Earlier this year, Amazon won the rights to stream “Thursday Night Football” games on Amazon Prime for this season. In this session, AWS Elemental will provide insights about how the NFL is delivering a new level of live streamed sports experiences for fans. A special guest from Amazon Video will join the discussion for a deeper dive into the video and cloud infrastructure that’s being used to deliver the live streamed sports action.

While CDN prices have never been lower, OTT delivery continues to weigh heavily on broadcasters’ budgets. Growing audiences, higher resolutions and more immersive video experiences bring both technical and business challenges at scale. This panel explores how content publishers are working to balance fixed revenue per subscriber models with the varying cost of delivery, while also getting the best quality for their money. The session will look at optimization efforts throughout the delivery workflow, with a special emphasis on CDN, multi-CDN, peer-to-peer, multicast and in-house delivery solutions.

As operators and media companies navigate through the growing mix of technologies and the changing TV environment, content owners continue to experiment with new TV services and OTT solutions. With the goal of finding new revenue streams, and retaining audiences, service providers are continuously introducing new engaging features that cater to today’s personalized viewing habits. This panel will dive into the technology landscape for scalable Next Generation TV deployments as well as how content owners can tackle scalable content distribution in a cost effective manner.

There’s a growing number of vendor options when it comes to encoding video, but each one is different in terms of feature sets, distribution functions, audience reach, monetization opportunities, interactivity and many other factors. This session will compare the panelists offerings, discuss the technical features they are bringing to market, and where they see demand for new capabilities from their customers. This panel will help you understand which platforms and approaches are best suited for specific video content and consumer use-cases as well as overall business goals. It will also discuss how the market for encoding services is evolving and what we should we expect to see in the next 6 to 12 months.

You’re at a venue with poor Internet connectivity and need to get your HD contribution feed to the cloud for live streaming delivery. What are your options? Join our panel for an interactive discussion about how to plan for and get around such hurdles, using bonded cellular devices, inexpensive satellite solutions, and networking technologies such as FEC, QUIC, SRT, Zixi, and others. We’ll compare the pros and cons of each, and answer your questions.

Streaming to one live streaming service is so 2016. Today, in addition to streaming to your own website or app, you may want to distribute your live stream to multiple other outlets like Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Livestream, Twitter, or Twitch. Fortunately, there are a variety of products and services that enable streaming to multiple output locations, from desktop encoders and appliances to cloud services. This session details the various options and lay out their pros, cons, and pricing models.

Successfully stream high-quality near-live content over the Internet can quickly become a near impossible task. Bad network conditions, latency and distance are known to dramatically impair video streaming. Various products and services have been introduced, such as forward error correction over UDP, peer-to-peer distribution and CDNs. However, none provide the same universal quality and "zero-delay" transmission needed for a great experience. Aspera FASPStream is the first open video transport solution capable of live streaming high-quality video globally over commodity Internet networks with low buffering and negligible start-up time. This session will outline how to integrate the Aspera fasp.io software suite with standard RTMP, HLS and DASH workflows on browser, desktop, mobile and set-top box platforms.

The Socionext “Media Cloud” is designed to deliver a 10-fold increase in video server speeds and efficiency, resulting in new levels of server performance and optimal user streaming experience. The initiative integrates a “Sea of Transcoders” for real-time transcoding up to 256 bundles of AVC/ HEVC adaptive bit rate (ABR) streams for a variety of inputs, up to 4Kp60. The dense transcode solution provides maximum server performance for video processing.

Attend this session for your chance to win: GoPro Hero6 Action Camera ($499 value)

WebRTC is an emerging technology supported by the majority of web browser that helps solve the latency issue but introduces its own set of challenges. This session will discuss what makes a successful deployment of WebRTC. Learn what open source and proprietary technologies can be used to jump-start a deployment and what the impact of NAT traversal for peer-to-peer deployments of WebRTC (STUN, TURN, ICE) has. Hear what tools enable WebRTC in a plugin-based architecture that is composed of fully open source software and how you can put it to use.

Considering Adobe’s recent announcement providing an end of support date for Flash, you need to be ready for a Flash-less world. HTML5 has had plenty of time to play catch up and surpass Flash capabilities—or has it? In this session, learn which transport technologies from HTTP, WebRTC, RTSP, and even RTMP work best, when to use them, and where to put your development dollars for maximum return.Programming in UHD has gone up tenfold, although only a relatively Platforms small amount is still available. More media enterprises are coming online with UHD broadcasts, and standards have arrived to a certain degree, with initial support for content and devices. But we are still far from pervasive UHD-ready facilities and end-to-end workflows. This session cuts through the hype to look at what realistically can be accomplished in UHD today and experiences thus far in deploying UHD. The panelists also cast an eye to the future, with discussion around topics such as live UHD event production and streaming and the potential for high dynamic range (HDR).

Virtual assistants such as Alexa, Google Home, and Siri are quickly moving from niche to mainstream. Streaming audio and video are the cornerstone of a successful skill deployment. This session explores the integration of virtual assistants into the connected home and their non-traditional business model. Attendees will learn about balancing production requirements and return on investment with the potential rewards of tightly integrating their brand into their user's daily routine. Panelists will also share their experiences of managing user expectations while exploring unobtrusive monetization paths.

Learn how Microsoft is applying intelligence to media to improve the user experience and automate the production process. This session provides an overview of how Microsoft is using the power of the cloud to apply machine learning to video. Demonstrations include improving live streaming video with automated closed captions, as well as extracting metadata from VOD libraries, making it extremely easy to index and search hours and hours of content.

Live streaming continues to dominate content on social media. What sort of ROI can publishers achieve with an effective social streaming strategy? What sorts of production workflows are best? This panel discussion brings together leading brands, media companies, and influencers to share their social media streaming stories and discuss what they’ve learned and what their plans are for the future.

Today's CDN platforms are upgrading and building out to reach an increasingly larger number of consumer mobile devices and smart TVs across North America, Europe, Asia, and beyond. IBM Cloud Object Storage can provide CDNs long tail and origin storage with the advantages of its patented technology: nearly infinite scalability, 10+ nines of reliability and availability, and an incredibly low total cost of ownership vs on-prem and other cloud storage platforms. This presentation will provide all stakeholders in the digital supply chain with compelling information about how flexible, scalable, and high-performing cloud object storage can be for your CDN.

Immersive media content such as 360-degree video places a unique set of demands on cloud-based infrastructure from a complete end-to-end solution point of view. A key goal for any solution of this nature is to keep costs low while not impacting availability, scale, and compute performance. In this talk we will look at how to solve ingest, processing, storage, and delivery of live and on-demand content for immersive media delivery, and present a reference design for 360-degree streaming using best-practice architectural patterns.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Echo Dot ($50 value)

All conference attendees and speakers are invited to join us for Lunch on Lawn taking place on the Lighthouse Courtyard. Enjoy some fresh air and networking after a full morning of sessions.

*Please note this lunch is not open to Discovery Pass holders or booth personnel.

The industry is very comfortable getting the best quality and highest encoding operational efficiency out of H.264, but with the newness of HEVC, video encoding engineers may be struggling to maximize operational performance with this advanced codec. Questions of how to implement a live 4K encoding solution, or best practices for encoding HDR, in software, are top of mind. In this session you will hear from video distributors the lessons learned building and deploying HEVC encoding operations, as well as secrets to obtaining the highest performance with HEVC.

If content is King, then user experience is God. Many of the best practices from data driven video companies can be boiled down to simple concepts you don’t have to be a data scientist to understand. This presentation will showcase how entertainment brands can make better use of their data in 2017 and beyond. The session will present actionable strategies for entertainment brands to effectively use data to compete in digital spaces. Topics covered will include A/B experimentation, thumbnail optimization, and social media KPIs.

Video is an exciting use case for Virtual Reality, but what’s the reality of creating, delivering, and monetizing it today? In this panel, you’ll hear industry experts discuss the state of VR Video, from technologies to capture and display it to methods for streaming and interacting with it, as well as the opportunities in the near- and long-term future.

With the speed of technology today, one of the most important parts of software is adaptability. By taking control of your own encoding and packaging, you can greatly reduce cost and maintain high adaptability and agility to meet your needs now and in the future. When working with cloud encoding, there are several transcoding and packaging options, and the APIs for these options will change over time. We talk about how to build a more dynamic cloud encoder that can use the best tool for a specific job by decoupling the tools from the core application, as well as how to mix and match multiple operations concurrently on a single encoding task. Operations include WebVTT and AAC sidecar manifests, DASH assets, metadata, video quality, and stream muxing/demuxing. This session covers some of the strategies we’ve used to handle dynamic cloud encoding and packaging for live and VOD delivery.

While the popularity of live streaming isn’t in doubt, even the biggest names in entertainment sometimes find it a challenge to monetize. What can be done to get consumers to pay for live content or make it more enticing for advertisers and sponsors? We look at various approaches to monetization, from pay-per-view and subscription to interstitial advertising and sponsored/branded content.

Think you know everything about encoding? Teradek’s Jon Landman thinks otherwise. Dive deeply into the world of hardware codecs, from compression technologies such as HEVC to transport protocols and delivery. If you’re still unsure about joining the cutting edge of IP video before the broader industry, Jon Landman is here to show you the way.

VAST 4.0 represents the first opportunity for a fully integrated, standards-based, server-side ad insertion workflow. Join this sessions to learn how it will impact your workflows and enable you to maximize your revenue by circumventing ad blockers, reaching more devices, and improving viewers' experience.

Attend this session for your chance to win: GoPro Hero Session Camera with Handler Hand Grip and SD card ($230 value)

During the last year, among all the other initiatives on digital, The New York Times invested on reinventing the ingesting and encoding pipeline of their on demand videos. The chosen approach was the built with a set of open source components that leverages cloud services for fast, scalable and reliable encoding jobs. This case study will walk through the new achievements and improvements that were built on the services set, including a thumbnails service for improving the click through rate, closed captions support, on the fly packaging and fragmented MP4's for adaptive streaming formats and analytics integration.

For decades, TV ratings have been the main barometer of commercial television success. But with the instant delivery of programming across all types of devices, content providers need to understand what viewers want before it arrives on their TVs, tablets and phones.  Featuring top executives from the TV industry, this session will explore findings from Altman Vilandrie & Company's annual consumer video survey, which for the first time will feature data on how and why consumers make viewing decisions - including the importance of program themes, networks, actors and creators.

The upcoming support of HEVC on iOS is bringing new dynamics into the video codec world, and by end of the year AV1 is going to be released. At the same time, VP9 gains a lot of popularity among content providers especially for Web browsers as well as Android devices. This panel will discuss what is the status of the different video codecs today, what are benefits and problems, and how this will change in the future. It will also discuss the question if the industry is getting into a codec war again, where content providers will have to support multiple video codecs in parallel to reach all devices.

Despite all the vendor marketing hype and so-called “objective” white paper publications, there is no one “best” system: There’s one that’s right for you, your business needs, your technical requirements, your integration points, and your budget. This presentation helps attendees identify their unique requirements for an effective video management solution. We identify the mistakes that many technology buyers make and provide best practice advice on how to avoid these mistakes. We discuss the options facing buyers looking for new technology for video review, approval, and delivery. Attendees get advice on how to get to a vendor short list, submitting useful RFPs, what questions need to be asked, and other tips to ensure you choose the right solution.

Live video content, whether linear or events, is among the most valuable content online, so you need to lock it down to keep it from viewers who aren’t authorized to watch it. This session examines the latest digital rights management and access control technologies and explores the most effective business and strategic responses to video piracy.

Live streaming for social media audiences is exploding and brands are getting onboard in a big way. LiveU’s Dan Pisarski will present some tips and tricks to get brands started. He’ll cover the ins and outs of Facebook Live and other platforms, creating content beyond “behind-the-scenes,” and share some live success stories.

Learn how your broadcasts to Facebook Live can reach the high expectations you have for yourself and your brand with unmatched reliability and quality that’s simple to achieve all while creating live content that can be truly dynamic based on the Live Reactions of your followers.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Insta360 Nano ($199 value)

This panel will feature participants from Harmonic, Nokia, and PCCW to discuss the challenges that PCCW Global faced to deliver an immersive 360-degree, VR sports experience during the 2017 Cathay Pacific/HSBC Hong Kong Sevens rugby tournament. Speakers will detail the workflow used, revealing how PCCW Global delivered exceptional UHD quality to VR head-mounted devices. By the end of the presentation, attendees will have a greater understanding of how they can elevate the sports fan experience, unveiling each and every angle of the action in exceptional UHD quality with stunning 360-degree, VR visuals on any device.

For content providers, achieving ubiquitous reach in today’s fragmented market often is a race against time and resource limitations. Unlike the simpler early days of web video, providers must write apps for hundreds of variations of mobile and streaming devices, gaming consoles and smart TVs, or risk losing market share to larger or more aggressive competitors. At the same time, many digital-first content providers are focusing on social media video experiences, further disrupting the landscape. This panel will bring together traditional and internet content providers to discuss strategies that can be used to quickly and efficiently extend cross platform reach and streamline app store certification processes.

Amazon has been investing deeply in artificial intelligence for over 20 years, and many of the capabilities customers experience are driven by machine learning. Within AWS, we’re focused on bringing that knowledge and capability to customers through three layers of the AI stack: Frameworks and Infrastructure, API-driven Services, and Machine Learning platforms. A common question often asked is how to best integrate these capabilities into media-based solutions. In this session, we’ll take a look at how Amazon AI and Deep Learning-based services such as Amazon Rekognition can be applied to media workflows such as metadata enrichment, image classification, live and VOD media processing, sentiment analysis, facial recognition and content moderation.

Many content distributors and aggregators still use H.264 as their primary, if not exclusive codec, but the bandwidth savings incident to newer, more powerful codecs are alluring. Those considering a switch must evaluate at least three options; HEVC, VP9, and the Alliance for Open Media’s AV1 codec, which should be close to release by the close of 2017. In this session, codec specialist Jan Ozer evaluates the quality of these codecs and compares them to H.264. Learn how much bandwidth you can save with each and how the newer codecs compare from quality and implementation perspectives.

Leaders in live streaming present case studies that take you behind the scenes of some of the industry’s biggest success stories. Details announced soon!

For more than a decade, the media industry has been able to endure inferior contribution signals as an acceptable trade-off for wider distribution, first-to-air, and cost savings. However, today’s consumers are demanding higher-quality content, forcing media companies to deliver exceptional consumer experiences that require higher bitrate contribution. Learn how the media industry is overcoming the limitations of public internet while maintaining security and control of their data to deliver higher quality content.

A cost-effective approach to monitoring the viewer experience at the network edge is more essential than ever before. Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) delivery protocols in combination with upstream quality measurement allow us to better judge customers’ viewing experience. This presentation will examine techniques to detect faults at edge locations before customers are affected.

Not only is 4K streaming here now, it is surprisingly affordable! In this session we will talk about the best tools for the job and the setup needed to ensure an optimal experience for all viewers.

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

As consumers increasingly go online to watch live sporting events, enjoy live video gaming, and participate in online gambling, delivering the lowest-latency live streaming experiences becomes critical for content distributors. In this session, we’ll discuss the motivations, challenges and solutions for delivering live video streams at sub-second latencies at global scale, without sacrificing the video quality your audiences want and expect. We’ll also cover the common use cases for low-latency live streaming and financial benefits driving innovation.

Attend this session for your chance to win: GoPro Hero5 Black 4K Action camera ($400 value)

Join us in the exhibit hall at the end of the day for drinks! The Streaming Media West 2017 Expo is the perfect place to meet with the leading companies in the industry in a relaxed atmosphere.

Join us for a fun night on the lawn as you network with industry peers while enjoying a selection of good brews and eats, as well as live music from our German Trio. Open to all attendees, speakers, and vendors.