On a Boat

Media over QUIC (MoQ) is a pull-based media protocol being standardized by the IETF, and Saronic has been using it in production on boats for ~2 years. Unlike push-based protocols (WebRTC, SRT, RTMP), MoQ only transmits tracks when a subscriber requests them, making it ideal for bandwidth-constrained environments like satellite-connected vessels with multiple cameras. Key features covered include: subscription-based track delivery, relay clustering for CDN-scale fanout, priority-based congestion handling, backfill for simultaneous lossy live and pristine VOD recording, and QUIC multipath support for bonding satellite and cellular connections. The post uses a nautical scenario to illustrate how MoQ's pull model enables AI-driven adaptive camera subscriptions, per-viewer latency tuning, and efficient bandwidth use.