Sterkers said. “It really depends on how much people want to spend on latency optimization,” he added. “But with MOQ they can do a lot more natively.”

Indeed, it was doing a lot more natively, especially in sports and other live-streamed services, that people at IBC repeatedly referenced as the reason the next-gen protocol is taking off across the M&E industry. As is now more widely understood, MOQT for the first time defines a single standardized streaming foundation that delivers support for:

• Unlimited scalability with synchronized receptivity across all end points,

• Independently manageable tracks comprising any given MOQ stream that can enablepersonalized feature and advertising flexibility along with interactive data and video applications,

• Multiple end-to-end latency options from sub-500ms to multi seconds with minimal quality tradeoffs from one level to the next up and down ABR ladders that streamers can set at any chosen latency tier.

Proof of Concept: Mission Accomplished

Proof that all this is possible stems from beta testing, often at global scales, that’s been underway much of this year and, in some cases, last year as well by service providers worldwide. They’ve been leveraging MOQ Relay-equipped CDNs operated by Cloudflare, Akamai, CDN77, Vindral, Broadpeak, Netskrt, CacheFly and others in conjunction with a host of software solutions ranging from the comprehensive network-orchestration and media-layer support provided on the CacheFly network by Red5 to incremental elements like the player and encoding support provided by Bitmovin, content protection from EZDRM, contribution playout enabled by Quortex, encoding by Ateme, and much else from many others. 

Support for MOQ relay environments serving as proving grounds has not only demonstrated the technology works as billed. It has proved to hyperscalers Oracle and AWS and to Akamai in its position as a successor to traditional hyperscaling focused on a global edge footprint that the market really wants and is ready to pay for what MOQ delivers.

“The streaming industry has come a long way,” said Arvind Suryakumar, director of software engineering at Oracle Media Services (OMS). “But with all the things added over time, there are a lot of interlocking pieces, which makes it difficult to scale things up. MOQ allows broadcasters and streamers to achieve new efficiencies by building more streamlined approaches from the ground up.”

In Akamai’s case, getting to this point was no slam dunk, even though Will Law, chief architect for the cloud technology group at Akamai, has been a leading force behind MOQ spec development. At IBC Law made clear that Akamai, after mounting MOQ relays across its CDN footprint for free use in testing by service providers over the past year, is now all in with plans to be commercially engaged as a major player in the MOQ ecosystem.

“The industry is getting excited about this,” Law said. “We’re going to roll out MOQ services in beta and hope to be commercial by NAB in April.” The strategy is to make Akamai’s global cloud compute platform, which, as previously reported, has been positioned to compete with traditional hyperscalers, a resource for MOQ processing that’s available to everyone, including competitors to its CDN operations.

As for finalization of specifications, “December is still a good target for MOQT,” Law said. “We’ve closed 912 categories with 92 to go as still open issues.” But he stressed testing can proceed with interoperability across multiple infrastructures as long as providers are in compliance with the latest versions of MOQT, including drafts 16, 18 and 20. “And 21 is now out,” he added.

IETF has also made substantial progress with streaming format specifications, including the MOQ Streaming Format encompassing “everything you need with modern media delivery,” CMSF for those who want to pursue distribution based on the Common Media Application Format (CMAF), and Low Overhead MOQ offering an approached stripped of elements that might be superfluous to some agendas, Law noted. Now, he added, it’s down to the details of getting vendor support for MOQ-optimized encoders, content protection systems, packagers, players – “everything that retrieves and plays MOQ content.” But, based on what he was seeing before and during IBC, Law was confident “there will be lots of people who make it simple.”

Steps to Building a Globally Operational MOQ Ecosystem

So now comes the heavy lifting that brings all this together in a coherent MOQ ecosystem. For the booming but margin-squeezed live streaming market, getting there is mission critical.

This is an end-to-end endeavor involving every point in the content supply chain, a fact that’s often overlooked with all the attention that’s been focused on MOQ’s role in streamlining and enhancing distributed stream flows. The truth is, there’s no place where video streamed over IP can’t benefit from the use of MOQ.

For example, as demonstrated at IBC by Quortex, the former Synamedia Network Division that was sold to Lumine Group earlier this year, MOQ can play an important role in producers’ contribution playouts to affiliated distributors. Quortex, which is now listed in Synamedia’s place as a founding member of the influential OpenMOQ Consortium, is totally committed to bringing MOQ into the contribution space, according to chief technologist Gwendal Simon.

Simon explained that MOQ contribution support has been incorporated into the company’s multitrack contribution management platform PowerVu, which works as a hybrid distribution control plane to provide a single operational view across satellite, IP, CDN and emerging delivery networks. “If you’re, say, running a TV channel in the U.S. and you need to deliver programming to service provider affiliates as well as online outlets like Roku and YouTube, PowerVu lets you play that channel out matched to the format and metadata requirements of each recipient,” Simon said. “This gives broadcasters an open, standard transport for primary distribution over IP, just in time for the C-band transition in the US.”

Each affiliate subscribes only to the tracks it actually needs, he said, noting this makes regionalization a subscription decision rather than a separate encode and cuts bandwidth that would otherwise be spent pushing feeds nobody watches. “In the case of MOQ, we support delivery in low-overhead containers in either CMAF for OTT distribution or MPEG TS for MVPDs,” he said, noting that during the IBC show MOQ support in PowerVu 2.0 won CSI Magazine’s award for most innovative product or project.

“We have CDN support for MOQ contribution from several OpenMOQ partners,” Simon added. “Our software improves performance on MOQ relays with the ability to reach 100 Gbps on a regular server, and we also make it easy to ingest analytics into those MOQ streams.”

Adding to MOQ usage versatility on another track, the OpenMOQ Consortium has endorsed the Playa open-software framework developed by Red5 as the repository for building blocks developers can use to create MOQ client players that conform with MOQT specs wherever MOQ is in play, from workstations in live production workflows through the contribution phase and on to distribution across end user devices. “Playa is a developer-friendly sans-io TypeScript library intended to support browser implementations of MOQ in all playback and publishing scenarios,” Chris Allen said.

Similarly, he noted, Red5 has developed a MOQT-compliant open-source native C library known as MOQ5 to provide a foundation for building software stacks that can manage session state, subscriptions, message encoding/decoding, objects, tracks, and much else. Already, he added, MOQ5 is being used to build MOQ support for initiatives leveraging things like Open Broadcast Software (OBS), FFMPEG, GStreamer, iOS, Android, and OEMs’ Smart TV platforms.

The Oracle MOQ Agenda

For Oracle, which made known its new commitment to the M&E market with its first booth presence at a major industry trade show, “The big challenge is making sure we don’t get too far out over our skis,” Suryakumar said. “MOQ is going to need a village united behind it. You can’t expect standards bodies to drive the transition.”

Commitment to MOQ support is part of how the OMS team is fulfilling the company’s M&E mandate, which as we reported in the previously cited article, starts at the top with Oracle chairman and co-founder Larry Ellison in conjunction with his son David’s agenda as Paramount Skydance CEO. “At the macro level our leadership has given us a starting point,” Suryakumar said. “Our job has been to figure out how to balance that with what we’re learning about market needs from the ground level.”

Based on feedback from other Oracle sources, getting to a workable strategy has been a matter of intense debate with some staffing turmoil. “The how is the big ambiguity,” Suryakumar acknowledged.

Noting OCI has many customers pursuing or likely to pursue their own MOQ initiatives, he said the discussion has focused on a key question: “Are you going to burn a lot of bridges moving in this direction? We don’t want to do that but wait and see is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you’re not acting, there’s no innovation.”

Taking all this into account, the team has landed on an eclectic, open-market approach to next-gen streaming. The plan as described by Suryakumar and others is to leverage the new Oracle Video Edge (OVE) platform to provide a consolidated managed “large-scale live” service approach to streaming over legacy protocols as well as MOQ while making the OVE and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) available for MOQ service implementations by other entities.

“We’re looking for a two-way business environment so we can avoid being stuck in holes,” he said without committing to how soon all this will come together. “By creating more two-way doors, we’re making it possible for people to experiment with us, and, if they like what they see, we’ll have a cycle of launches.”

At this point, “we have several partnerships materializing really well,” he added. Citing Cloudflare and Akamai as partners on the infrastructure side, he said, “Partners like that give us a fantastic sounding board. We’re taking a MOQ hybrid delivery posture with our managed service working over MOQ relays in CDNs and service provider networks, not just OCI.” This allows Oracle to connect “demand and pipelines” wherever those pipelines have taken Oracle’s “media button” on board to eliminate month-long waits to begin publishing over MOQ.

As described by Oracle documentation, OVE is a media delivery service at the heart of what makes all this possible by providing a purpose-built layer that interoperates with CDNs, ISPs, and existing media stacks to complement the delivery ecosystem. The architecture aligns ingestion, transport, playback, and telemetry into a single operational fabric that can absorb burst demand while maintaining predictable performance and deep visibility.

A Steep Learning Climb on the Road to Coopetion

How far Oracle has gone toward actualizing these capabilities for real-world operations is hard to tell, but we learned from one insider it’s likely to be spring before commercial rollouts begin, hopefully in time for the NAB Show in April. In one indication of where things stand, Canadian CDN operator Netskrt teamed with Oracle to demonstrate an end-to-end MOQ delivery path through coordination between an OVE containerized relay running in Netskrt’s infrastructure and Oracle’s OCI-based relay network.

At an IBC Showcase session, speakers from Paramount, Oracle, Netskrt and Cloudflare described how the demo was created to enable Paramount content flowing through OVE to reach Netskrt endpoints for playback on the Paramount player. As Netskrt co-founder and CEO Siegfried Luft noted, given that large live events require enormous capacity spread across clouds, CDNs, and broadband networks, “a more effective way to work together can help bring content closer to viewers and create a more responsive delivery model for the biggest moments in streaming.”

This type of open-ended approach to running MOQ streaming infrastructure and software platforms has taken hold on multiple fronts as rivals recognize something requiring such a major transformation in operational fundamentals is best accomplished through coopetition. “We understand we all need to move together,” said Reinhard Grandl, chief product officer at streaming platform provider Bitmovin. “We have our own vision, but we need others, including some we compete with.”

Oracle is one of Bitmovin’s partners, he noted, adding “Oracle could be a game changer.” Free of commitments to existing services and relationships built around conventional streaming, Oracle “could be quite annoying for established hyperscalers already in the M&E space,” he said.

But it’s all easier said than done. As previously reported, AWS is one hyperscaler that’s determined to play a leading role as a provider of both cloud compute support for all comers in the MOQ ecosystem and an end-to-end managed service that streamers can activate over its infrastructure. But at IBC we saw how hard getting there can be, even for a unit like AWS Elemental with deep experience in software-based streaming.

The company’s plan was to introduce its move into MOQ support with a demo showing its capabilities. But on the small screen displaying the fruits of the Elemental team’s MOQ labors surrounded by walls of larger screens promoting all the other things AWS was bringing to the M&E industry at IBC, it was clear things hadn’t gone as planned.

A developer speaking on background discussed his struggles putting together a live demonstration of MOQT running on the AWS cloud. It was obvious this included hitting MOQ’s ultralow latency target insofar as the lowest level attained in the demo registered at 1 second as opposed to the 500ms or below widely achieved elsewhere. A planned display of MOQ real-time streaming interactivity proved out of reach in the timeframe the developer had to work with, and he alluded to other issues others have resolved.

But as ever more players climb the MOQ learning curve, it’s clear that, with demand sky high, an ecosystem can be expected to emerge in the year ahead on a scale that allows the industry to move ahead. There’s no better proof of what’s in the offing than what’s been accomplished by Red5.

“We’ve put a lot of work into bringing MOQ into real-world operations over the past year or so,” Chris Allen said. “The cloud resource orchestration architecture we call Experience Delivery Network (XDN), which we originally developed for WebRTC, has to easily add MOQ support to the entire stack.”

“Our goal with all of this has been to make it easy for developers to build MOQ based experiences of all sorts through either our Red5 Cloud SaaS, where we host the infrastructure, or through Red5 Pro, where customers deploy within their own environments,” he added. “Our SDKs can target either of these environments, making this an extremely flexible toolset for real-time development that can be further enhanced with the use of MOQ5, Playa and our other core open-source software elements.”

Arvind Suryakumar, director, software engineering, Oracle Media Services