MOQtail, our open-source Media over QUIC Transport (MOQT) relay and client libraries, received the Best Open Dataset and Software Award at ACM MMSys 2026. It started with a decision that looked risky at the time.

MOQtail logo

The fork in the road

Two years ago, our MOQ research ran on moq-rs, an excellent early implementation. Then moq-rs moved in its own direction, away from the IETF MOQT draft. We had two options: stay on moq-rs and drift away from the standard, or build our own stack that tracked the draft.

For us, compatibility with the draft mattered. Our research needed to work with other implementations and stay relevant to the standard as it was being written. So we chose the second option, and MOQtail was born.

The cost

In graduate research, you usually don’t want to rebuild software that already exists. You build on it so you can spend your time testing new ideas. Leaving moq-rs meant giving up the experience we had built with it, and for a while my own research slowed down.

In line with my PhD work, I focused on the transport side: I developed the relay and the client, and I led our interop testing against other MOQT implementations. I also built Meet, a small web conferencing demo that uses nothing but the MOQtail relay for audio, video, chat and signaling.

The payoff

Once the MOQtail relay and client were in place, they became the base for all our MOQ work. They led to demos, papers, and the MMSys award.

Our most-cited MOQ papers so far, from both before and after MOQtail:

Full list: Google Scholar · moqtail.dev

Try it

MOQtail supports draft-22 today. The code is on GitHub, and you can see it running in the live demos. Clone it, run the relay, and start building.

If you’re working on MOQ, whether in research or in production, I’d like to hear from you: contact@zafergurel.com.