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Sneak Preview: Cutting Streaming Delivery Costs With AI

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No other events provide the clarity and information you'll find at Streaming Media conferences. That’s why Streaming Media attracts serious, high-level technology decision makers ready to do business. For more than 20 years, our events have been the No. 1 gathering place for streaming industry professionals. Join us this November 12-14 for the next installment of Streaming Media Connect, a FREE online event.

On Wednesday, November 13, streaming industry consultant Nadine Krefetz will moderate the panel "Cutting Streaming Delivery Costs With AI."

AI is making inroads into streaming workflows and experiences at nearly every stage, from ingest all the way through discoverability. This panel explores how AI promises to streamline and reduce investments on the processing and delivery end through time-efficient, cost-efficient encoding tools that minimize buffering, fine-tune image quality, and enable workflow optimization. This panel explores how AI is currently impacting streaming delivery and playback experiences, how we can expect its role to continue to evolve over time, and how you can leverage AI's benefits in the streams you deliver.

Confirmed panelists include

Moderator Nadine Krefetz focuses on how technology will drive change in the media industry. She writes on Generative AI, Adtech and a wide range of cloud SaaS for delivering streaming. Her background is in software development, project management, journalism and marketing consulting through her company, realitysoftware.com. She also moderates technical industry panels and executive keynotes in many of the areas she writes on. 

In her Streaming Media Magazine article "Generative AI and the Future of Media Tech," Krefetz wrote, "It would be hard to miss all of the ongoing conversations concerning generative AI and how it will impact media technologies. So far, the conventional wisdom is that it promises to enable novices to complete repetitive tasks more easily and efficiently, to create better monetization opportunities, to foster new tool development, and—for better or worse—to drive disruption in many different ways. The intelligence that generative AI models like ChatGPT have been trained on is vast, and, therefore, instead of counting on what a single human can produce, it can provide as many permutations as a machine drawing on the entire span of its learning can deliver. Ask the right questions, and you will be rewarded...Incorporating generative AI into our workflows has the potential to impact almost everything in media technologies."

Panelist Andy Beach is a digital media expert with over two decades of experience at the intersection of technology, creativity, and business. As the CTO of Media at Microsoft, he spearheads cloud, AI, and edge strategies that are transforming how media and entertainment companies create, distribute, and monetize content. A published author on video compression and a frequent speaker at global industry events, Andy has been pivotal in driving partnerships and major deals with organizations like the NBA, Disney, and Fremantle. His strategic leadership and effective communication are key to building relationships and pushing forward innovations that are redefining the future of media.

Beach gave a Keynote at Streaming Media NYC, where he talked about using AI in an ingenious new type of FAST gamification experience called Beat The BUZZR. Leveraging content from the Fremantle BUZZR Network's deep reservoir of classic TV game shows from the '60s, '70s, and '80s, Beat the BUZZR launches FAST viewers headlong into the game with quizzes, trivia, and personalized insights, pointing the way to revolutionary, readily monetizable opportunities for interactive FAST. 

In an interview at Streaming Media NYC, Beach said, "We have announcements in generative AI right now where we can do sort of a text-to-video creation. So I imagine we're very close to someone creating a service that automatically fills in the pillar boxes on content so that old content suddenly doesn't feel old.”

Panelist Ethan Dreilinger is a leader in applying AI to media workflows to enable unique customer experiences. His background is built from the ground up, starting in radio and television, learning the content creation side of the business. Ethan now helps senior leadership at some of the largest media brands plot strategies to optimize workflows and drive monetization across streaming and other digital platforms. Before joining Alvarez & Marsal, Ethan spent 8 years working with publishers and local broadcasters as part of IBM and the Weather Company.

"We've done some projects where we were creating highlights using AI, no humans involved, just creating highlights from different sporting events," Dreilinger says. "We've done some stuff on the political side with residential and congressional debates where you're pulling out the highlights of the debates and sort of matching up the responses. So they kind of make some sense and stuff along those lines. So there's a lot of value to be created there."

Panelist Sujana Sooreddy is a Senior Lead Software Engineer at Netflix, working primarily on the Media Infrastructure and Platforms team. A key aspect of her role involves optimizing compute efficiency and resource usage on the platform that supports all media encoding workflows at the company. She's skilled in the distributed asynchronous realm, focusing on improving systems to enhance effectiveness, scalability, and cost-efficiency. Before Netflix, Sujana was a founding engineer at multiple startups, where she honed her focus on system efficiency. As a speaker, Sujana shares practical strategies for achieving better workflow development and resource optimization.

Panelist Maria Ingold is a strategic innovator with 20+ years of expertise as a CTO, specializing in video streaming and using artificial intelligence to make and save money ethically. As a board advisor, Maria has positioned AI media start-ups, including iSIZE—which can save 25% of streaming costs—sold to Sony Interactive Entertainment. She has consulted internationally for over a decade, using her “Six Steps to Success” to innovate streaming solutions and private equity technical due diligence across EMEA, including into emerging or unusual markets.

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