Sneak Preview: Tunable Latency, MoQ, and the Future of Video Delivery
On Monday, Nov. 9, SVTA’s Bhavesh Upadhyaya will moderate the Streaming Media Connect panel “Tunable Latency, MoQ, and the Future of Video Delivery.” Get in tune with the evolving landscape of video delivery as this panel explores tunable low-latency architectures and Media over QUIC (MoQ), the emerging protocol poised to recast the future of real-time streaming. The panel explores the trade-offs between latency, quality, and reliability as live streams scale, providing insights into what’s next for streamers as they deploy MoQ and map out the future of low-latency video.
Confirmed panelists include:
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Bhavesh Upadhyaya is currently volunteering with SVTA as a subject matter expert for QoE, AI, and live operations in the Streaming Media Operations and Measurement/QoE working groups. A veteran of the streaming industry since the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Upadhyaya has experience and expertise in product, operations, and professional services from a variety of companies such as iStreamPlanet, Verizon Digital Media, Deltatre, and Warner Bros. Discovery (now Skydance). He is a consultant to the streaming industry, co-chairs SVTA’s AI Committee, and helps coordinate the Streaming From the Moon and Beyond project.
“Is lower latency always better? Not necessarily,” notes Upadhyaya. “For years, we’ve pushed to reduce streaming latency, often at the expense of quality, reliability, or cost. But the future isn’t just about getting video to viewers faster; it’s about making latency tunable to the needs of each experience. MoQ introduces a fundamentally different approach to media distribution, with the potential to bridge traditional streaming and real-time communication. We’ll explore what’s technically possible, what’s ready for production, and what MoQ could mean for the next generation of video delivery.”
Sean McCarthy is co-chair of the Measurement/QoE Working Group at SVTA. He was most recently head of OTT live engineering at YouTube. Prior to joining YouTube, Sean spent time at Paramount, Bitmovin, and Akamai.
“We all know MoQ can help get us to near real-time streaming, but it is about much more than just reducing latency,” says McCarthy. “Much of today’s broadcast contribution infrastructure still relies on legacy, point-to-point transport architectures that are inefficient to scale, operationally complex, and often less resilient than we’d like. MoQ offers an opportunity to fundamentally rethink that model. With native publish/subscribe capabilities, relay-based fan-out, and tunable latency, we can envision a much more flexible and efficient approach to moving live media from source to audience. I’m excited to explore how MoQ could reshape broadcast contribution and distribution, and what challenges remain before widespread adoption.”
Alex Zambelli works at Bitmovin and is based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Prior to his current job he was a product manager at Dolby, Warner Bros. Discovery, Hulu, and iStreamPlanet (Turner), and technical evangelist for media technologies at Microsoft. He has been professionally involved with development of digital video and streaming technologies since 2002.
“While the strongest initial demand for ultra-low latency may be coming from high-stakes use cases such as sports betting or online auctions, I think that eventually any kind of live-streaming scenario involving interactivity or relying on immediate feedback from the audience will benefit greatly from ultra-low latency,” Zambelli believes. “And while MoQ transport isn’t the first protocol to offer ultra-low latency, it’s probably the first one to offer it without completely sacrificing scalability—and it’s precisely those use cases requiring low latency at high scale where I expect MoQ to eventually replace WebRTC. At the same time, scalability is ultimately MoQ’s biggest wild card, as the only way we’ll know for sure that it works as designed is when we finally see it used to deliver real-world live events to millions of concurrent viewers.”
Luke Curley was previously at Twitch and Discord. He spent the last decade pushing the boundaries of low-latency video at scale. Curley wrote the original MoQ specification and has been advocating for its adoption ever since. He works on MoQ full-time and open source, with the express goal of never using WebRTC again.
Curley shares, “The primary usage of MoQ in production right now is, surprisingly, robotics. We focus a lot on the mass fanout distribution use case, but really people want a replacement for WebRTC that doesn’t hard-code specific latency/quality trade-offs. Imagine flying a drone over Starlink using Google Meet; that’s the state of the art before MoQ.”
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