Big Blue Marble has launched a Proof of Concept for Media over QUIC at Austria’s Football Bundesliga, aiming to develop and test ultra low-latency streaming for live sports events.
Broadcast and streaming specialist Big Blue Marble is launching a Proof of Concept (PoC) for Media over QUIC (MoQ) during the ongoing Austrian Football Bundesliga championship. This PoC, which will continue over some months, aims to test low-latency streaming in a live sports environment.
Running on Big Blue Marble's video processing and delivery engine, Cloud Video Kit, and supported by video compression and streaming developer Ateme, the project will use live broadcast feeds to assess MoQ's performance, scalability and readiness for live event streaming operations in the future.
Streaming Protocol for the Future
MoQ is a new, emerging internet-native streaming protocol that delivers live video with ultra-low latency, ensuring viewers and devices stay in sync. This capability enables innovative interactive experiences such as synchronised watch parties, second-screen applications, live statistics and other types of real-time fan engagement.
Live streams typically have to travel across three segments. A camera feeds into an encoder, which sends the stream to a live platform and CDN. The CDN handles global distribution across regions, where viewers pull the stream from the nearest server via a player.
Each segment affects quality and introduces latency. MOQ aims to tackle all three, in part by replacing the TCP-based protocols most streaming infrastructure currently depends on. Built instead on the WebTransport, HTTP/3 and QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connection) protocols, it is designed for faster recovery, lower latency and more resilient performance, even when network conditions are compromised.
To break down this foundation – QUIC, itself part of the HTTP/3 standard, uses the UDP protocol at the network layer, with advantages over TCP-based HTTP connections that include faster connection times and lower latency, resilience to packet loss, smarter congestion control and less buffering.
Even more significant are adaptive bitrate and stream prioritization so that streams always have enough bandwidth, and scalability for one-to-many applications of virtually any size audience. MOQ can also ensure live stream reliability and quality and, unlike HLS and DASH which are also designed for media streaming, is not based on chunked video segments, which generally create significant latency.
Promise of Ultra-Low Latency Streaming
"This initiative demonstrates how innovation, cloud technologies and operational expertise can drive the next generation of live streaming services," said Krzysztof Bartkowski, CEO of Streaming & Cloud Media at Big Blue Marble.
Johann Mika, Chief Innovation Officer and owner of the Proof of Concept project at Big Blue Marble, emphasised the significance of the results achieved. "Our Proof of Concept shows that ultra-low latency streaming is now a reality, delivering the fastest live streaming signal in Austria and proving that internet-native delivery can outperform conventional OTT services."
According to the continuous measurements made during the championship period, the MoQ platform can achieve the fastest live streaming signal currently available in Austria. It reduces end-to-end latency by about 20 to 40 seconds when compared to other Austrian TV streaming platforms, and it often surpasses terrestrial and satellite broadcasts by several seconds.
"Media over QUIC is one of the most promising developments for low‑latency streaming and large‑scale live event delivery," said Mickaël Raulet, Chief Technology Officer at Ateme. "We are pleased to support Big Blue Marble and contribute our expertise as the industry explores new ways to deliver premium live content at scale."
Key Project Features
As part of the project, the Big Blue Marble engineering team has extended the open-source MoQ implementation with additional capabilities, including NTP (Network Time Protocol) timestamp insertion for clock synchronisation between computer systems over variable-latency data networks, end-to-end latency measurements, enhanced monitoring metadata and backend analytics integration.
The company’s Cloud Video Kit is a modular set of tools, built into a simple UI, that handles video processing, delivery and playback to help organisations build their own scalable streaming infrastructure. Using AWS Cloud and Media Services, users can add a video streaming feature – with live streaming, VOD, live recording, playback and analytics – to their websites and mobile or SmartTV apps.
Detailed metrics are continuously collected across the publisher, relay and player environments to use when evaluating QoE, network performance, capacity requirements and platform scalability. Live broadcasts are also secured from unauthorized access and downloading through Big Blue Marble's scalable multi-DRM solution, Cloud DRM.
Ateme's MoQ support demonstrates that sub-second end-to-end latency and broadcast-grade video quality do not need to be a tradeoff, owing to its TITAN transcoder and open-source solutions from the OpenMOQ consortium. TITAN maintains content quality at very low bitrates on all platforms and, in particular, broadcast-level latency on streaming platforms with reduced rebuffering. Its compression efficiency helps achieve faster-than-real-time processing and simultaneous processing of all formats.
A Wider Streaming Ecosystem
The PoC will be conducted throughout the championship and for several months afterwards. Big Blue Marble and its partners will take the opportunity to gather further operational insights, validate performance and evaluate future deployment options.
Because the underlying Cloud Video Kit simplifies integration with existing streaming systems, Big Blue Marble intends to expand the project by collaborating with other ecosystem partners, including cloud providers, content delivery networks (CDNs), technology vendors and media organisations interested in MoQ and new streaming architectures generally. The findings from this initiative will help inform future plans for internet-native media delivery. www.bigbluemarble.com
