Big Blue Marble Pilots Ultra‑Low‑Latency MoQ Streaming For Live Football

International broadcast and streaming specialist Big Blue Marble has begun a multi‑month Proof of Concept (PoC) of Media over QUIC (MoQ) at a major international football championship, aiming to validate next‑generation low‑latency streaming in a live sports setting. The trial uses live broadcast feeds and is driven by Big Blue Marble’s scalable Cloud Video Kit, with support from Ateme, a global leader in video compression and streaming. It will measure MoQ’s performance, scalability, and operational readiness for future large‑scale live event delivery.

MoQ is an emerging internet‑native protocol designed to deliver live video with ultra‑low latency while keeping viewers and devices in sync. That synchronisation opens the door to interactive experiences including synchronised watch parties, second‑screen applications, live statistics, and real‑time fan engagement.

"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 continuous measurements taken during the championship, the MoQ platform is currently delivering Austria’s fastest live streaming signal. End‑to‑end latency is reduced by approximately 20 to 40 seconds compared with other Austrian TV streaming platforms and often beats terrestrial and satellite broadcasts by several seconds.

As part of the initiative, Big Blue Marble's engineering team has extended the open‑source MoQ implementation with new capabilities, including NTP timestamp insertion, end‑to‑end latency measurements, enhanced monitoring metadata, and backend analytics integration. Detailed metrics are being gathered across publisher, relay, and player environments to assess Quality of Experience (QoE), network performance, capacity requirements, and platform scalability. The live streams are protected against unauthorised access and downloading using Big Blue Marble’s highly scalable multi‑DRM solution, Cloud DRM.

Ateme's MoQ support shows that sub‑second end‑to‑end latency and broadcast‑grade video quality can be achieved together, leveraging its TITAN transcoder and open‑source solutions from the OpenMOQ consortium.

The PoC will run throughout the championship and continue for several months afterwards, enabling Big Blue Marble and partners to collect further operational insights, validate performance findings, and evaluate future deployment options. With Cloud Video Kit designed for straightforward integration into existing streaming ecosystems, Big Blue Marble plans to broaden collaboration with ecosystem partners — including cloud providers, content delivery networks (CDNs), technology vendors, and media organisations exploring MoQ and next‑generation streaming architectures. The outcomes are expected to inform future technology roadmaps for internet‑native media delivery.

ateme.com