Meta has transitioned its Instagram Live ingest infrastructure from the proprietary RUSH protocol to the open IETF standard Media over QUIC (MoQ). This deployment aims to unify Meta's streaming transport stack, improve latency and resilience, and leverage a standards-based approach for future live and interactive video services.
Meta's transition to an open IETF standard for Instagram Live ingest marks a significant shift away from the fragmented landscape of RTMP and proprietary QUIC variants. By adopting a unified transport layer, Meta reduces the engineering overhead of maintaining separate stacks for live streaming, voice calls, and real-time AI interactions. This move validates MoQ's readiness for hyperscale environments and pressures other major platforms to move toward standardized, relay-based architectures that handle congestion more efficiently than traditional HTTP streaming. Watch for Meta to implement QMUX for standardized TCP fallback, which would allow the company to fully decommission its legacy RUSH infrastructure.
Meta has officially transitioned its Instagram Live ingest infrastructure from the proprietary RUSH protocol to the open IETF Media over QUIC (MoQ) standard. This shift unifies Meta's streaming transport stack, enabling improved latency and resilience for live video while establishing a standardized, relay-based architecture for future interactive video services at scale.
Meta replaced its decade-old proprietary RUSH protocol with the open IETF Media over QUIC (MoQ) standard.
The protocol supports tunable latency, allowing interactive participants to operate at approximately 100 ms, while archival services can utilize larger buffers.
Meta is using a temporary translation layer at the network edge that converts MoQ frames into the RUSH format to ensure backend compatibility.
The deployment utilizes moxygen, Meta's open-source library, and the mvfst QUIC stack to manage large-scale ingest workloads.
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