Mounting demand for a next-generation video streaming solution that surpasses the latency and unidirectional limitations imposed by the currently dominant streaming architecture is generating strong support for a new standard known simply as "MOQ" (Media over QUIC).
While by all accounts, it will take at least a few more months before the Internet Engineering Task Force finalizes the MOQ specifications, there are now multiple projects underway allowing producers to try out this new multidirectional, multi-latency approach to streaming.
“There’s a buzz and excitement in the air about MOQ we’ve never seen before,” says Will Law, chief architect for the cloud technology group at Akamai and a leader in the IETF MOQ initiative.
HEIGHTENED INTEREST AT NAB
This was evident at the recent NAB Show where MOQ demos abounded on the exhibit floor and an overflow crowd filled the large meeting room devoted to the NAB’s first-ever session on the standard. Entities announcing infrastructure support for MOQ included public CDN operators Broadpeak, CacheFly, Cloudflare, and CDN77 as well as cloud compute platform providers Akamai, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Streaming software system suppliers demonstrating delivery of payloads and advanced features over MOQ-enabled facilities included Ateme, Bitmovin, EZDRM, Nomad Media, Norsk Media, Oracle Media, Synamedia, Red5 and Wowza,.
While proprietary real-time streaming systems supporting video conferencing and a host of other applications have been around for several years, MOQ is meant to satisfy the need for a standardized, ubiquitously available two-way superhighway over which video flows in any direction at any scale with latencies attuned to specific use-case requirements. That’s why Red5, a successful provider of a highly scalable WebRTC-based streaming platform, is throwing its weight behind MOQ, says Red5 CEO and co-founder Chris Allen.
“WebRTC was designed as a peer-to-peer protocol, which means there’s no standard for scaling the way we do by building out clustered cloud resources,” Allen says. “MOQ was designed from the get-go as a scalable broadcast technology for the internet, which we believe will accelerate adoption of next-generation streaming.”
The foundational set of MOQ specifications, known as MOQ Transport (MOQT), marks an incompatible break with conventional streaming modes like HLS and MPEG DASH that are based on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). As a so-called connectionless platform, MOQT employs a simple publish/subscribe approach to streaming by signaling the start and end points of a session while avoiding the thousands of request/response exchanges that transpire between clients and servers in HTTP streaming.
QUIC is a modern transport protocol built on UDP that is designed to make web connections faster, more secure, and more resilient. It was originally developed by Google and later standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force as RFC 9000
MOQ was designed from the get-go as a scalable broadcast technology for the internet, which we believe will accelerate adoption of next-generation streaming.
Chris Allen, Red5 CEO and co-founder
Moreover, the new standard provides a way to automatically tune end-to-end latencies to whatever levels meet user requirements, including real-time 200-400ms latencies that are imperceptible to humans as well as what Law calls “interactive live” at 2 seconds for use in sports betting, online casino gambling, banking and similar applications and “conservative live” supporting ironclad HD, 4K, and, eventually, 8K quality persistency at 5 seconds.
ALL YOU NEED IS CACHE
With decoding and other device rendering processes managed through leading browsers, MOQ in most instances doesn’t require client plug-in software. And depending on how MOQ-ready CDNs are designed, MOQ can also support recording live content for short-term replay and catchup and long-term storage for VOD archives and cloud DVR applications. “VOD just means my cache is big enough to hold stuff that was live a while ago,” Law says.
Paralleling MOQT development, there are other initiatives within IETF and through the closely affiliated ad hoc organization known as the OpenMOQ Software Consortium that are aimed at creating a practical operating environment for the transport protocol. They include media layer streaming formats emerging from IETF, a new client player template developed by Red5 and endorsed by the consortium, and several ready-to-deploy players, , including a MOQ-based plug-in for Bitmovin’s new multi-purpose Player Web X platform.
“We have an array of features we enable, and each is treated as an individual plug-in,” says Bitmovin product manager Jacob Arends, who describes Player X as the latest, completely rebuilt version of its popular Web X player. “From a player [configuration] perspective there’s not much more to it than that,” but with MOQ playback departing from the HTTP norms, “it takes a lot of heavy lifting on the cloud side.”
While much of the focus on MOQ has to do with overcoming the limitations of conventional B2C streaming, the protocol also needs to be accommodated in post-production playouts to producers’ broadcast and OTT affiliates, notes Gwendal Simon, senior director for video network technology at Synamedia. “We’re bringing MOQ into our Quortex PowerVu multitrack contribution management system,” Simon says.
