Toward Accessible and Safe Live Streaming Using Distributed Content Filtering with MoQ

Live video streaming is increasingly popular on social media platforms. With the growth of live streaming comes an increased need for robust content moderation to remove dangerous, illegal, or otherwise objectionable content. Whereas video on demand distribution enables offline content analysis, live streaming imposes restrictions on latency for both analysis and distribution. In this paper, we present extensions to the in-progress Media Over QUIC Transport protocol that enable real-time content moderation in one-to-many video live streams. Importantly, our solution removes only the video segments that contain objectionable content, allowing playback resumption as soon as the stream conforms to content policies again. Content analysis tasks may be transparently distributed to arbitrary client devices. We implement and evaluate our system in the context of light strobe removal for photosensitive viewers, finding that streaming clients experience an increased latency of only one group-of-pictures duration.