Media over QUIC, abbreviated MoQ, is the IETF's attempt to design a single protocol that serves both the cacheable-CDN use case (where HLS and DASH rule) and the sub-second live use case (where WebRTC rules). The core idea is a publish-subscribe model: publishers send media into "tracks" identified by URI, subscribers fetch tracks by name, and intermediate relays cache and fan out the data exactly as a CDN does for HLS but with QUIC streams instead of HTTP responses.
The architecture is documented in draft-ietf-moq-transport (latest draft as of 2025) plus draft-ietf-moq-streaming-format and draft-ietf-moq-warp for media-specific framings. The substrate is QUIC plus WebTransport for browser access. The killer property is per-track loss recovery: a single relay can serve thousands of subscribers with each subscriber getting QUIC's per-stream behaviour, eliminating the head-of-line and per-subscriber state problems that limit WebRTC SFU scale.
By 2026 MoQ is at proof-of-concept stage in several major operators: Cloudflare, Meta, Twitch and Akamai have all shipped MoQ experiments. The protocol is not yet ready for general adoption — drafts are still moving, browser support is partial, and tooling is sparse. The expectation is that 2027–2028 will see the first standardised RFCs and the first wave of production deployments in interactive-live applications that today choose between LL-HLS (too slow) and WebRTC (too operationally heavy).
The book · Volume 2 of 7
Video Streaming: A Complete Guide to Video Delivery: From Network Protocols and Transport to Ingest, HLS, and MPEG-DASH
Media over QUIC promises one protocol for both CDN-scale and sub-second live, but the IETF drafts are still moving and production stacks are few. This volume covers the transport groundwork MoQ builds on in detail: QUIC and HTTP/3, congestion control, TCP versus UDP behaviour and the latency budget that MoQ is trying to shrink. Written by Nikolay Sapunov, CEO at Fora Soft.
Evaluating Media over QUIC as a replacement for your HLS or WebRTC delivery?
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