The video viewing landscape is broader than ever, and is constantly shifting under the feet of content developers and providers. This session will discuss major trends in video viewing, including pay TV subscribership, OTT services, TV Everywhere, multitasking, content discovery and device viewing. Learn about new topic areas, like measuring the impact of "skinny bundles" and "virtual MVPDs," that have the potential to shake-up the TV industry. In the session, experts in video content and distribution will discuss detailed data from Altman Vilandrie & Company's latest survey of U.S. consumer video viewing habits and debate the current state of video – and where it's going in the future.

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.

Google has announced that Chrome will be “HTML5 By Default” as of Q4 this calendar year, meaning that users will need to click to allow Flash content to be played. This is obviously a major concern for the streaming industry, as Flash remains the dominant player technology today. There are native HTML5 solutions available for streaming video, but so far, the adoption has been low. This session reviews the state of the video player industry and compares a few open source and off-the-shelf solutions that can help keep those videos streaming.

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)

As the content ecosystem prepares for HDR, 4K/UHD, and even 8K at scale in an on-demand, any device world, the risk of high-quality pirated content rises in tandem, putting the evolving business models and infrastructure investments at immediate risk. Forensic watermarking is positioned as a requirement in Movielabs' Enhanced Content Protection Guidelines to mitigate the ravaging effects of un-monetized distribution. However, getting the technology widely deployed is challenging due to misaligned priorities among the many players in the value chain who must implement or enable the technology and related services and policies. On this panel, we bring together key experts from leading companies in the forensic watermarking ecosystem to discuss the technical, business and practical challenges of implementing such a system at scale.

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)

As the OTT market continues to experience dramatic growth, it’s also become incredibly crowded and competitive. Content owners are under more pressure than ever to get to market quickly and having the right business model is crucial. This session will discuss the different strategies for going OTT; a templated, turnkey service that enables faster time-to-market or a more customized, highly differentiated offering and the pros and cons of each. Speakers will deliberate on how to best address the growing challenge of device fragmentation in an increasingly complex OTT ecosystem and how content owners are successfully monetizing content via advertising or subscription models.

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.

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)

The way that people watch television is changing. As the broadcast industry gradually transitions to IP and consumers adopt more online video, it’s clear that a transformation is underway. But what will TV look like in 5 years? This session explores the future of television and how the gradual, generational shift from linear broadcast to online will fundamentally change not only consumption but the underlying business models as well. Attendees learn about the long-term vision for the television experience and how they can prepare (and plan) to take advantage of the evolution in video consumption that is happening today.

Building a great Roku channel has never been easier. In this session, Roku will unveil new methods to quickly publish on the Roku platform and monetize with video advertising. The presenter will discuss these new tools and some of the ways that developers and content creators can build their audiences on the Roku platform.

Server Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) is an excellent path for content providers and distributors to a better user experience, higher overall video consumption, and providing less obtrusive ad delivery. This presentation will explain the differences between SSAI and Client Side Ad Insertion. Learn how SSAI works, its limitations, architecture readiness for migration, ad preparation considerations and possible changes to existing workflows. This presentation will also cover planning for target devices, platforms and video delivery methods and will highlight real-world use cases.

During this session, leading content owners and distributors will join top technology companies to examine the elements essential to making VR not just a reality but also a viable business opportunity. The expert panel will define VR video and discuss the workflow required to deliver a high-quality VR experience. Considering audio, video and CGI, the group will cover capture and production, processing, delivery and consumption. The session also will address the importance of standards in scaling the VR business, current technical challenges, and how the industry can address those challenges via more concerted efforts - such as those undertaken in the past by the DASH Industry Forum and the Ultra HD Forum - to drive the technology forward.

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)

This session will explore why publishers need a holistic view of consumers' Quality of Experience (QoE) in today’s open and unpredictable Internet environment. Learn how companies are using data to adapt to the changing entertainment landscape and how correlations can be made across the video delivery spectrum to understand the impact of experience as it pertains to the engagement of your audience. In this session, you'll hear from leading OTT providers, about the holistic and comprehensive picture QoE data provides that enables their services to ensure successful video delivery, engaged audiences, and exceptional viewer experiences.

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.

Check back soon for details regarding this Discovery Track session.

In this session you will learn how easy it can be to create and customize your offer and then build native applications for deployment on all app stores for personal devices, streaming players, smart TVs, and games platforms with Cisco’s cloud-hosted Infinite Video Platform.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Beats SOLO2 wireless headphones ($200 value)

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)