Cloudflare Launches First MoQ CDN: A Game-Changer for Live Media Streaming

Cloudflare has officially launched its Media over QUIC CDN, marking a major milestone for the emerging MoQ standard. This is the first CDN to offer a production-ready MoQ service, available on Cloudflare’s global anycast network. The announcement comes as a technical preview, free to use but subject to change, with the public relay endpoint at relay.cloudflare.mediaoverquic.com. MoQ, short for Media over QUIC, is designed to become the dominant protocol for live media delivery, aiming to replace WebRTC, HLS/DASH, and even legacy protocols like RTMP and SRT. With Cloudflare now offering a scalable, globally distributed MoQ infrastructure, developers can finally test and deploy real-time streaming solutions without relying on fragmented or experimental setups. The current implementation supports a limited subset of draft-07, and while it’s not yet feature-complete, it’s already functional. Developers can use existing clients like Mike’s fork, Lorenzo’s imquic, Meta’s moxygen, or any MoQ-compatible library. The author of the post, @kixelated, recommends their own library, @kixelated/hang, which provides both a simple Web Component API and a powerful JavaScript API for advanced use cases. The Web Component approach allows for quick setup in the browser with minimal code. For example, publishing a live stream is as simple as using the element with a unique name and the Cloudflare relay URL. Watching the stream is similarly straightforward with . The system even supports AI-powered closed captions, generated in the browser using Silero VAD, Whisper, transformers.js, ONNX Runtime Web, and WebGPU—transmitted via MoQ itself. For developers wanting more control, the JavaScript API enables frame-level access, audio processing, and integration with machine learning models. The library also includes a Rust-based toolchain that supports MP4 ingestion, FFmpeg pipelines, and GStreamer integration—ideal for complex media workflows. While the web version is the focus, the author acknowledges that Rust offers better performance and flexibility, even if it means building WebRTC-like functionality from scratch in JavaScript. Despite being a preview, the release is significant. Cloudflare’s move validates MoQ as a viable alternative to entrenched protocols. The author, a long-time advocate for MoQ, criticizes the slow pace of standardization, noting that protocols like QUIC took years to mature after real-world deployment. He argues that waiting for an RFC is no longer acceptable—real usage is needed to shape the standard. The post also highlights limitations: only a small subset of draft-07 is supported, bugs are expected, and Safari lacks native support. However, workarounds exist, including a WebSocket fallback and JWT authentication. For those who want full control, the author provides a Terraform module to deploy a self-hosted MoQ relay with three nodes, though it’s expensive and complex. The author invites developers to join the MoQ Discord, where over 900 people are already discussing the future of live streaming. He’s especially eager to see more companies—Google, Akamai, Fastly—adopt MoQ and start building real-world systems. Finally, the post ends with a tongue-in-cheek technical deep dive into the library’s reactive API, showing how signals can be used with React or raw JavaScript. It also hints at secret features like browser-based object detection, with a nod to future blog posts. In short, Cloudflare’s MoQ CDN is not just a product—it’s a movement. The era of WebRTC as the default for live media may be ending. The future is MoQ.