MoQ Relay Featured
Media over QUIC relay: sub-second live video and audio over QUIC and WebTransport.
MoQ Relay is the reference relay for Media over QUIC (MoQ), an emerging IETF standard for live media transport. Instead of the classic segmented-HTTP stack (HLS/DASH) that trades latency for scale, MoQ carries live video and audio as prioritized streams over QUIC and WebTransport, reaching sub-second glass-to-glass latency while still fanning out to many viewers. This appliance runs the reference relay from the quic.video ecosystem: a headless Rust service that terminates WebTransport/QUIC on a UDP media port and relays broadcasts from publishers to subscribers.
Key features
- Sub-second live latency over QUIC / WebTransport, not segmented HTTP
- Headless relay: publishers push broadcasts, subscribers pull them, the relay fans out
- A relay you can place near your audience - drop one in each PoP and build an anycast-style live mesh close to viewers
- Standards-track: implements the emerging IETF Media over QUIC (moq) transport
- Self-signed TLS certificate generated at first boot so the relay runs immediately; the certificate fingerprint is published for browser cert pinning
- Runs the official, unmodified upstream kixelated/moq-relay image
- Open demo relay: no login to manage
Use cases
- Ultra-low-latency live streaming (sports, auctions, betting, interactive shows) where HLS/DASH latency is too high
- A relay tier placed in a PoP near your audience to shorten the live delivery path
- Experimenting with and building on the emerging Media over QUIC standard
Why run it on the NetActuate edge MoQ is designed for relays that live close to audiences. Running a MoQ relay in a PoP near your viewers is exactly the anycast-mesh live-delivery model the standard was built for: place relays where your audience is, keep the live path short, and keep the transport on infrastructure you control.
Deployed from the NetActuate marketplace, the relay boots pre-configured from your seeded values: the UDP media port (QUIC/WebTransport), the management/landing port, and an optional hostname to advertise. The media transport is QUIC over UDP, so the deploy network must allow UDP passthrough to the relay port. The relay comes up with a self-signed certificate so it runs out of the box; FULL BROWSER playback requires you to point a real domain and TLS certificate at the instance (browsers reject WebTransport to an untrusted certificate unless its fingerprint is pinned). The co-located landing page explains MoQ, prints the relay endpoint and the current certificate fingerprint, and only serves once a first-boot self-check has confirmed the relay accepts a real MoQ publish session.
Frequently asked questions
How do I deploy MoQ Relay on NetActuate?
Use the Deploy on NetActuate button to talk to our team. We provision MoQ Relay on a NetActuate virtual machine in the point of presence you choose, close to your audience. Each deployment runs in the single location you select.
What does it cost to run MoQ Relay?
MoQ Relay is open-source software and free to run on the marketplace - you pay only for the NetActuate compute (virtual-machine size and location) it runs on, at standard rates. There are no usage-based software fees.
Where can MoQ Relay run?
MoQ Relay can be deployed in any of NetActuate's 45+ points of presence across every continent, so you can place ingest, transcode, delivery and caching close to your contributors and viewers.
Who supports MoQ Relay?
NetActuate operates and supports the underlying infrastructure - the virtual machine, network and edge platform. The application itself is supported by its upstream open-source project.
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