Shipping Media Over QUIC at Meta Scale for Instagram Live Ingest
Meta deployed Media over QUIC on Instagram Live to unify its fragmented protocol stack
“As live video, real-time AI, and generative AI creation tools increasingly share the same product surface, the lines between these use cases are starting to blur.”
Meta has shipped the emerging IETF standard Media over QUIC (MoQ) for Instagram Live ingest on iOS and Android, replacing its decade-old in-house RUSH protocol. The move consolidates three separate protocol stacks (RTMP, HLS/DASH, WebRTC) into a common transport layer. The AI angle is peripheral — Meta notes that converging live video and generative AI tools on one surface motivated the unification, but the core story is infrastructure simplification, not AI.