The prospects for a rapid M&E industry transition to next-gen streaming over networks supporting the new MOQ (Media Over QUIC) standard are surging amid growing support from global hyperscalers and CDN operators.
MOQ is meant to address broadcasters’ growing frustration with the twin whammy imposed by the mounting opex costs and technical limitations of conventional streaming, especially when it comes to delivering sports, news and other live programming over the internet. Widely acknowledged top-line issues include high latencies, timing variations in reception from one user to the next and the costly complications of increasing monetization through ad personalization and feature enhancements.
Supporters say MOQ-based streaming can distribute live video in unicast or multicast feeds with simultaneous reception across vast audiences at global scale. The platform supports streaming at three end-to-end latency tiers from as low as less than half a second to multiple seconds, while greatly simplifying ad personalization and feature enhancements, regionalization of regulatory conformance, advanced security implementation and much else.
Notwithstanding its incompatibility with current streaming norms, widely accepted validation of MOQ—a nearly complete Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard—as a practical streaming solution follows months of beta testing over MOQ transport-optimized CDNs operated by Cloudflare, Akamai, CDN77, Vindral, Broadpeak, Netskrt, CacheFly and others. “We’re talking about transformation of the internet,” Damien Sterkers, Broadpeak vice president of products and solutions marketing, said.
Oracle, AWS and Akamai on Board
New plans for MOQ service launches by spring, as shared by executives at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Akamai, are especially noteworthy additions. It’s also notable that at least two streaming platform providers, Red5 and Globecast, intend to get commercial MOQ operations underway globally by the end of 2026.
“The streaming industry has come a long way,” said Arvind Suryakumar, director of software engineering at Oracle Media Services (OMS), a new unit formed with OCI’s decision to put more effort into supporting the M&E industry. “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.”
This is what makes getting to MOQ ASAP a top priority for Globecast, Chief Marketing Officer Jean-Christophe Perier said. “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.”
Nothing better illustrates the urgency behind streamers’ need to move beyond conventional streaming than Oracle Chairman and Co-Founder Larry Ellison’s role in spurring OCI’s expanded commitment to the M&E industry and MOQ—all in support of the agenda of his son, Skydance CEO David Ellison, now the owner of the Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery media empires. The MOQ strategy is part of an effort to make OCI central to everything Skydance does in the streaming domain, according to Ray Gilmartin, senior principal outbound product leader at OCI. “It’s a big strategic push,” he said.
At the 2026 IBC Show, Canadian CDN operator Netskrt teamed with Oracle to demonstrate an end-to-end MOQ delivery path for a Paramount/Skydance livestream. The stream coordinated MOQ transport processing nodes known as relays running on OCI and its new Oracle Video Edge (OVE) extension with a relay operating on Netskrt’s CDN.
Given that large live events require enormous capacity spread across clouds, CDNs and broadband networks, Netskrt Co-Founder and CEO Siegfried Luft noted, “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.”
Open-Ended Approach
This type of open-ended approach to running MOQ streaming infrastructure and software platforms has taken hold on multiple fronts, as rivals recognize 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.”
Echoing that point, Sterkers said the fact that MOQ can be implemented with standardized software running on commodity computers creates a relatively low-cost approach to mounting a globally interoperable environment for next-generation streaming.
“We’re looking at ways to create a smoother transition where you can input on our CDN in HTTP and output over MOQ or vice versa,” Sterkers said. “If you don’t want an all-MOQ network at the outset, you can start with MOQ in the core or over the last mile, and we’ll do the transition.”
A Compelling Set of Benefits
While the so-called real-time, sub-500-millisecond latencies supported by MOQ have been prominent attention-getters, the growing enthusiasm stems from what people are learning about its overall benefits, according to Will Law, chief architect for the cloud technology group at Akamai. He has been a leading force behind the IETF’s MOQ initiative. “Real time isn’t the only thing,” Law said. “MOQ allows you to operate at 2- and 5-second latencies as well.”
Specifications for the MOQ Transport (MOQT) foundation are close to finalization, expected by year-end, Law added. “We’ve closed 912 categories with 92 to go as still open issues,” he said. But testing can proceed with interoperability across multiple infrastructures, he stressed, as long as providers comply with the latest versions of MOQT, including drafts 16-21.
There’s also progress at the MOQ media layer, with three sets of IETF specifications for streaming formats and substantial progress on developing MOQ client players. Now 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,” Law said.
But “there will be lots of people who make it simple,” he added. “We’re going to roll out MOQ services in beta and hope to be commercialized by NAB [Show] in April.”
Akamai hasn’t just instantiated MOQ relay nodes on its CDN. Like OCI and AWS, the company will support MOQ services over its global cloud compute platform, which it touts as an edge-focused alternative to hyperscalers’ regionally clustered processing centers.
Of the three, AWS seems farthest from getting things up and running, judging by what the company did and didn’t demonstrate at IBC.
As previously reported, the company had intended to use the show to prominently promote its entry into MOQ support. Instead, with no one available to speak publicly about the progress of the strategy executed by AWS Elemental, the only indication at AWS’s large IBC stand that the company was engaging with MOQ was a small-screen display of a demo, which, according to the developer who set it up, fell short of original expectations.
Speaking on background, they discussed the difficulties they encountered, including registering 1 second as the lowest latency, compared with the 500 milliseconds or less widely achieved elsewhere. Along with other issues, they also noted a planned display of MOQ real-time streaming interactivity proved out of reach in the timeframe they had to work with.
Eyeing Spring Deployments
It’s hard to tell how far Oracle has gone toward actualizing these capabilities, but one insider said it’s likely to be spring before commercial rollouts begin, hopefully in time for NAB Show.
“The how is the big ambiguity,” Suryakumar acknowledged. “At the macro level our leadership has given us a starting point. Our job has been to figure out how to balance that with what we’re learning about market needs from the ground level.”
The result is a plan described by Suryakumar and others that focuses on developing a managed “large-scale live” service approach to streaming not only over MOQ, but also over legacy protocols, while making OCI with OVE infrastructure available for other entities’ MOQ service implementations. Critically, OVE provides a purpose-built orchestration layer that interoperates with CDNs, ISPs and existing media stacks to align ingestion, transport, playback and telemetry in a single operational fabric.
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.”
Jean-Christophe Perier, Globecast
No one appears to be farther along toward MOQ service commercialization than Red5, which has been supporting beta testing over the platform it mounted CacheFly’s CDN at the start of 2026. Red5 CEO Chris Allen said that along with tweaking its cloud-orchestration technology to coordinate use of MOQ relays and the on- and off-ramps to MOQ-optimized CDNs, the company has formulated open software stacks endorsed by the Open MOQ Consortium that developers can use to expedite preparations.
Using Red5’s Playa TypeScript library, Allen said, users can build MOQ client players to accommodate receptivity at any point in end-to-end MOQ flows, from production workstations to end-user devices. And Red5’s MOQ5 open-source native C coding library can be used to compile resources for executing transport functions, including session state, message encoding and decoding, subscription management, track and object handling and much else, he added.
“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,” Allen said. “Because of this level of agility, we figured there’s no reason to wait.”
