Vindral CEO Daniel Alinder Talks MoQ, Interactive Livestreaming, and Tunable Latency
In this wide-ranging interview from Streaming Media 2025, Vindral CEO Daniel Alinder and Streaming Media Contributing Editor Timothy Fore-Siglin discuss Vindral’s Live hybrid streaming solution, the versatility of the emerging Media Over QUIC (MoQ) protocol, and the benefits of tunable, configurable latency for high-interactivity live streams at scale.
What Vindral Does
Before diving headlong into tunable latency into Media Over QUIC, Fore-Siglin asks for a quick description of what Vindral is and what it does. "Vindral is a Swedish company," Alinder says. "We have several products, but for streaming specifically, we have a product called Vindral Live focused on doing live streaming synchronized to all viewers. So that's our main proposition. We started out in the ultra-low-latency space 10 years ago when ultra-low-latency was a buzzword. We don't only do ultra-low latency; you can do subsecond if you want to. Some of our clients are running 500 milliseconds, glass to glass."
Today, Alinder says, Vindral’s focus is no longer how-low-can-you-go with streaming latency, but tunability, or making that latency “configurable. So any one of our clients can choose 3.7 seconds to sync up with broadcast because that's what broadcast happens to be,” or they can go the fashionable sub-second route if that’s what they prefer.
"That's a really good point,” Fore-Siglin concurs, “because one of the conversations we've had over the last couple of years in the industry is, how low do you need to go? Obviously, the assumption is, the lower you go, the closer to real time you are. But the opposite conversation, if we can't sync everything between our broadcast and our online stream--especially when it comes to things like sportsbook and sports betting--you want everybody on the same playing field. If you get two or two-and-a-half seconds ahead because you're doing an ultra-low-latency stream, that then makes all the people who are watching broadcast television upset because you know the outcome” before they do. Historically, that shoe was famously on the other foot.
MoQ and the Changing Dynamics of Choosing Low Latency
Making a quick pivot to an emerging protocol that’s drawing more and more attention in the low-latency realm, Siglin says, "One of the other conversations in the industry is around MoQ, Media Over QUIC, or Media Transport. I hear people using those terms interchangeably. Do you want to describe what MoQ is briefly?"
"It's a big topic," Alinder says. He says he would describe MoQ as "an emerging standard for transporting not only video [but other types of data] on the internet. It is a bit of a paradigm shift when it comes to transport of live video, although it's very, very similar to what we've always been doing. We used to rely on our proprietary stack to deliver with video with these performance metrics." For Vindral, he explains, the big change was "we won't be using web sockets on the last mile. We'll be using Web Transport."
Alinder goes on to describe MoQ as "very much a standard in the works. You mentioned a question that's very relevant, how low do we need to go? That question implies that you're trading something off. If you could, you would like to go as low as possible unless you need to sync with something that is slow. But here, Media Over QUIC holds promise due to a number of factors to actually change that dynamic of choosing if you need low latency. Maybe you want it, maybe you don't need it for your stream to be viable. And one of the big promises there is because it's an emerging standard that has big names behind it. We know Akamai is in, YouTube is in, Meta, et cetera."
MoQ’s Interoperabilityand Interactivity Edge
Another signature benefit of MoQ, according to Alinder, is that “it holds the promise of interoperability. And interoperability is an amazing thing.”
"I came out of the video conferencing space where we had baseline interoperability tests that we would run and publish every three to six months, we could do standardized resolutions and data rates, but also the ability to say that across all the endpoints, it will consistently have these particular features," Fore-Siglin reflects. "On top of that, we could add additional features as individual companies. Is that sort of a similar model with MoQ where there will be a baseline standard and then you can add additional features on top of it?"
"Just looking at the standard, it handles so many more things than legacy technology does," Alinder replies. "For example, you have a track where you can put events in the track. If you use an AI feature to track things that are happening in a basketball game, you mark it up, and within the MOQ protocol you actually define, 'something happened here,' and then your system can create a replay. And that was one of the demos by Synamedia at IBC, which is amazing to see. So they use MoQ fetch to go back to that highlight in the game, which makes it more interactive in a way."
Pursuing further the interactivity angle, Alinder continues, “Low latency is also a prerequisite for interactivity and for people to interact around the content. Just a simple thing as adding reactions or a chat. You need people to be synchronized with each other."
Vindral’s Hybrid Model
Another feature of Vindral’s offerings that Alinder highlights is that their live streaming technology can be purchased either as a full-featured cloud SaaS solution, or as an engine that will work within whatever infrastructure a client is using. “This is one of the things where, with MoQ emerging, it's very interesting for us to position as that a vendor that has done an implementation, and a company that wants to run a system using MoQ for a specific part of the workflow, they can use our engine to do that."
“So that hybrid model that you're talking about, it's interesting to me because being in the industry now for over a quarter of a century, you see that swing back and forth from on-prem to cloud and that hybrid model that sits in the middle,” Fore-Siglin says. “So from your standpoint, you're saying there's flexibility to allow those kinds of hybrid models.”
“That's how we've built our own cloud service," Alinder says. "We've built it on both on-prem and cloud resources, and we think it's only logical to do that. I remember one of our early conversations actually when we were in the NETINT booth and we were launching AV1 support, so we actually put their cards in our server racks, and that's how we delivered AV1 to viewers. Now it's more widespread, but we couldn't do that if we were relying only on cloud vendors waiting for them to put it on the market."
A Global MoQ Movement
“Now the other thing on MoQ," Fore-Siglin asks, "is I understand that it primarily been driven as a European standard and then has been adopted by the rest of the world. Is that the first instance of that? Because traditionally, it would be large American companies going to large American companies and perhaps Asian companies going to the MPEG committee, going to ITU, et cetera. This seems to have almost been homegrown in Europe and is now moving to the rest of the world."
“I'm actually not aware of those parts," Alinder replies. "I would say that our involvement in the SVTA has been instrumental for us. We've been asked to participate with the team that is defining the standard. We also have to prioritize where we put our time, but we do appreciate the dynamic of being able, as early adopters, to give input to how would we like to see things play out. Now we see the OpenMOQ Consortium backed by Akamai, YouTube, and many big companies, but also some European companies like CDN77, and you have Synamedia in the mix there as well. So I would say at its current state, now that it's starting to gain traction, I would say it's very much a global movement."
MoQ Adoption Wiggle Room
Wrapping up the interview, Fore-Siglin seizes on Alinder's mention that MoQ is a broad standard encompassing "a lot of things," and speculates on how its evolution or adoption might mirror similarly complex protocols used in the streaming industry. "One of the things we found in the H.264/DASH/HLS model was that very few companies wanted to implement the entire DASH standard," Fore-Siglin recalls. "So you ended up with DASH-264, which was essentially a subset of DASH as a whole focused around that particular codec. Do you see that there's that kind of flexibility with MoQ as well?
“Yes, for sure, because it's not finished yet," Alinder says. "We are actually currently using it as a transport protocol, but there are things that haven't been defined yet there. Because our solution has been so similar to what MoQ does, we're using the parts that are not finished yet from what we've developed. But as the standard matures, we expect to conform to the decisions that are being made for an increasing number of components."
"And the beauty, too," Fore-Siglin adds, "is with IETF and others involved that move with HTTP/3 to work with QUIC as well or to actually have QUIC as part of its underlying [technology]. Then we also get the potential benefit of browser-based video that isn't just a dumb window. It actually has some underlying technologies that benefit video transport as well."
“Yeah,” Alinder concurs. “It’s exciting.”
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