MoQ x 5G Broadcast

5G Broadcast is the efficient way to reach a large audience with live content: one transmission serves every device in the coverage area, so the cost of delivery does not grow with the number of viewers. That property is exactly what makes it attractive for a major live event.

The weakness is at the edge of coverage. When broadcast reception is unavailable or conditions deteriorate, the service simply stops for that viewer - playback is interrupted or the stream is lost entirely, and there is nothing in the broadcast path to fall back on.

This POC closes that gap by treating broadband as a recovery path rather than a replacement. The transition to MoQ delivery happens without the viewer being asked to do anything and without playback stalling, so the experience stays consistent whether the picture is arriving over broadcast or over the network.

The usual way to make broadcast resilient is to run a broadband stream in parallel the whole time, which spends network capacity on content that broadcast is already delivering successfully. Here the MoQ subscription is created on demand, at the moment the SDK sees packets go missing, and only for the affected content - so broadcast efficiency is kept for the mass audience and broadband is spent only on recovery. Because the recovery path is MoQ rather than conventional streaming, the fallback arrives with sub-second latency, which is what keeps the audience synchronised during a live event instead of splitting it into viewers who are seconds apart. The switching is handled inside the Nakolos SDK and presented to the player as one continuous stream, and both halves of the architecture are standards-based: 5G Broadcast on the transmission side, Media over QUIC on the broadband side.