Introduction
IBC 2026 left no doubt that it’s now off to the races for the new MOQ streaming standard as the M&E industry confirms the platform achieves the cost-saving efficiencies and expanded functionalities everyone involved in live streaming is looking for.
The transformative impact of real-time interactive streaming as enabled by MOQ remains key to what lies ahead, but right now it’s the streaming industry’s urgent need to escape the cost/functionality crunch imposed by conventional streaming that’s top of mind. As was evident everywhere we turned at IBC, the do-more-for-less combination with unlimited scalability, personalized feature and advertising flexibility, support for interactive data and video applications, and multiple latency options readily implemented on a single standardized platform is what has sealed the case for market-wide acceleration into MOQ-based streaming.
Widely acknowledged proof of what MOQ can do follows months of beta testing by service providers at global scales over our partner CacheFly’s global CDN and other MOQ-equipped CDNs operated by Cloudflare, CDN77, Vindral, Broadpeak, Netskrt and others. Especially notable at IBC was the fact that these results have spurred cloud compute giants Oracle OCI, Amazon AWS and Akamai to declare they’re all in with MOQ, with more likely to follow.
MOQ demos were in abundance, by one count tripling the total last year. Critically, any uncertainty about the platform’s support for real-time interactive streaming in a multi-device environment was put to rest in a live game-playing competition Red5 staged for attendees at CacheFly’s stand. This and the Red5 MOQ content-protection and provenance-verification demo running at the EZDRM stand were among several MOQ demos we described in this pre-show blog.
As we met with major players across the streaming ecosystem, we were glad to learn the idea of making MOQ readily available with other streaming protocols in a multi-cloud and CDN environment has taken hold as the best way to bring next-gen streaming to life. This was fitting at an event where, apart from streaming, a major theme was vendors’ adoption of standardized interfaces that allow their customers to deploy competing products with seamless interchangeably in production workflows.
Commercializing MOQ
The prospects for massive transition to MOQ streaming are greatly enhanced by the fact that all of us who package end-to-end support for MOQ at the software-defined media layer will be able to compete at global scales employing cloud infrastructures as merited by business goals, even as suppliers of those infrastructures might be mounting their own managed MOQ streaming services. The same holds in instances where platform suppliers are making it easier for providers to seamlessly shift across MOQ and legacy streaming modes from a single platform.
But it’s also important to note that much of this remains aspirational in terms of commercial execution by the suppliers of MOQ streaming infrastructure. This stuff is hard to master, which is why Oracle, Amazon, Akamai and others say they won’t be ready for commercial MOQ operations until the April 2027 NAB timeframe.
In one manifestation of the challenges, a developer heading up demo preparations from one major newcomer to the market told us about the difficulties he encountered preparing what was shown at IBC, which failed to achieve latency below 1 second or the real-time interactivity that was originally planned as part of the demo. But these things are clearly doable, which, as we said at the outset, is why MOQ is now taking off in preparations for widescale commercial rollouts, in most cases by next spring.
An exception to that timeframe is Red5. We’re pleased to report that these capabilities will be available for commercial operations on Red5’s MOQ-optimized multi-protocol platform by the end of this year, no matter when remaining spec details are finalized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Our beta operations utilizing the latest versions of MOQ Transport (MOQT) demonstrate we have all we need to move ahead commercially.
Under the Hood at IBC
A First in Demonstrated MOQ Streaming Interactivity
Before we drill down on why this is the case, we want to share as much of what we experienced at IBC as we can without violating conversational privacy. We turn first to the Ms. Pac Man inspired game we created for IBC with Open Broadcast Software (OBS) capture and FFMPEG media processing support from our OpenMOQ Consortium co-member Qualabs. The cloud-hosted game projected onto the playing screen at the stand allowed two competing players’ inputs to be transmitted to the cloud and returned for real-time display as if the game were hosted locally.
To the best of our knowledge, this was the first time MOQ’s real-time interactive video capabilities were demonstrated publicly. Critically, moving MOQ interactivity to mass-market adoption is now possible without the need for device plug-ins in cases where newer-generation smartphones and other devices are running browsers supporting WebTransport APIs, which allow browsers to handle the underlying transport layer natively by exposing low-latency QUIC streams and datagrams directly to Web applications.
But there’s a caveat. Absent the echo and other noise cancellations essential to videoconferencing which are not yet part of MOQT specs, MOQ-based real-time video interactivity doesn’t supplant the video conferencing use case for WebRTC, which we’ve made seamlessly available for use with MOQ through our TrueTime MeetingsTM toolset.
Nonetheless, synchronized real-time video interactivity across MOQ streams does open the door to the multitude of commercial opportunities for streamers who want to support mass social video engagement with their services. Applications like multiplayer gaming, sports micro-betting and virtual casino gambling, live shopping, auctions and much else, including variations involving extended reality (XR) technologies, will be readily at hand for any entity choosing Red5 or others who can support such interactivity over their MOQ platforms.
Hyperscalers’ MOQ Strategies
Much of what we learned from leading players on both the supply and user sides of the MOQ evolution in discussion at our demo site and elsewhere, including the canal cruise we co-sponsored with our interactive data intelligence partner PubNub, added to our understanding of what’s transpiring with the industry’s transition to MOQ. Much of this, including new partnerships we’re forging with CDN operators, hyperscalers, software vendors and streaming providers, we’ll be bringing to light in the months ahead.
But what we can share now as important examples of what’s in store in the emerging MOQ coopetition market are some aspects to the strategies Oracle, Amazon and Akamai have landed on for next year. These developments augment what we’ve already reported about industry activities, including the many agendas we covered in our post-NAB 2026 blog.
Oracle
In Oracle’s case, after some internal debate under a mandate from chairman and co-founder Larry Ellison to put MOQ front and center in a new focus on the M&E industry, as described in this report, OCI executives decided to take an open-market multi-protocol approach, which they hope to bring to market by next April at NAB 2027. They anticipate their backing for MOQ will help to induce encoding, CDN and other vendors into shaping products that will accelerate market adoption of the new standard in a multi-infrastructure environment.
At the same time, they’re creating a turnkey end-to-end multiprotocol managed streaming service that will be marketed in competition with other users of OCI infrastructure like Red5. Some of this came to light in an IBC Showcase session describing how Paramount, led by Ellison’s son David Ellison, and CDN operator Netskrt had worked with Oracle to build an end-to-end MOQ pipeline leveraging OCI’s Oracle Video Edge (OVE) to connect to Netskrt end points for delivery to end users.
AWS
Plans at AWS are still in flux as to what level of turnkey service support will be provided for users of its cloud infrastructure for MOQ streaming. But, with a commercial rollout timeframe similar to Oracle’s, the goal is to work with partners to ensure the AWS cloud is fully operational for end-to-end MOQ streaming. Pending further discussions, it remains to be seen what role Red5, already deeply engaged with both of these hyperscalers, will play in their new MOQ-related strategies.
Akamai
As for Akamai, the company is focused on providing a global MOQT environment that leverages its deep-edge presence as an alternative to traditional hyperscaling, which appears to be the direction OCI is taking with its OVE agenda. As Akamai explained in a recent blog, its edge-based strategy is motivated by the AI market’s move beyond training to inference where AI agent processing should be as close to their use cases as possible to enable them to perform dedicated tasks at lightning speed.
Not only does this aid in latency reduction when MOQ relays are deployed to make use of those edge resources. It also makes AI-targeted GPU resources that are sometimes needed in advanced streaming applications more readily available as alternatives to the commonly used CPU resources.
The Red5 MOQ Commercialization Timeframe
People may wonder why, if most of the MOQ platform market, including these hyperscalers, have set spring 2027 as the target for commercial operations, Red5 is able to implement its multi-protocol approach to streaming with both full end-to-end MOQ managed service and DIY support as soon as specifications are frozen, which, again, we expect to happen by year’s end. This is significant because it means live-streaming service providers who want to capitalize on MOQ will have a three-to-four-month lead over competitors who choose other approaches.
The two-pronged answer to why our early timeframe is achievable lies with what we’re doing at both the transport and the media layers of the MOQ protocol stacks, which has to do with the versatility of our Experience Delivery Network (XDN) Architecture and the open-software knowhow we’ve been able to apply.
Player and C Library Templates
One important aspect to our work with software involves development of two key Open MOQ Consortium-endorsed building blocks, including:
- Playa, the MOQ Type S cript library . Playa is a versatile TypeScript library endorsed by the Open MOQ Consortium as a way developers can build client applications primarily targeted for browser implementations, whether for devices used at the publishing end or for end-user playback, with assurance that their software stacks will be in complete compliance with MOQ specifications.
As described in this blog, anyone who follows the prescriptions for using readily available open software components as laid out in the Playa specs can build a browser-supported end-user client player that delivers the full playback benefits of MOQ streaming on devices of every kind. At the same time, Playa can be used in the publishing process to equip hardware used at every step from live capture through all the workstations in a localized or dispersed production workflow. For example, to create the interactive MOQ game demo described earlier we used Playa in conjunction with Chrome to capture and encode the real-time dynamics for output to people playing at the show.
From a MOQ media layer perspective, Playa dovetails with the IETF’s emerging specifications for three versions of MOQ Streaming Formats: CMSF, where the C signals the fact that’s it’s meant exclusively for use with the Common Media Application Format (CMAF); LOC, the low-overhead, encoded and encrypted A/V container format, and the emerging LOCMAF format, which combines the best of the other formats’ techniques. All these IETF-specified formats define how the streamed A/V and ancillary elements conveying captioning, personalized and commonly shared features and ads, and other applications are compressed, encrypted and packaged.
- A unique MOQT-compliant open-source native C library known as MOQ5, which, like Playa, is being adopted by the Open MOQ Consortium as another template that can foster accelerated MOQ implementation across the streaming ecosystem. As described at greater length here, MOQ5 provides an open-protocol foundation focused on session state, message encoding and decoding, subscription management, track and object handling, protocol negotiation and transport-independent logic. This gives developers a flexible foundation for integrating MOQT into different products and runtime environments independently of any particular network stack.
Exclusive Software Components
In addition to these open software templates, there are many proprietary elements to what we’re making available with MOQ in the software domain.
One important new product along these lines is the Red5 Video Packager, which, as described in this white paper, provides a software stack supporting all the transcoding and packaging requirements embodied in MOQ, HTTP and WebRTC streaming protocols. A universal packager, of course, is essential to enabling any streaming provider’s support for all these highly divergent streaming modes in a single managed service.
Red5 customers streaming over MOQ will also have access to the application versatility encompassed in our TrueTimeTM toolsets. Along with the aforementioned TrueTime MeetingsTM, these include TrueTime MultiView™, TrueTime WatchPartyTM, TrueTime Datasync™, and TrueTime StudioTM. As with everything else we’re doing with MOQ, these tools can be applied at the MOQ beta stage and in forthcoming commercial services with the managed MOQ service provided through Red5 Cloud or in customers’ self-managed MOQ deployments they build using our Red5 Pro SDKs.
The Importance of Networking Knowhow
Open availability of the Red5 Playa universal player and the MOQ5 C-library template can help everyone get over the hump to commercialization of MOQ streaming, but there’s still a lot of work to be done at the networking level, where orchestrating cloud resources to maximize speed and efficiency across the MOQ relay footprint, let alone getting those resources to dance on command to the tunes emanating from a multi-protocol streaming platform, is a major challenge.
This brings us to the network orchestration component of the XDN Architecture that underlies our ability to bring MOQ streaming to market sooner than later. With MOQ we’re utilizing the capabilities of our Stream Manager, which has made it possible for customers worldwide to achieve end-to-end 250ms latencies over WebRTC at interactive streaming scales reaching into the millions of users – something that even today some naysayers contend can’t be done. Much of the documentation on our website, including this account, describes how this is done and the many use cases we’re supporting with the Red5 Cloud managed service and customer implementations of self-managed XDN infrastructures with the aid of our Red5 Pro SDKs.
As we said two years ago when we first decided to back MOQ, even though we had automated implementation of WebRTC streaming with the Red5 Cloud service, we were making the move to MOQ while supporting WebRTC full stop because MOQ provides a universally standardized approach to streaming with tiered latency options and other advantages that are fundamental to meeting live streamers’ goals of doing more for less.
As we explain in our What is MOQ blog, this is a connectionless mode of streaming that avoids the complexity and error-prone request-response method used with HTTP streaming. Encapsulating independently manageable application tracks within each payload, MOQ streams reach end users through a system of cloud relay nodes that allow any given stream to be fanned out from a single source to any number of end users with minimal use of processing resources. At the same time, MOQ relays provide short-segment caching support that allows latecomers to access a stream in sync with other users, and they optionally enable live content recording for short-term replay and catchup.
The XDN Stream Manager’s support for MOQ applies a multitude of benefits customers have long experienced with our networking infrastructure, including end-to-end latency reductions stemming from our approaches to using cloud resources for transcoding and other processing, multi-transport protocol ingestion into and egress from MOQ relays, multi-stream compositing that can consolidate synchronized feeds in mass numbers from users participating in interactive applications, and much else.
Adding to the MOQ deployment versatility we support through Red5 Cloud and Red5 Pro, we’re introducing support for private MOQ-optimized CDN configurations with release of the Red5 MOQ Relays into that domain. This allows anyone running their own infrastructure and data centers to deploy a MOQ based CDN using our licensed software
Moreover, to extend our cloud resource orchestration capabilities into the legacy HTTP streaming domain we’ve introduced Version 2 of the Stream Manager, which works in tandem with the universal Red5 Video Packager. This makes it possible in cases where XDN Architecture supports MOQ streaming over CDNs optimized for MOQ to switch to HLS or DASH just as use of the XDN enables seamless activation of real-time streaming over WebRTC.
In the case of HTTP-based live and on-demand streaming, when a stream is ingested onto an origin node, the Stream Manager sends a request to the Video Packager to begin transcoding. The Video Packager pulls the stream, generates HLS or DASH segments and uploads the packaged payload to one of the output destinations configured to work with the Packager, which currently includes cloud-based distribution and storage platforms supported by AWS, GCI, Azure, OCI, Linode and Digital Ocean.
Conclusion
That the streaming industry has reached the point of transition to next-generation operations over MOQ in so short a time from its beginning as a proposed IETF standard is nothing short of amazing. The excitement over the prospects for what this means to how people engage with the internet was palpable everywhere we turned at IBC.
The spotlight on MOQ will grow ever more intense in conferences, webinars and trade publication reports over the months ahead. And we’ll be doing all we can in public appearances and our postings to keep the world up to date on fast-moving developments.
As we said earlier, one of the great advancements with preparations for MOQ streaming has been the commitment of ever more platform providers to streamlining operations in a multi-stream-mode environment. It remains to be seen how all these plans will play out, but, as we’ve explained here, streamers can be assured they’ll have this kind of versatility and the attendant cost savings when they opt to implement MOQ over Red5 infrastructure.
Meanwhile, to learn more about our technology, plans and how to prepare for what’s ahead, reach out to our team by email or schedule a call.
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