MoQ Monthly, Issue #0

March 2026

Welcome to MoQ Monthly! I'm putting this together as a way to keep up with everything happening around Media over QUIC - the implementations, the research, the real-world applications, and the growing community around all of it. One issue per month. If I make a mistake, misstate some detail, or miss something that should be on everyone’s radar, please let me know.

I'm Mike English. I lead Cloudflare's MoQ work, which includes our open source Rust implementation (moq-rs) and global relay infrastructure. I also participate in the IETF MoQ working group. This newsletter is a personal project - I'm not speaking on behalf of Cloudflare or the IETF, just keeping the community informed in one place. For this first issue I'm covering roughly the last few months of activity rather than trying to recap the full history. If you're new to MoQ, the WG charter and the moq-transport spec are good starting points. If video is more your style, I have an informal collection of various MoQ presentations and videos on YouTube.

MoQ at Mile High Video

This year’s ACM Mile High Video conference ran February 2-5 in Denver, and MoQ had a strong showing. Wowza's recap noted it was the top topic at the conference by presentation count, including two full technical session tracks dedicated to MoQ topics.

The team from Bitmovin presented on adding MoQ support to their next-generation web video player. Commercial player support for MoQ has been one of those milestones of maturity people have been watching for, and it's great to see Bitmovin investing here.

Andrew Freeman (Baylor University) had two presentations that I found particularly exciting: a distributed content moderation system running client-side video analysis over MoQ, and implicit adaptation for point cloud streaming. These are both cases where MoQ's advanced transport-level features (priorities, per-object delivery, relay-based distribution) enable things that just aren't practical with traditional streaming protocols. I think these types of novel applications are an area where we'll continue to see a lot of interesting work in the coming years.

Zafer Gurel, Deniz Ugur, and other students from Ali Begen’s research group at Ozyegin University were prolific as usual with presentations on live streaming with AI-generated event timelines, synchronized video-on-demand playback, and live sports watch parties.

There was a ton of great hallway discussion where MoQ also featured prominently. Qualabs showed off one of the fruits of this year’s MoQ Summer Project: OBS MoQ support including both a MoQ output and a MoQ source. Erik Herz showed me some neat fully vibe-coded MoQ demos (and continues to explore the space with projects like quicfeed.net). I pointed a few people to Nate Burr’s impressive demonstration of Real-Time Audience Voting over MoQ. Synamedia’s Gwendal Simon also demoed a possible server-guided approach to ad insertion for MoQ-based streams.

Finally, on Thursday, Will Law organized a MoQ Streaming Format workshop (in conjunction with MHV) that completely filled the room (we had to bring in extra chairs). There was a lot of great engagement from some very sharp folks there, and a good number of issues were filed to flesh out the specifications as a result.

The full MHV program is at mile-high.video.

Boulder Interim

The following week the IETF MoQ working group held a two-day interim at Google's office in Boulder (Feb 9-10), followed by an interop hackathon on the 11th and 12th.

Joining FETCH got significant attention, with eight specific problems enumerated. Martin Duke’s "rewind" subscription filter extension draft incorporates solutions to the major issues we identified and looks like a promising path forward. We're planning to implement it to get some hands-on experience with how well it works in practice.

This is a good example of a pattern that's emerging in the WG: at this stage, we're moving towards a model where substantial changes to the base spec (especially new features) are being proposed as extension drafts first. The idea is to get implementation experience and validate the proposed approaches more concretely before merging into the base MoQT draft. The working group is working towards Working Group Last Call for the base draft. As with any standards work of this magnitude, predicting exact timelines is tricky, but a large number of the remaining open issues have recently been addressed by PRs to the draft text.

ABR was another big topic. There were discussions around receiver-side approaches (including a proposed SWITCH message for optimizing certain cases) and ideas about how sender-side ABR could work or at least be signaled. Some of this ties into a proposed overhaul of filters to make them more expressive. Active area, lots of moving pieces.

DoS and resource protection: A supplementary document augmenting the security considerations of the MoQT base draft is being written up as a result of discussions we had in Boulder. A few of us (myself included) are working on draft-englishm-moq-relay-dos.

Meeting materials are on the Datatracker.

Spec Status

moq-transport draft-16 was published in January and was the interop target for the Boulder interim. draft-17 was published yesterday and includes some substantial changes, including changes to how control messages are conveyed. Notably, the main control stream is no longer a single bidirectional stream but two unidirectional streams, and many control messages now get their own dedicated streams. This resolved a number of flow control and possible denial-of-service issues and looks like it may also simplify some implementations by allowing for more localized state management rather than requiring coordinated access to a monolithic control stream. That said, there’s a fair amount of change here and we’re not treating draft-17 as a stable interop target. Instead, we’ll continue to deepen interop on draft-16 through at least IETF 125, and look for a future draft as our next interop target when some of the dust has settled on the draft-17 changes.

The streaming format layer has also gone through a bit of reorganization recently. MSF (MoQ Streaming Format, draft-ietf-moq-msf-00) replaces the old “WARP” draft, defining how media is packaged and mapped to MoQT objects and how information can be conveyed in a catalog (MoQ’s analog to HLS/DASH manifests). CMSF extends it with CMAF-compliant packaging. An increasing number of streaming/broadcast-oriented implementations are now aligning their approach to media with CMSF, and I expect that trend to continue. Being able to reuse CMAF tooling (and share content with other existing delivery mechanisms) makes the transition to MoQ much more palatable and approachable for many broadcast use cases, especially when you consider the fact that with CMAF, much of the work to support features like DRM is already done.

Secure Objects (draft-ietf-moq-secure-objects) has been adopted by the WG. It's an adaptation of SFrame for MoQT - end-to-end encryption where relays can forward media without accessing content. This feature makes secure real-time communication over MoQ a real near-term possibility.

Implementations & Interop

There are well over a dozen MoQT implementations now in Rust, C++, TypeScript, Go, Python, C, and Java, from organizations including Meta, Google, Cisco, Cloudflare, Meetecho, id3as, Vindral, Red5, Bitmovin, and several universities.

The moq-interop-runner (which I open sourced in early February) is a Docker-based framework for automated conformance testing across implementations - pluggable adapters, standardized output, and a growing registry of implementations. It's still early. Some of the current failures are a matter of getting test details right rather than real bugs. But we're already catching real interop issues much faster than manual testing could, and contributions have already come in from multiple organizations.

I'd like to make noteworthy implementation and interop progress a regular feature. If you're working on an implementation and want it covered, let me know!

Browser Support

Safari 26.4 (shipping with iOS 26.4 and macOS 26.4) is adding WebTransport support! This is significant - Safari and iOS have been the biggest gap for broad support of MoQ browser applications. There are still some caveats around related APIs like transferable streams that may affect certain player implementations, so it's not quite "MoQ works everywhere in the browser" yet. More on this as we test.

WebTransport was also selected as a focus area for Interop 2026, a yearly cross-browser effort where Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla commit to improving interoperability on a shared set of web platform features, measured against Web Platform Tests. The original proposal cited MoQ as a motivating use case. Having all major browser vendors committed to getting WebTransport right is exactly the kind of foundation the ecosystem needs.

Coming Up

IETF 125 is March 14-20 in Shenzhen. The MoQ WG will have a session, with remote participation as always.

NAB Show is April 18-22 in Las Vegas. I expect to see MoQ work featured at a number of booths. I'll be there in person - if you want to meet up, you can grab a slot on my calendar or come look for me at the Cloudflare booth (W2300G).

A MoQ hybrid interim is being planned for the week of June 8. These hybrid interims are where the bulk of the working group’s work gets done, with high bandwidth in person interactions and whiteboarding sessions happening around the formal sessions and interop hacking.

Resources

• IETF MoQ WG: datatracker.ietf.org/group/moq
• IETF MoQ Mailing list: mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/moq
• Community MoQ Discord: discord.gg/FCYF3p99mr

If you're working on something MoQ-related - a draft, an implementation, a deployment, a talk, a blog post - I'd love to hear about it and help share your news with the broader community.

Subscribe: buttondown.com/moqmonthly

See you in April!

-Mike