Major media and entertainment companies’ quarterly earnings calls ought to pull back the curtain on what’s really happening in the industry, but they routinely bury unflattering numbers in expert spin, and the press on hand rarely ask questions tough enough to draw out the real story. With 3Q earnings call season upon us, M&E industry cartographer Evan Shapiro pulls no punches in this real-time response, digging deep into the data to hold the spin doctors accountable, and giving Streaming Media Connect attendees an unvarnished view of the industry they won’t get anywhere else.

And stick around the no-spin-zone for a no-holds-barred discussion, where we flip the script, turn on the mics, and invite attendees to join a moderated discussion. 

It’s always been chicken-and-egg with OTT monetization. You can’t launch a service without capital. You can’t sell ads without reach. You can’t build reach without content. Even the top-tier services aren’t relying exclusively on AVOD or SVOD anymore and are tinkering with a hybrid approach. So where is the sweet spot, the magic bullet for making OTT investments pay off? Is there more to innovative OTT monetization than throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks? Or are we all just holding our breath to see if the hybrid models work? It’s hardly an overstatement to say an industry hangs in the balance. In this session, top OTT practitioners and analysts weigh in with real-world answers to OTT monetization’s most pressing concerns.

As streaming services and TV platforms become competitive and popular, a continued reliance on subscription as the primary revenue driver is no longer sustainable. Thus, ads are increasingly becoming a more lucrative and viable option for these businesses. Additionally, with user expectations from their streaming services continuing to evolve well beyond traditional TV and media, personalized, AI-based solutions bringing compelling content will be critical for effective user engagement. Consumer services and platforms that will successfully meet their users where they are, and however they access content and engage them with a deep understanding of their needs while making the experience easy, will likely get ahead in the race. And they now need to balance this with effective ad positioning. This keynote explores how businesses can manage the shift toward FAST (free ad-supported streaming television), the challenges involved, and how to do it right.

In this special keynote program, Help Me Stream Research Foundation’s Tim Siglin is joined by our research partner Tulix to talk about changes and trends in the industry in key areas, including live vs. on-demand, latency, scale, monetization, and technology.

Moving broadcast workflows to the cloud promises heightened efficiency, reduced TCO, quicker response times, and other critical efficiency gains. But it also brings substantial challenges all along the supply chain with disruptions to existing technology partnerships and transitions to new vendor relationships. When it comes to vetting and partnering with cloud services companies, how do you get started, and how do you ensure that you end up where you wanted to go in the first place?

Even as WebRTC emerges as the de facto framework for large-scale live streams, the need to maintain optimal quality for live streams grows exponentially as streaming audiences scale into the thousands and millions. The challenges mount as well, with the proliferation of potential points of failure from ingest to edge. Monitoring and QC’ing streams becomes a game of identifying the most crucial points, since you can’t watch all of them all the time. And in areas such as live sports, where low latency is at a premium, trade-offs are inevitable, and optimization becomes less a fixed target than a balancing act of competing priorities. How can large-scale streamers deliver the best possible experiences for the audiences that consume their streams and the brands that support them?

Many owners of codec-related patents feel like streaming services have paid far less than their fair share for the business opportunities that compression technologies have afforded. This was a taboo until recently, but it's starting to look like 2024 might be the year that this taboo changes for streaming services. During this session, participants discuss the equities involved in paying to support the innovation ecosystem, codec royalties on content, the relevant current and imminent lawsuits, and plans by patent owners and patent pools.

Making live streams and streaming platforms, players, and apps accessible is a key concern for anyone delivering D2C content as well as those fostering streaming-based communications behind the corporate firewall. Whether meeting broadcast or W3C accessibility standards, providing captions and transcripts is critical. While AI has emerged as a convenient, cost-effective, and widely used vehicle for improving the accessibility of live and VOD content, all AI captioning solutions are not created equal, and content providers’ opinions vary on when and where it’s appropriate to use. This session explores best practices and requirements for making streaming, VOD, and conferencing content more accessible; how the enabling technologies are evolving; and how streaming platform and channel providers and producers are practicing and implementing streaming accessibility today.

What are the most critical business and technical challenges of live streaming in late 2023? What platforms and protocols are in play, from acquisition and ingest to delivery? Is the transition to cloud workflows still a prevailing trend? What are realistic expectations for streaming latency, and where are streamers and audiences prioritizing it highest? And how is the device landscape shaping up for live content consumption? Data takes center stage again at Streaming Media Connect as we report findings from Streaming Media’s latest live streaming survey, conducted in September of this year, so the findings are fresh, and the analysis is even fresher.

Industry leaders discuss and present the latest cutting-edge solutions and strategies to help you maximize efficiencies and minimize costs in your streaming video workflow. ATTEND FOR YOUR CHANCE TO WIN A $50 AMAZON GIFT CARD!

Combining multi-input switching, graphics, streaming, recording and monitoring in one portable device, Magewell’s Director Mini all-in-one live production and streaming system has been creating buzz in the video production community since its unveiling in September. See what the excitement is about and learn what makes Director Mini unique in this live demonstration of its extensive input flexibility, production tools and output capabilities.

Blazar, the Just-In-Time Transcoding (JITT) solution from igolgi, enables many new streaming use cases, as well as the ability to slash CapEx, OpEx, and carbon emissions for transcoding.  For example, targeted ad insertion can be improved by dynamically inserting the best ad.  For streaming OTT systems, Blazar JITT allows operators to reduce the size of their origin/cache and VOD systems by 50% or more since Blazar JITT can be used to provide any lower profile requested on-the-fly, and therefore only the top profile needs to be maintained in the system.  This slashes costs and energy usage. Blazar also has the ability to regenerate any arbitrary profile on-the-fly, which in turn can enable a completely new evolution to content distribution by not requiring a static profile set in a manifest. Blazar can run on-premise or in the cloud and is in production today.

Join a live demo of the latest version of Wirecast, and discover how you can create engaging video experiences for audiences everywhere. As the most robust, powerful, customizable live video streaming and production tool, Wirecast allows you to capture, produce, and stream high-quality video content all in one place. Wirecast offers automated production workflows, animated graphics and title templates, built-in multi-streaming and ISO recording, and a vast Stock Media Library to boot. Take your productions to the next level with Wirecast’s latest features, including a new AI-powered virtual assistant, a Zoom integration for remote panel productions, support for custom LUTS and video filters, and more.

It goes without saying that better data—effectively analyzed—is the key to better ROI, both for streaming services and their advertisers. But what if you’re not among the O&Os of the streaming world, and you don’t control the platform or the data that goes with it? Knowing what makes viewers engage and why and when they disengage (i.e., churn) is the name of the game in streaming analytics, but these are broad categories, and identifying key datapoints and interpreting them effectively are the game itself. How much actionable analytics advice can four Streaming Media Connect panelists cram into 1 hour? Tune in and find out.

Content delivery that leverages edge networks is the obvious solution for large-scale streams to global audiences, but it introduces greater complexity at the far end of the streaming workflow, from intelligent load balancing and distribution to real-time performance assessment involving multiple vendors. What challenges are large-scale streamers facing when it comes to latency, QoE, and more, and how are they solving them?

From facilitating live-event streaming to remote production and beyond, AJA’s multi-channel UltraHD and HD live video solution BRIDGE LIVE supports a wide range of streaming and contribution codecs. Join AJA product manager Mike Boucke to learn more about this powerful device and all it offers for live-stream workflows—from ultra-low latency to support for NDI and more.

Are the riches really in the niches? Do pinpointing and superserving a narrowly defined audience create a winning strategy in an overcrowded M&E ecosystem? And with the long-predicted Great Rebundling not yet off the table, is identifying aggregation partners as important to niche offering success as great content and knowing and nailing your target demo? Perhaps the path to niche service success is a narrow one, but this panel of innovators offers proven strategies to help you sidestep suspect get-niche-quick schemes.