Caton and Whale TV Aim to End Streaming Lag with AI-Powered Real-Time CDN

By Kathleen Cook

LAS VEGAS, NV – January 05, 2026 – The frustrating delay between a live event and its appearance on your screen may soon be a relic of the past. Caton Technology, a specialist in AI-driven network optimization, and Whale TV, a major smart TV operating system provider, have announced a strategic collaboration to launch what they are billing as the world's first real-time Content Delivery Network (CDN) based on the emerging Media over QUIC (MoQ) protocol. The partnership, unveiled ahead of a joint demonstration at CES 2026, promises to slash media delivery latency from as much as 30 seconds on traditional CDNs to under a single second.

This leap in performance is poised to redefine real-time digital experiences, with profound implications for live sports, cloud gaming, interactive broadcasting, and any application where immediacy is critical. By integrating Caton's AI-enhanced MoQ platform directly into Whale TV's operating system—which powers over 44 million active smart TVs globally—the companies are creating a direct pipeline for ultra-low-latency content to reach millions of living rooms.

The Quest for Real-Time: Unpacking Media over QUIC

The core of this innovation is Media over QUIC (MoQ), a next-generation protocol currently being standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents a fundamental shift away from the dominant HTTP-based streaming protocols like HLS and DASH, which were designed for reliability over speed and are the primary cause of the buffering and delays common in live streams.

MoQ is built on top of QUIC, the modern transport protocol that also underpins HTTP/3. This foundation provides several inherent advantages, including faster connection setups, more efficient congestion control, and robust performance on unreliable networks. Unlike traditional protocols that send media in sequential chunks, MoQ uses a more flexible publish-subscribe model. Content producers can publish media tracks, and a decentralized network of relays can efficiently distribute them to millions of subscribers simultaneously. This architecture is inherently designed for the one-to-many distribution required for large-scale live events, enabling both massive scalability and sub-second latency.

The goal of MoQ is to create a unified protocol that can handle everything from media ingest to global distribution, potentially replacing a patchwork of legacy technologies like RTMP, SRT, and WebRTC. By decoupling the media transport from the application layer, it allows for more intelligent network management without compromising end-to-end security.

AI-Enhanced Delivery: Caton's Intelligent Edge

While MoQ provides the framework for real-time delivery, Caton Technology is differentiating its solution, Caton Media XStream, through a sophisticated layer of artificial intelligence. The company's "AI-driven Smart MoQ Relay Management" promises a self-healing, observable, and highly reliable network that goes beyond a standard MoQ implementation.

Caton's AI engine continuously analyzes network conditions across its global Points of Presence (PoPs), using machine learning models to predict congestion and potential packet loss. This proprietary system, honed through the company's Caton Transport Protocols (CTP), enables what it calls two-layer AI traffic engineering. The platform monitors the health of every link in the transmission path and can proactively reroute traffic to an optimal path in milliseconds, effectively dodging network disruptions before they impact the viewer's experience. This intelligent overlay is designed to mitigate the unpredictability of the public internet, ensuring a stable, high-quality stream even under challenging network conditions. It's this combination of MoQ's low-latency architecture and Caton's AI-powered resilience that forms the backbone of their real-time CDN offering.

"This collaboration with Whale TV marks a major milestone for real-time media delivery," said Chandler Wang, SVP of Technology at Caton Technology. "By integrating Caton Media XStream into Whale TV's platform, we are delivering the industry's first truly real-time CDN powered by Media over QUIC and enhanced by AI-driven relay management."

From Protocol to Living Room: The Whale TV Ecosystem

A groundbreaking protocol is only as powerful as its reach. The strategic importance of this partnership lies in Whale TV's vast and established ecosystem. As an independent TV operating system provider, Whale TV has quietly built a massive global footprint, shipping on 10-15 million new televisions annually through partnerships with over 400 TV brands.

By embedding Caton Media XStream directly into the Whale TV OS, the companies are bypassing a significant adoption hurdle. The technology won't require a separate app or hardware; it will be a native feature of the television itself, ready to deliver ultra-low-latency content from any provider using the platform. This gives Caton immediate access to a potential audience of over 44 million monthly active users, creating a powerful incentive for content creators and distributors to adopt the new standard.

"Whale TV is at the forefront of innovation, and we are excited to work with partners like Caton to enhance the TV experience of millions of consumers," stated Raymond Chung, CTO at Whale TV. This integration signifies a move toward a more seamless and responsive entertainment experience, where the line between broadcast and interactive media becomes increasingly blurred.

A New Battlefield for Latency

The push for real-time streaming is creating a new competitive front among CDN providers. While the Caton and Whale TV announcement is significant, particularly for its OS-level integration, they are not alone in the race to commercialize MoQ. Cloudflare, a major CDN and internet infrastructure company, launched a technical preview of its own MoQ-based CDN in August 2025, leveraging its extensive global network. Other industry giants like Akamai are also heavily involved in the MoQ standardization process at the IETF, signaling broad industry commitment to the technology.

However, the Caton-Whale TV alliance highlights a different strategy: a vertically integrated approach that combines cutting-edge network technology with a massive consumer endpoint. Instead of offering a general-purpose CDN, they are creating a dedicated media ecosystem optimized for the living room. The demonstration at CES 2026 will be a critical showcase, where the partners will need to prove that their AI-enhanced, OS-integrated solution delivers tangible, measurable improvements in latency and stability for applications like cloud gaming and live interactive events.

The industry will be watching the metrics from Las Vegas closely, as they could set a new performance benchmark and accelerate the shift away from the high-latency streaming methods that have defined the internet's video era until now.