On the November 19 episode of WebRTC Live, we attempted to settle the debate on “MOQ vs. WebRTC” once and for all. Since Cloudflare has been expanding its offerings in 2025, with both WebRTC- and MOQ-related product announcements, we invited a few members of their team for a MOQ debate (pun intended) and to get their take on the best use cases for WebRTC, MOQ, and a DASH of HLS (also intended).
Panel host:
- Arin Sime, CEO and Founder, WebRTC.ventures and AgilityFeat
Cloudflare Guests:
- Nils Ohlmeier, Principal Systems Engineer
- Renan Dincer, Principal Systems Engineer
- Mike English, Principal Engineer
The episode also features Arin Sime and Tsahi Level-Levi’s Monthly WebRTC Industry Chat. This month, Arin challenged Tsahi with five rapid-fire questions, asking him to predict WebRTC’s year ahead. Watch Five WebRTC Predictions for 2026.
Watch Episode 107: MOQ vs. WebRTC: A Panel Discussion with Cloudflare
Episode highlights and key insights below.
Key Insights
⚡ WebRTC or MoQ? Use each where it shines. Real-time video isn’t about picking a “winner,” it’s about using the right tool for the right job. WebRTC and MoQ address different needs and complement each other perfectly. As Mike explains, “If you are in a place where you need something that already has most things worked out and you need low latency, you’re probably looking at using WebRTC. But if you are in a space where you can afford to invest more in [the] future, and you’re kind of forward-looking R&D cutting-edge applications that need something different than MoQ, is something to start playing with now.”
⚡ The “latency vs scale” challenge is fundamental. One of the core challenges in real-time streaming is balancing latency and scale. Nils explains, “WebRTC is optimized for low latency. Most of the software stack tries to reduce, for example the video resolution to get it through the pipe, and basically try everything it can to deliver the audio and video, and as low latency as possible and compromise maybe the quality but still stay on latency is key here so we don’t have to go over and out communication style and I think that’s basically a big use case for where WebRTC came from and is still going to be used in the future. It makes perfect sense to try and squeeze everything through the pipe no matter what the conditions are, and handle basically changes in latency, handle bandwidth changes because we know that networks are not going to be stable. It doesn’t help if you measure once and then try to get that through [the] pipe if something on the internet changes and suddenly you have to adapt. And I think that’s where WebRTC is really good and can shine.”
⚡ Every protocol comes with trade-offs. What you gain in flexibility or scalability, you often take on in complexity elsewhere. Renan explains one example, “MoQ has this primitive called a relay that is kind of a singling agnostic. It’s the same signaling all throughout, so you can use Cloudflare’s MoQ relay as well as somebody else’s, your own, whatever MoQ relay, and use them in conjunction, and they will all speak the same primitives, the same objects will be delivered, which is not something it builds, this lack of signaling from WebRTC. But at the same time, I’m not going to be super pro MOQ here. MOQ also lacks a lot of things that WebRTC has, like noise cancellation.”
Episode Highlights
MoQ is the next-gen streaming protocol
As the streaming landscape evolves, developers are looking for protocols that combine flexibility with performance. This is where MoQ comes in. As Mike explains, “MoQ is a new protocol being developed at the IETF. It’s an open standard, and it’s designed for both ingest and distribution of low-latency video, but it’s flexible to support any latency. And the big thing about MoQ is that it’s taken a kind of layered approach, so there’s a base transport protocol that’s designed for fan-out relays to implement. And then on top of that, streaming formats can implement more media-specific features.”
WebRTC remains essential for low-latency in-browser videos.
WebRTC’s core strength, low-latency, browser-native video, ensures its continued relevance. Nils explains, “Probably most people know it started basically with people saying we want to bring video conferencing into the browser. Before it was all proprietary, you had to buy certain boxes or whatever. And I think that’s still going to stick around, you’re still going to have the full integration in the browser, easy convenience with a very small API surface, so kind of hopefully easy to handle. I mean, obviously, we all know the devil is in the details. But that’s not going to go away, if you want low latency, these interactive discussions or whatever, WebRTC will continue to be relevant and a good protocol for that.”
Both MoQ and WebRTC have long-term relevance.
Both protocols are built to last, but the right choice often comes down to practical considerations. As Renan explains: ”I think for a good engineer, both protocols, both things are very similar. But I think maybe in the end, what it might come to is developer experience and the ease of understanding and the primitives, things like browser support, but also kind of the economics of peer-to-peer first protocol and having to run your own SFUs with your own signaling versus using a public relay that has X amount pricing and kind of separation of concerns around not having to have your own backends or having some sort of a custom signaling that is not part of the standards.”
Up Next! WebRTC Live #108
Using AI for Object Detection in Real Time Video
with Chris Allen, CEO of Red5
Wednesday, December 10 at 12:30 pm Eastern
