Shipping Media Over QUIC at Meta Scale for Instagram Live Ingest

• Meta has begun deploying Media over QUIC (MoQ), an emerging open protocol for real-time video streaming at scale.
• MoQ will help simplify our protocol stack for live streaming video and enhance overall user experience for live video.
• We’re sharing how we shipped MoQ on Instagram Live ingest, and what the future looks like from here.
• This work was also presented at DEMOQED 2026.

Instagram Live now uses the open standard transport protocol Media over QUIC (MoQ) for live video ingest on iOS and Android. As a transport designed for both ingest and playback, MoQ gives us the foundation to build toward an architecture that is lower-latency, more resilient on unreliable networks, and more responsive for creators and viewers. It also gives teams across Meta a common foundation for bringing those improvements to future live and interactive experiences without rebuilding them on separate protocol stacks.

MoQ: A Media Protocol for Every Moment in Time

The internet has accumulated a rich set of media protocols, each shaped by the problem in front of it. RTMP for ingestion. HLS and DASH for playback. WebRTC for real-time calls. RUSH for the cases that did not fit neatly into any of those. Each was a strong answer for its moment, and together they’ve carried the industry a long way. At Meta, someone who starts a live stream and then makes a voice call on the same app touches three different protocol stacks, each with its own serving infrastructure, monitoring, and operational expertise.