NetActuate Launches MoQ Relay for Live Media Delivery

NetActuate, a global leader in edge infrastructure and network services, has launched MoQ Relay, a new managed service for live media delivery. This innovative offering allows broadcasters and streaming platforms to distribute a single live feed to multiple downstream subscribers from relay capacity positioned near their audience, leveraging NetActuate’s extensive global network.

MoQ Relay is the latest addition to NetActuate’s live-media suite, alongside the NetActuate Media Substrate and the C-Band Transition Acceleration Service. The service enables media companies to deploy relay capacity on NetActuate’s infrastructure, distributing one live feed to more than 45 locations worldwide. This new managed service is designed to streamline the delivery process, reduce costs, and enhance reliability for media distribution.

Mark Mahle, CEO of NetActuate, highlighted the company’s unique advantage in managing the relays. "Every conversation about MoQ ends up at the same question, which is who runs the relays," he said. "We already run the network underneath them, so that is our lane and where we excel."

Media over QUIC (MQUIC) is the protocol powering MoQ Relay. MQUIC is an open standard that allows for efficient and scalable live media delivery, preserving the transport-stream workflow. With MoQ Relay, a live feed travels to a single relay once, and everyone nearby is served from that single copy. NetActuate’s testing with four relays demonstrated that one relay could send out sixteen times as much video while using the same backbone needed to serve a single viewer. This means that audience size no longer drives network costs.

The service runs on infrastructure that NetActuate operates, rather than on rented transit. Paths between relay locations are continuously measured and steered to ensure that when a route degrades, traffic moves to a better one. Each session is pinned to a stable per-location address, which allows the routing beneath it to change independently. The network manages the relay, not an external layer.

Capacity is placed in the locations where a customer’s traffic actually needs it, drawn from more than 45 locations worldwide and extended beyond them on request. Each customer receives its own tenant, with namespaces issued by the service rather than chosen by the customer. This ensures that no one pays for or shares a footprint built for someone else.

MoQ Relay is designed to provide detailed visibility into what is delivered per hop and per track, ingress to egress across NetActuate’s own network. This operational view is invaluable for evaluation teams testing live distribution patterns.

Mark de Jong, VP of Business Development at NetActuate, stated, "MoQ is moving out of protocol work and into deployment planning. A managed relay service on an operator-run network is a practical way to evaluate it without building every piece yourself."

NetActuate is offering a no-charge evaluation deployment to qualified broadcasters, streaming platforms, and distribution teams. Each team receives relay capacity of its own in the locations it selects, with full observability and support from NetActuate’s network team. Interested parties can request an evaluation at netactuate.com/moq-relay.

NetActuate will also demonstrate MoQ Relay and meet with media teams at IBC 2026, taking place September 11 to 14 in Amsterdam.