Live streaming has always been a game of trade-offs. You either had low latency or you had scale. You either had seamless ad delivery or you had complex infrastructure. For years, the industry worked around these limitations rather than solving them.
Two technologies are changing that. Media over QUIC (MoQ) and SCTE-35. And at Ant Media, we're building for both.
Why the old stack is showing its age
Today, most streaming platforms run on one of two protocols. WebRTC for real-time, interactive use cases — think live auctions, one-to-one video, sports betting. And HLS/DASH for large-scale broadcast delivery — think concerts, news channels, OTT platforms.
The problem? WebRTC delivers sub-second interactivity but can be expensive and difficult to scale beyond small audiences. HLS and DASH scale beautifully through HTTP CDNs but introduce latency — in practice, often six seconds or more. Ant Media
Every team building a serious streaming platform eventually hits this wall. You pick one and sacrifice the other.
Enter MoQ — one protocol to do both
MoQ combines the low-latency interactivity of WebRTC, the scalability of HLS/DASH, and the simplicity of a single architecture — all built on a modern transport layer. Medium
It's built on QUIC, the same transport protocol behind HTTP/3. MoQ's choice of QUIC as its transport foundation enables faster connection and retransmission times, organises media into a clean Tracks/Groups/Objects hierarchy, and supports web browsers natively through WebTransport and WebCodecs. Ant Media
What does that mean practically? Sub-second join times and internet-scale fan-out — without maintaining thousands of individual real-time sessions. Concerts, sports broadcasts, and live events where you need sub-second latency for a million simultaneous viewers — a CDN relay model makes this economical. Ant Media
The architecture is also simpler to operate. Relays don't need to understand the media. This makes relay infrastructure far simpler and cheaper than the equivalent WebRTC SFU or HLS origin/packager chain. Fan-out is built into MoQ — one upstream subscription from a relay to a publisher can serve thousands of downstream subscribers. Ant Media
Is MoQ production-ready today? Not fully. WebTransport, which MoQ depends on in browsers, represents a fraction of a percent of web page loads versus WebRTC's stable 0.35%. But the momentum is real — Cloudflare, Akamai, Google, Meta, and Cisco are all invested in the standard. And at Ant Media, we showcased MoQ live at NAB Show 2026. We're not waiting for the market to catch up. We're helping build it. Ant Media
SCTE-35 — the unsexy technology that makes you money
While MoQ gets the headlines, SCTE-35 quietly solves one of the biggest revenue problems in live streaming: ad insertion.
SCTE-35 signals are used to identify national and local ad breaks as well as program content like intros, chapters, blackouts, and extensions when a live program runs long. For modern streaming applications, they are included within a transport stream and converted into metadata embedded in HLS and DASH manifests.
In plain terms: SCTE-35 tells your ad system exactly when and where to insert an ad, without interrupting the stream.
Since SCTE-35 is designed for server-side ad insertion (SSAI), ads blend seamlessly into the stream. No buffering. No jarring cuts. The viewer barely notices. The advertiser gets precise placement. The platform gets paid. iotum
With live events, it isn't always possible to know exactly where to insert the ads — for example, you may need to go to an ad break at any time during a game depending on the flow of play. Dynamic SCTE-35 ad markers can automatically detect when an event is going to break and insert the markers in real time.
Ant Media Server supports SCTE-35 natively. Any SSAI platform that supports HLS with SCTE-35 markers will work — such as AWS MediaTailor, Google Ad Manager, Broadpeak, or Yospace. You bring the content, AMS handles the signalling, and your ad platform does the rest.
What this means for you
If you're building a streaming platform today, the infrastructure decisions you make now will determine how much you can scale tomorrow — and how much revenue you can capture along the way.
MoQ gives you a path to sub-second latency at broadcast scale without building and operating an SFU fleet. SCTE-35 gives your platform a professional-grade monetisation layer that works with the ad ecosystem you already rely on.
At Ant Media, our strategy has always been simple: give you a multi-protocol streaming engine that evolves with the industry, without locking you into any single approach.
MoQ and SCTE-35 are not the future. They're what the best streaming platforms are building with right now.
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