Content distributors and aggregators adding HEVC to their delivery pipeline will have plenty of codec options, but who has the time to evaluate their features, output quality, and performance? No worries—codec specialist Jan Ozer has done the work for you. He’s evaluated leading contenders like x265, MainConcept, Beamr, Intel, and NTT and he’ll share his results. You'll walk away from this session with a much clearer picture of the strengths and weaknesses of your HEVC encoding options for VOD streaming.

The industry has made big strides forward in bridging the divides between HLS and DASH, Fragmented MP4s and Transport Streams, CBC and CRT, and the myriad little details that continue to cause fragmentation and chaos in delivery and rendering of DRM-secured content to devices. Achieving cost-effective, cross-platform secure playback remains a critical yet mostly unsolved challenge. While the unified vision of HTML5 and seamless playback across browsers is still several years from potential fruition, there are methods to conquer the madness and implement delightful, yet secure, OTT services. This presentation will provide an update on the state of DRM including insight into the apps vs browsers debate, customer needs, and best practices recommendations.

Learn how Ontario Hospital Association uses video to engage members, create valuable new partnerships and generate new revenue without new staff or fundraising. The non-profit reaches more than twice the number of people using webcasts than it would through face-to-face meetings and achieved a 280% ROI in less than a year.

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Veterans from the military Special Operations Forces (SOF) community are among our nations greatest   untapped economic assets. The skills learned and honed while in service are directly applicable and invaluable when effectively employed in the private sector. This session with former Special Operations veterans and entrepreneurs will explore how the notions of situational awareness, transparency, empathy, adaptability and integrity inherent to the SOF community can and should be incorporated in your life and within business irrespective of industry.

Streaming directly to social media has exploded. Everyone is looking to enhance their content and expand what they produce on these platforms without a large budget or production team. LiveU’s VP of Engineering, Dan Pisarski will conduct a lively presentation where he looks at the ins and outs of live streaming to social media – and how to get broadcast quality productions out of cloud-based streaming solutions. How are brands and production companies producing content and syndicating online? Which software and service offerings are available to produce everything in the cloud? How can we expect the live production to evolve further? What does the live streaming workflow look like today and how can content creators prepare for the future?

Piracy monitoring systems must evolve from sending DMCA whackamole notices to real-time watermark detection. However, pirate content originates from multiple sources using different watermarking technologies. Using new audio/video watermark detection techniques, learn how torrent and cyberlocker monitoring providers can streamline piracy monitoring workflow to curtail the supply of unauthorized content.

Attend this session for your chance to win: DWA-branded mugs

The worst way to find out that viewers aren't having a good experience is via angry support emails or Twitter. If you have the right data at hand, getting out in front of problems your viewers might be seeing is crucial to keeping viewers happy and watching. This discussion will dig into real world examples and approaches to collecting, utilizing, and making QoE data actionable in order to improve the viewer experience.

360 and VR video are one of the major topics in the industry this year. This panel will discuss which platforms content provider are targeting, i.e. Web, Smartphones, or VR head-sets. In particular the panel will discuss which projections, streaming formats, and rendering techniques are used to stream content today. It will also discuss how new codecs like HEVC, VP9 or AV1, or new streaming standards like Omnidirectional Media Application Format (OMAF) of MPEG will enable better quality and new use cases.