In mid-October, AMD, StreamingMedia.com, and Help Me Stream Research Foundation launched a survey that gauges the impact of (and planning for) hardware acceleration on real-time, ultra-low-latency and interactive live video streaming. Hot off the presses, in near-real-time, for the first time anywhere, Streaming Media contributing editor Tim Fore-Siglin joins editor-in-chief Steve Nathans-Kelly to reveal the findings and discuss their implications in this opening keynote at Streaming Media Connect.

Some elements of streaming workflows and architecture may always stay on-prem. However, the cloud affords streaming pros opportunities for scaling and cost-cutting that make the lure of cloud workflows too powerful to resist for most live streamers intent on managing large and unpredictable audiences, improving QoE, increasing ROI, and satisfying brands. For most of the industry, the great cloud migration has largely happened. For all of their advantages, end-to-end cloud workflows also bring new challenges, from production to playout to distribution. Tune in to this panel of cloud streaming experts for actionable insight on how to refine and streamline your scalable cloud live-streaming workflows and jump and dodge the hurdles that threaten to break your stride.

5G’s capacity to connect vastly more devices at low latency than previous protocols has long been heralded as a home run for in-arena live sports streaming experiences, though its predicted impact on contribution, distribution, play-by-play prop betting, and other rapid-fire interactions has not always been readily apparent. Has the promised 5G future finally arrived for live streaming delivery? Where is 5G making a splash, where are the untapped opportunities, how can stakeholders strategically leverage them, and where do the roadblocks remain?

In the wake of the “Streaming Olympics” and a series of eye-popping premium sports licensing deals, what remains to hold sports streaming back from surpassing linear broadcast sports? This panel examines the state of sports streaming and its day-to-day challenges, how tech debt and technological shortcomings directly impact monetization, and what emerging innovations in 2025 will help everyone, from video tech teams to revenue and ad operations, to better manage large tentpole events as the viewership shifts from linear to digital and on a variety of streaming platforms.

The growth of highly interactive streaming genres such as gaming, auctions, and sports betting has put pressure on networks while increasing the need to integrate interactivity and heightened engagement into more traditional methods of content delivery. With the challenges organizations face to ensure that their users have the smoothest and most dynamic interactive streaming experiences, and the additional investment in delivery infrastructure required as those experiences scale, how can streamers deliver ROI from interactive streaming every time?

In this hour, we look at leading new products that streamline live streaming and make it easier, more reliable, and more cost-effective. Be sure to attend to qualify for the exclusive prize!

Producing exceptionally engaging live streams requires robust, high-quality products throughout your workflow. The visual quality of your stream starts with the camera, and must be maintained throughout the production process. And even the most compelling content can be derailed if you don’t have a stable and fast enough network connection to deliver it to your distribution platforms. This session features live demos of three of the latest and greatest solutions: Telycam’s top-of-the-line Explore advanced PTZ camera with 1" sensor and ultra-fast auto-focus; Magewell’s new USB Capture HDMI 4K Pro plug-and-play 4K/60fps capture device; and Miri Technologies’ new X510 bonding router for enabling fast, resilient internet anywhere. Attend this presentation for a chance to win Magewell’s new USB Capture HDMI 4K Pro!

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.

As the demand for high-quality video experiences continues to rise, managing, encoding, and optimizing video content will only become a more cumbersome and costly process—unless you have the right video API in place. Kim Matenchuk, managing director of video at Cloudinary, and Streaming Media editor-in-chief Steve Nathans-Kelly discuss the complexities of video post-production and how automation can streamline workflows and get your video, and all your products, live on your site faster. Topics include the many advantages of smart cropping, image-to-video transformation, adaptive bitrate streaming, and AI-powered tagging; how these tools simplify video management and ensure consistency and quality across all channels; and the role that automation and AI can play in helping you deliver video at scale—without sacrificing quality.

Monitoring plays a critical role in live streaming—particularly as live streams scale—enabling organizations to track QoS and QoE, flag buffering and encoding issues as they arise, analyze network component performance on-the-fly, and more. You can’t monitor every aspect of streaming performance when you’re live, of course, so the quantity of data you gather is less important than capturing the right datapoints to optimize performance. But which metrics will deliver the best results, and which ones are best suited to help you economize as you optimize?

Streaming and tech industry pundits have been proclaiming “The Year of 4K” for at least a decade now, and yet, its long-anticipated heyday never seems to arrive. The screens are capable, the quality is undeniable, but whether it’s infrastructure or bandwidth challenges or diminished demand from a viewing audience skewing younger and mobile, the stars never seem to align. And there are those who suggest with 8K-capable screens going mainstream, the industry might just leapfrog 4K for its pixel-richer successor. Still, progress is apparent, as we’ve seen 1080p live streaming (finally) surpass 720p as the market’s prevalent resolution of choice. Four great debaters are set to square off to make their cases on our virtual stage. Tune in, hear the arguments, and pick the winners!

Streaming Media recently partnered with The Weather Company and Help Me Stream Research Foundation to conduct a unique survey on emerging market and revenue growth opportunities for integrating short-form, local weather-specific reels into live and on-demand streaming. This type of content has historically been marketed only to broadcasters for traditional weather reports, but as it moves online, the survey’s findings reveal emerging opportunities for previously untapped revenue streams for a range of streaming platforms.

The promise of streaming as a boon to advertisers has always been its potential to help them target audiences more precisely by delivering more substantive audience data than broadcast can offer. But even as streaming’s audience share has grown to justify substantial migration of CTV ad dollars from broadcast to digital, when it comes to quantifying audiences and measuring engagement, the lack of consistent and easily translatable measurement standards—not to mention the sheer number of measurement options—continues to frustrate ad buyers. How can streaming move toward the proposed “single source of truth,” or is that even the answer?

As the premium content world moves beyond the peak content era of reckless, volume-centric overproduction, emerging content strategies—especially for services relying all or in part on subscription revenue—revolve around increasingly complex subscription schemes, whether it’s tiered approaches, new aggregation models, or bundling deals built on partnerships that make temporary allies of direct competitors. This session will offer fresh insight on the latest content monetization strategies from the premium content world that are shoring up subscription revenue, growing audiences, and delivering value to advertisers.

Today’s streaming providers deliver endless amounts of content, which can overwhelm viewers who are simply looking for something to watch. The content discovery process often takes far longer than viewers are willing to wait. FAST channels have the power to redefine content discoverability by using data to serve customers the content they want to watch and help them find new content based on prior viewing habits. FAST platforms have a vast amount of data available to them, but only a small amount of it is being used to its full potential. Incorporating viewership data into the content discoverability process can remove the pain points that have bubbled up in the new streaming landscape, lead to more engagement with the content, and open up more opportunities for advertisers to reach their target audiences. This session looks at the success of genre channels and provides attendees with insight into how they help their viewers find their content faster.