moq://bayarea

Primer

What is Media Over QUIC?

Media Over QUIC — MoQ — is an IETF effort to move live media with a publish/subscribe model that runs directly on QUIC. Publishers push named tracks made of objects and groups; subscribers ask a relay for the tracks they want; the relay fans them out and can drop or reprioritise data when the network gets tight.

The point is to stop choosing between the two bad options. Segmented HTTP streaming scales to millions but adds seconds of latency. Real-time stacks are fast but were designed for conversations, not broadcast fan-out. MoQ aims for one transport that a relay network can cache and a live encoder can drive at conversational latency.

The shape of it

  1. 01 — Track

    A named stream of media — a video layer, an audio channel, timed metadata.

  2. 02 — Group

    An independently decodable chunk, roughly a GoP. The unit of recovery.

  3. 03 — Object

    A frame-sized payload inside a group, with its own priority.

  4. 04 — Relay

    Subscribes upstream, fans out downstream, drops what it must.

How it compares

HLS / LL-DASH

Segments over HTTP. Scales beautifully, buffers badly.

2–10s

WebRTC

Great for calls. Fan-out and media pipelines get expensive.

<500ms

MoQ

Pub/sub over QUIC, cacheable through relays, one stack for both.

<200ms target

It is still a draft. Interop breaks, APIs move, and opinions differ — which is precisely why the meetups exist.