A Modern Interpretation of Live Streaming in the Cars 2 Cinematic Universe

A Modern Interpretation of Live Streaming in the Cars 2 Cinematic Universe - Media over QUIC published 7/13/2026 A Modern Interpretation of Live Streaming in the Cars 2 Cinematic Universe

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This is an unexpected collaboration with Fastly. They liked the MoQ blog posts and actually sponsored me to make a hinged version, cross-posted to their OFFICIAL BLOG . Go read that one instead if my usual cringe is too much.

Roses are red. 🌹 Sports cars be too. 🚗 MoQ be fast. 🚀 Cars 2™ is a 2011 American animated comedy film produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures.

starring Lightning McQueen, the devilishly handsome race car

Cars 2: Electric Boogaloo

Lightning McQueen is racing around the track. The spectators in the stands are honking wild. HONK HONK

But we don’t care about the stans in the stands. We care about the cars in their garage? The ones willing to pay big bucks if we can transmit the LOUD CARS DO CIRCLES race over the internet. Or whatever currency cars use, IDK I’m not a lore expert.

The answer for the last decade has been HLS/DASH. Split the media into fragments, anywhere from 0.5s to 4s long, and serve them over HTTP. It’s boring but it works.

But just like the Mini Cooper, there are a few short-comings.

Flushing media in batches adds latency (0.5s to 4s).

Network congestion causes head-of-line blocking and the spinny boye .

Every second of the spinny boye means even more latency .

This is why I created MoQ while at Twitch. The goal was to make live streams more interactive (and less boring). Stream frames, and occasionally drop instead of blocking.

High latency is for losers. I always finish first, just like Lightning McQueen.

MoQ for the Fans

First, I wanted to address the SUV in the room. My previous blog post, You Don’t Need It, mentioned that you don’t need MoQ for high-quality content. It’s true, but as always, there are exceptions to my shitty opinions.

But before we disprove one shitty opinion, we need to prove another. Racing is boring .

The video footage is so boring that the only thing separating two laps is a counter. Like yes, sometimes the car goes boom, but there’s so much dead air. I postulate that you’re watching to be part of the story LIVE , not to see every millisecond of lap 392 in the Toilet Bowl 500.

And it might actually be a good use-case for MoQ. Because instead of buffering/pausing to load boring content, we can instead skip it to keep latency low. It keeps you in the action with sub-second latency . And milliseconds might be the difference between winning and losing.

FUN FACT : Sports betting prediction markets are a thing. Degenerate users love lower latency.

gotta go fast

And before you get your suspension in a twist, MoQ can still provide the same quality/latency you expect from HLS/DASH. We just lower the latency floor for the Lightning McQueens out there who want to WIN .

MoQ for the Cars

I originally made MoQ for the fans. But people keep running my code on the cars. Or the boats.

TBH, this is the better use-case for MoQ.

You might have pieced together that I don’t watch racing (boring ) outside of critically acclaimed movies for children. Starring Lightning McQueen and his goofy comrades, the cars go fast vroom vroom. But when I do see snippets of F1, the camera feeds from the cars are awful .

Me, the uninformed dumbass, has a hunch that it’s due to networking. There’s going to be deadzones or interference or whatever around the track. We are bound by the laws of physics, even in the Cars 2 Cinematic Universe.

We no can send all bytes. - Lightning McQueen (2011)

Boring protocols like RTP drop packets/frames based on SLAs. The publisher gives up (re)transmitting a frame after ~100 milliseconds; then it’s gone forever. This often shows up as artifacting or tearing or frozen video.

But the chad protocol doesn’t give up.

MoQ publishers prioritize transmitting the newer stuff (in dependency order). The old stuff gets queued in RAM (up to a TTL). When bandwidth recovers, we can backfill old footage instead of losing it forever.

Each MoQ subscriber independently decides how long to wait for each frame:

The live stream might wait for up to 1 second

The instant relay might wait for up to 10 seconds

The VOD recording might wait for up to 1 minute.

So your real-time feed might be lossy af, but the VOD is pristine.

If I ever own a racing team, it’s going to be called The Backfill Boyes

The packets may have given up. But Lightning McQueen never gives up. He always finishes first and the crowd goes HONK HONK .

MoQ for the Robots

We’re closer to the Cars Cinematic Universe than we want to admit. Humans are a dying breed. Like a pug on a hot day. RIP us.

Enter the robots. They byte. And they need networking for their bleeps and bloops. It turns out that MoQ works for more than just media:

The speedometer? A live stream .

The steering wheel? A live stream .

The G force sensor as Lightning McQueen heroically crashes into...

A Modern Interpretation of Live Streaming in the Cars 2 Cinematic Universe

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