Montevideo Tech Summer Camp: Where Video Engineering Meets Humanity
Every year the media-tech calendar fills up with conferences and expos. But, every so often you attend something that feels fundamentally different. Montevideo Tech Summer Camp is one of those experiences. It’s less a traditional event and more an extended, intentional collaboration among engineers, founders, and operators who care deeply about the future of streaming technology and open standards.
Hosted by Qualabs in Uruguay, Summer Camp is a global gathering of video engineers, operators, founders, and product leaders who care deeply about where media technology is heading, and how we get there together. It’s a rare blend of deep technical collaboration, open-source contribution, and intentional human connection, all grounded in a place that invites you to slow down and really talk.
What Summer Camp Is (and Isn’t)
Summer Camp isn’t a conference. There are no vendor booths, no rushed hallway pitches, and no rushing to the next back-to-back session. Instead, it’s a three‑month journey of remote collaboration on open‑source initiatives, culminating in a week in‑person in Montevideo.
The focus is simple and ambitious at the same time: work together on real problems facing the video‑tech ecosystem, share knowledge openly, and leave the industry stronger than we found it.
During Summer Week, that work is interwoven with Uruguay’s culture. Shared meals, new friends, long conversations, and the kind of pacing that makes space for reflection rather than burnout.
The Montevideo Tech Summer Camp is a global, collaborative program focused on advancing the video and media technology ecosystem through open work and shared learning.
The idea isn’t simply to talk about what’s next, it’s to build it with others.
Fostering Collaboration Between Video Engineers & Operational Leaders
At its core, Summer Camp is about collaboration across the entire streaming ecosystem. Engineers, product managers, operations leaders, and business stakeholders all show up because they want to raise the bar.
That mix matters. Technical decisions are informed by real operational constraints. Product ideas are stress-tested against engineering reality. Business context is part of the conversation, not an afterthought. Everyone contributes however they can: through code, architecture discussions, design feedback, or simply listening and asking the right questions.
Projects and discussions are grounded in the belief that strengthening shared open-source infrastructure benefits the entire industry.
MonteVIDEO Tech Day
Summer Camp also included MonteVIDEO Tech Day, a focused evening of technical talks, lightning sessions, and informal discussions. The tech talks represented a great selection of subjects across the video workfow, covering topics from enhanced RTMP, to Low Latency with MoQ, Next Generation Advertising, Security and of course AI.
The result was great food for thought that carried into the rest of the week’s work and conversations.
Summer Camp By the Numbers (and Beyond)
- 26 campers: 19 first‑timers, 7 returning
- 6 technical talks, 3 lightning talks, and a Mate Talk
- 15+ women participating in the Women’s Roundtable
- 2 open‑source project demos
- 25+ contributors across MoQ and SMPTE AI Copilot
But numbers only tell part of the story. What’s harder to quantify are the bonds formed, the trust built, and the sense of shared ownership over the future of media technology. Summer Camp proves that another model is possible.
One where open source is about stewardship, not extraction. Where innovation happens through collaboration, not competition. Where technical depth and human connection reinforce each other rather than compete for attention.
For those who were there, it’s difficult to fully explain what Summer Camp leaves behind once it ends. For those considering it in the future, the takeaway is simple: If you care about video technology, and the people building it, Montevideo Tech Summer Camp is worth the journey.
The Work: Open Source With Purpose
This year’s Summer Camp delivered tangible, community‑driven results across multiple projects:
MoQ (Media over QUIC)
Continuing on last years work on moq-js, this project focused on bringing the protocol closer to real‑world usage and making it easier to build experiences. The emphasis wasn’t just on experimentation, but on practical usability such as leveraging existing packager workflows with HLS and DASH into an MoQ delivery pipeline. By creating a modular open library with packages for transport, WebCodecs and MSE-based playback, the building blocks are in place for creating many different types of MoQ-based workflows. From real time chat to low-latency sports, all work on open infrastructure.
https://github.com/moq-dev/moq/tree/main/js
https://montevideotech.dev/summer-camp-2026-moq-project/
SMPTE AI Co-pilot
The SMPTE AI Co-pilot tackled a different, but equally challenging problem: making complex multimedia archives genuinely usable. The team created working POC of an AI-powered system that enables natural language querying to search across vast archives of content in multiple formats. Then, it produces direct answers citing the original sources while enforcing access rules for all content. The result is an open source “Media Co-Pilot” that can easily be generalized and extended to index any content archive.
https://github.com/qualabs/SMPTE-Copilot
https://montevideotech.dev/summer-camp-2026-co-pilot-for-multimedia-archives/
I encourage those interested to watch both presentations here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7XRN-UM4lU&t=1391s
The Innovation Track: Designing What Comes Next
One of the new additions this year was the Innovation Track, hosted in Punta del Este.
Designed for people who want to create what’s next (not just react to it) the track brought together a small group of operators, engineers, founders, and product leaders to explore system‑level shifts reshaping media technology.
Guided by Andy Beach and Juan Pablo Saibene, this wasn’t a typical breakout session. It was a structured, high‑signal working environment, intentionally designed to produce real output – a working paper (dare we say manifesto) detailing the ideas we discussed, and how we as an industry might execute on them.
The Human Layer
If there’s a single theme that defines Summer Camp, it’s intentional connection.
From unrushed conversations to shared vulnerability, the environment made it easy to listen, challenge assumptions, and learn from one another without judgment. Many campers spoke about leaving not just with new ideas, but with renewed optimism about the industry and their place in it. As one camper put it, Summer Camp offers:
“An amazing mix—deep technical conversations with people you can really go deep with, and at the same time, Uruguay, culture, and spaces that help everyone connect and get to know each other.”
Building A Network of Video Engineering Experts
For me, Summer Camp stands out because it creates a level of connection that’s almost impossible to achieve at a traditional trade show or conference.
Instead of brief hallway conversations or tightly-scheduled meetings, you spend real time working alongside people. You debug problems together, you share meals, and you explore Uruguay. The atmosphere is casual and human, which makes the technical collaboration better, not worse.
That combination of working deeply and experiencing the country together leads to relationships that are more durable and more honest than the ones formed under conference lights.
As with many things in this industry, it ultimately comes down to people.
Summer Camp is about sharing experiences, listening carefully, learning from one another, and walking away with new perspectives you didn’t have before. The technical output matters, but it’s the shared time and mutual respect that make those outcomes possible.
I’d like to personally thank the wonderful team at Qualabs that made this all possible – I plan on returning as often as I can!