MoQ vs WebRTC
WebRTC is the integrated real-time communications stack browsers ship, so it is what conferencing uses in a tab. It is less dominant than it looks: Zoom, Teams, and Discord run custom RTP stacks in their native apps and keep WebRTC for browser compatibility, and the one vendor that controls libwebrtc gets its features first.
What MoQ offers
- Publish and subscribe on one session. Each participant is a broadcast; peers discover each other through announcements on a path prefix. No SDP offer/answer, no renegotiation when someone joins.
- Latency you choose. WebRTC decides when to drop. A MoQ subscriber sets its own budget per track, so audio can be near-lossless at 500 ms while video stays at the live edge.
- Scale from the same relay. A relay that serves a two-person call also serves a ten-thousand-viewer webinar. There is no SFU/CDN split.
- Full pipeline control in the browser. WebCodecs frames and
AudioDatasamples are yours: render to a texture, run a model, apply effects. - No STUN/TURN. Clients dial the relay over WebTransport like any HTTPS server. Native peers on a LAN can go peer-to-peer over iroh.
Interop
WebRTC clients still fit. The WebRTC gateway accepts WHIP publishers and serves WHEP players, bridging them into the same broadcasts the MoQ clients use.