New processors and consumer devices are making big bets on HEVC, even as AVC remains ubiquitous. Despite some risk, HEVC can add significant value in certain use cases. In this presentation we present the forecast for HEVC uptake from an objective and reliable perspective. We also provide an update to our long-trusted recommendations on choice of codecs and architectures for popular applications in the context of ongoing trends such as 4K, virtual reality, and virtualization.

Choosing the number of streams in an adaptive group and configuring them is usually a subjective, touchy-feely exercise, with no way to really gauge the effectiveness and efficiency of the streams. However, by measuring stream quality via metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, and VQM, you can precisely assess the quality delivered by each stream and its relevancy to the adaptive group. This presentation identifies several key objective quality metrics, teaches how to apply them, and provides an objective framework for analyzing which streams are absolutely required in your adaptive group and their optimal configuration.

From doing a full live 4K video production, including switching between multiple 4K cameras, to using a single 4K camera to produce a show with virtual camera angles - what are the practical applications for 4K live streaming today, and what options are right around the corner? Learn with industry expert David Kirk as he describes the 4K scenarios he finds most common today and where things are moving in the coming months.

Attend this session for your chance to win: AV.io 4K Video Grabber ($400 value)

As a content creator or service provider, value in your application is determined by how quickly and easily the digital assets you create are delivered to your audience. A poor end-user experience causes lost viewers; while spending too much on infrastructure can quickly deplete capital. Learn how to solve these issues with object storage that combines massively scalable, searchable storage with direct HTTP access to radically simplify content storage and delivery infrastructure while reducing latency and costs.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Sony Bluetooth Headphones ($100 value)

This session discusses how analytics tools can be used to produce more engaging video content. Learn the metrics content owners use to identify if content is sufficiently engaging an audience and how insights gathered impacts content owners creation and acquisition strategies. The session also covers what efforts are being made to personalize experiences, reviewing the tactics used to create segmented user groups and target individual users. Speakers have an open discussion about the gaps that must be bridged on the technology side to do better content personalization, prediction and the positive impact to content publishers.

Streaming company-wide meetings, training, and other events through your internal network saves on time, travel costs and resources. This session looks at real-world architectures being used for distributing streams to all screens within an enterprise setting. You’ll learn about how peer-to-peer and multicast technologies fit in, and how to reach remote and mobile workers. Our panelists will recommend ways to increase quality and broadest audience reach, and share best practices and lessons learned.

60% of all user interactions suffer from video playback issues, yet not much is done to help solve this. Rebuffering and downgrading to subpar video bitrates continues unabated as high-speed broadband and faster cellular networks have reached near ubiquity in the United States and some international markets. So why does video still fail and rebuffer? What is the impact of video stream issues on revenue, brand, and churn? We explore these questions and more.

Starting from scratch, we’ll show how to do 4K live streaming in minutes. Using technologies from Wowza and others, we'll deliver live adaptive bitrate streaming, record the video for on-demand playback, and deliver the live feed with global any-screen streaming. In the remaining time, you’ll see how to leverage 4K to create an immersive VR/360 experience.

Attend this session for your chance to win: A Wowza Streaming Cloud-volume plan for one month, including 100 hours of compute time and 5,000 GB of global CDN delivery ($600 value)

The Humane Society of the United States is the nation’s largest and most effective animal protection organization. They have gained significant insights into live streaming by going live via Facebook, Periscope, and Youtube around the world. Their live events have reached millions, exposing their brand to new members, allowing them to engage, converse, and convince these community members to take actions and support their cause. Each livestream event has taught them valuable lessons about what to do and what not to do, and they will share these lessons in this case study presentation.

The video compression industry often encounters claims that some new encoding technology is X% better than previous state-of-the-art encoders, where “X” is some large number. In reality, arriving at a percentage gain is a complex process, depending on the reference (“baseline”) encoding, the encoding settings, the encoding bitrates, the video content being encoded, the method of comparison, and the comparison metrics. This presentation explains how to perform subjective evaluation of encoding technologies using a practical subjective test methodology that is credible and leads to meaningful results. The talk presents several examples of encoded bitstreams to be scored subjectively, shows how to score those bitstreams based on the artifacts present, and illustrates how to collect subjective scores and derive meaningful gain metrics from them.

We will discuss Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and how content can be integrated from each of these into your live show. We'll also provide case studies of how these have been used in real world productions.

Attend this session for your chance to win: vMix 4K live streaming software ($700 value)

With so many OTT services for consumers to choose from, providers must find ways to improve their OTT experience if they want to attract new and retain current subscribers. In this session, we’ll share a checklist of strategies for ensuring fast, reliable, secure online video experiences that wow audiences and keep them coming back for more!

Attend this session for your chance to win: GoPro Hero4 Silver edition ($400 value)

Providing a good experience is key when providing millions of live video streams to tens of millions of viewers. This session dives into the technology needed to deliver an industry-leading live streaming experience on Periscope. Learn how Periscope, Twitter’s live broadcasting platform and the first to popularize live streaming, recently partnered with OpenTelly to improve its viewer experience through a series of technology migrations. Attendees will hear how Periscope improved the experience delivered to its viewers by migrating to HTML5 and low latency HLS.

Streaming continues its rapid evolution, moving away from proprietary core technologies and towards open standards. Which leading-edge technologies (H.265, VP9, AOMedia Video, WebM, DASH, fMP4 HLS, CMAF, HTML5 & WebRTC) should you be adopting to future-proof your streaming deployments so you reach your targeted devices and deliver a great user experience? We’ll look at the royalty-laden HEVC vs. royalty-free VP9 vs. the new open-source AOMedia Video for streaming with MPEG-DASH. Which will win out in the end? How will Apple’s adoption of fragmented MP4 for HLS impact DASH adoption? Will the death of browser plug-ins finally herald the age of HTML5 video streaming, and how does WebRTC fit in? Our panel will dive into these and other questions, helping you decipher which technologies are here to stay, and which should be forgotten.

This presentation covers how broadcasters can improve quality of service by making small changes to their ABR algorithms and analyzing via an effective AB testing workflow. We begin by offering practical feedback on how Dailymotion was able to improve QoS significantly via small player-side ABR iterations, explaining what metrics were used and the results obtained. In the second part of the talk, we delve into how to build an effective AB testing analytics stack, honing in on the tools needed and the appropriate environment to be able effectively analyze our actions and make changes in real time.

The confluence of data forces and sources—cloud, mobile, social, analytics—are at the center of today’s massive data growth, and it’s essential that your business can economically and securely store, manage and leverage that data. With on-premise, cloud, or hybrid solutions, IBM Cloud Object Storage offers unmatched flexibility, massive scalability, and powerful simplicity to address your diverse set of needs and content.

Attend this session for your chance to win: GoPro ($350 value)

Watermarking is becoming a crucial component for UHD distribution. However, due to the proprietary nature of different watermark algorithms integrating various watermarking technologies has not been straight forward. We present ongoing work in the UHD-Forum on best practices and standardized interfaces to allow scale.

Attend this session for your chance to win: 30 color-change mugs ($5 value each)

This presentation will focus on best practices around reliable live streaming of critical, high importance global events with multiple redundant signal pathways. Learn how to overcome challenging on-site environments like flakey internet, failing encoders, faulty cables and failing CDNs. Learn some best practice tips covering the gamut of on-site challenges (cameras, switchers, signal paths, ingest/uplink) to reliable end-user playback (transcoding/transmuxing, reliable playback engines, CDN selection). Find out how you can implement backups and redundancy at every possible level of your live workflow. The presenters will also cover best practices (and caveats) around successful leveraging Facebook Live - Facebook's native new entry into the live streaming category that is gaining enormous traction and engagement right now. Learn from our experiences (and the odd failure) to make sure your next event is a resounding success.

Tastemade is a video network built for the mobile generation that enables people to come together to discover and share their passion for great food and travel. In this case study presentation, Tastemade will outline how they went from using YouTube as their primary distribution source to building their own global video platform and applications, which connect with over 100M monthly users around the globe.

In 2016, The New York Times created a new team to build a faster, cloud-based and reliable video publishing pipeline. This presentation will walk through the set of microservices being developed by the NY Times Media Factory team to create an elastic and reliable solution that can be used across the globe. Learn about content acquisition; transcoding; distribution; APIs and how the NY Times is support a set of new requirements such as adaptive streaming and VR/360° videos.

Live video is a key tool to engage with audiences and Facebook is poised to help you get the right people viewing your stream, interact with your content AND measure results. But there are two key things you need to stand out and be successful. This session will cover what they are and share how other Facebook Live customers are doing it right now.

This session will highlight today’s OTT ecosystem and explore why publishers need a holistic view of consumers’ Quality of Experience (QoE) in today’s open and unpredictable internet environment; discuss why consolidation is becoming necessary for many businesses to remain competitive in the evolving content delivery ecosystem, highlighting the growing trend of quadplay providers; and examine how companies are using data to adapt to the changing entertainment landscape.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Apple TV ($199 value)

Education video usage both inside and outside the classroom is on the rise. The process of creating, managing, and delivering live and on-demand content continues to evolve. What technologies and best practices are schools using? This session will explore successful workflows schools have developed to simplify video adoption and make the technology more transparent to educators and students. Our education panelists will also recommend crawl-walk-run implementation steps and share lessons learned.

Almost all of the commercial cloud encoding services, and many of the largest streaming producers encode in the cloud using FFmpeg. It’s cheap, relatively simple, and highly effective. To accomplish this yourself, you need two basic skill sets; first how to encode with FFmpeg, and then how to automate, schedule, and manage the encoding processes. This presentation will detail how to produce H.264 files with FFmpeg, and describe the tools and techniques available to simplify the automation and management of these encoding jobs for both live and VOD encoding.

Using operational streaming analytics to monitor and support streaming media deployments is as important as—and in many cases more mission critical than—just deploying an in-player streaming analytics solution. In-player and last mile solutions focus on issues as they affect the customers, which is often too late and does little to improve customer retention and minimise churn. Operational streaming analytics alert content distributors and live streaming solution providers to delivery problems as they happen and provide immediate solution responses, before they become end user issues.

Attend this session for your chance to win: GoPro Hero4 Silver edition ($400 value)

Attendees to this session will learn about the exciting and unique new process of deploying OTT applications as well as managing and updating content to the Apple, Amazon, and Roku platforms. We will also discuss how brands/content owners are maximizing and commercializing OTT in the emerging direct-to-consumer medium.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Roku3 ($100 value)

A lot of recent changes are going on in the area of online streaming formats. Apple announced at WWDC 2016 the support of fragmented MP4, a key feature of CMAF, and others have demonstrated its usage on all major browser platforms. Video players now support HLS in HTML5 via re-multiplexing in JavaScript, so that HLS can be played using the HTML Media Source Extensions. In parallel, MPEG-DASH got a lot of traction for DRM-protected premium content, as all major Web browsers support now the HTML5 Encrypted Media Extensions. This panel will provide an overview about MPEG-CMAF, and discuss whether it is an opportunity to actually harmonize deployments that currently have to support both (and separate from each) DASH and HLS. Finally, we will also discuss potential threats on existing deployments having its clear focus on MPEG-DASH and DASH-IF.

This presentation will provide a brief overview of how modern video players work, what broadcasters should look for depending on their technical and business goals, and different open-source tools that are available. It will discuss compatible formats, codecs and supported DRMs, user performance, the ability of each media engine to handle edge cases, and the performance of the ABR algorithms. At the end of the presentation, broadcasters will better understand what tools are right for their needs and be able to evaluate the pros and cons of each solution available.

Virtual Reality (VR) and 360-degree are emerging as two of the most innovative live streaming trends, powering events such as sporting events, concerts, corporate meetings, education, medicine, military applications, and many other areas. In this interactive session, you’ll get to try live demos and get more familiar with the technology as we walk through some common 360-degree live streaming workflows, including the Lollapalooza Berlin 2015 music festival that allowed virtual attendees to attend the live concert series and be immersed with the band on stage. Most VR technologies use industry-standard streaming protocols that can be implemented with common streaming servers and platforms. We’ll show a few examples of 360-degree camera examples, and also review how playback is achieved using common player apps.

Private clouds built on object storage offer huge potential for more efficient, streamlined content delivery. This session will outline elements for success with this new architecture, including: applications that operate on objects vs files, web interface integration, and data management that integrates content delivery with the content production environment.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Beats wireless headphones ($300 value)