Major advances in cloud virtualization and vendor interoperability are finally unleashing the cost-effective transition to IP-based live production workflows that has become an urgent priority worldwide.

The question is, how far does the industry want to go in upsetting old apple carts?

Standing out among a multitude of approaches to speeding the IP transition is the release of an open-source software development kit (SDK) supporting what’s known as the Media eXchange Layer (MXL). The innovation is part of the Digital Media Framework Reference Architecture (DMF RA) that was formulated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and a handful of vendors and media companies at workshops in late 2024.

The real-time interactive streaming revolution kicked into high gear at the recent IBC show in Amsterdam, fueled by intensifying activity around the emerging Media-over-QUIC (MOQ) standard and an outpouring of unrelated innovations by multiple suppliers.

With myriad paths now open to a market hungry for real-time connectivity, competing vendor messages mixed with much confusion over who is doing what lent an air of chaos typical of any major sea change in how things are done on the internet. But the momentum behind MOQ suggested that whatever upheaval lies immediately ahead, the International Engineering Task Force’s standards-based approach will become the new norm in video usage before too long.

This year’s football season is taking the venerable sport a quantum leap closer to what fans of all sports worldwide will soon be taking for granted with next-gen viewing experiences that fully exploit the interactive personalized dynamism of IP technology, especially when it’s employed with ultralow-latency streaming.

The transformative implications of what’s taking shape around efforts to drive viewer engagement with on-screen magic have been largely overshadowed by press reports covering new streaming deals as a way to reach cord-cutters and cord-nevers. The big news is that pervasive inclusion of live football as part of streamed services’ programming has led to virtually every NFL and top-tier college game becoming available through live-streamed as well as multichannel pay TV and over-the-air distribution.

The emphasis on the business side is understandable, given what’s at stake as the big four broadcast and streaming rights holders with billions invested in recent multi-year contracts compete in high-wire acts aimed at balancing monetization agendas across traditional TV and digital outlets. But they’re also going further than ever in the digital domain to deliver the feature personalization and gamification deemed essential to driving engagement with a restless generation of younger consumers.

2025 is proving to be a year full of surprises at the crossroads between legacy TV and streaming, starting with a general business climate that’s turning out to be better than many industry players and analysts expected in the months following Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

Perhaps the biggest surprise lies in new reasons for optimism in the TV broadcasting sector as station groups report the falloff in ad revenues following a national election year isn’t as bad as expected. Outweighing concerns about tariff policies, station owners are especially upbeat about the outlook in light of the deregulatory agenda promised by new FCC chairman Brendon Carr.

A new video streaming platform achieving real-time latency without the use of WebRTC is undergoing early deployment by nanocosmos, which has built its business supporting low-latency streaming needs of enterprises typically not involved in mainstream media services.

While the new strategy is based on what nanocosmos refers to as “the new next-generation streaming protocol MoQ (Media over QUIC),” it actually has nothing to do with the IETF MoQ standardization initiative that we’ve been tracking, most recently in this article. Instead, as described by nanocosmos CEO Oliver Lietz, his company’s version of MoQ is its own adaptation to use of the QUIC protocol.