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The rising role of AI and deep learning in streaming in 2025 is evident in the automation of live captioning and translation, clipping for rapid highlights generation, and more. How can AI help streamline your cloud streaming workflows, and in what other areas will we see workflows evolve in 2025?

Multicast ABR combines the efficiency of multicast streaming with the flexibility of adaptive bitrate (ABR) technology. Instead of sending individual unicast streams to every viewer, multicast ABR allows one stream to be sent to many viewers simultaneously within an ISP’s network. Can multicast ABR provide the flexibility to deliver massive global live streams—for live sports in particular—as traffic demands ebb and flow with minimal buffering and dropouts? What kind of architectural adjustments are necessary to make it work?

The familiar knock on live streaming analytics is that it’s high on data and low on actionable insights that can help solve real-world problems in real time. Increasingly, streaming services are infusing analytics packages with AI to pinpoint key performance metrics such as bitrate problems, buffering, and quality degradation. This panel is made up of seasoned streaming pros whose views you can use to leverage deep data for insights on user behavior, streaming performance, and platform optimization.

The conventional wisdom in streaming these days is the closer you cache your content to your end users, the easier it is to handle traffic spikes and achieve your latency goals. With live sports, a distributed architecture is almost mandatory. Edge caching also offers more capabilities on personalization, security, and anti-piracy, and can be used to combine edge compute functions. However, centralized delivery often is more cost-effective. How do you find the balance on how distributed to go, and how do CDNs offer these kinds of differences? How can you manage and operate it if you go for highly distributed setups?

Leveraging Media Over QUIC (MoQ) and designed to enable ultra-low-latency (ULL), bidirectional data transfer, WebTransport may not be today’s prime-time solution for real-time interactive live streaming, gaming, and esports, but it may well be tomorrow’s. Join this panel of tech innovators and experts to learn what’s ’round the bend for ULL streaming. It’ll be here sooner than you think.

Software encoding is ideal for VOD and some live events, but when you're managing hundreds of FAST channels running 24/7 or a large-scale security, surveillance, or smart city video deployment, hardware solutions become a compelling option. Choices range from GPU-based systems to FPGAs and ASICs, each with its own trade-offs. This panel features producers who have navigated these decisions, sharing the key factors that influenced their choice of transcoding solutions for their specific applications.

This panel covers the key items to consider when broadcasting from the cloud, so you leave knowing what went right, not wishing for answers to what went wrong. Here are some questions to be discussed: What element of my architecture should I transition to IP first (master control, production, graphics, playout, recording, clipping, storage, or metadata)? Which cloud provider should I choose? Is multi-cloud a better approach? Should I go open source? What are the best/most important metrics to use?

Server-guided ad insertion (SGAI) arguably combines the advantages of CSAI and SSAI and allows for more targeted ads and better technical delivery, which is a boon to FAST and other AVOD platforms. Ads start faster, and only the “decisioned” ads are inserted, which means allocating less overhead to fetching ads that won’t be used. But who is using SGAI now, how effectively are they implementing it, what can it do for you, and how likely is it to move into the ad-supported streaming mainstream?

Premium sports streaming is a big event business, with licensing fees reaching into the stratosphere and large-scale, global delivery traffic demands threatening to overload the most formidable networks. The highest-profile sports streams happen on premium subscription services and draw users through exclusivity. As sports increasingly makes inroads with FAST, exclusivity is a much smaller part of the equation, according to the latest Gracenote data. What do FAST sports channels look like, what kind of sports programming works on FAST, and how do successful FAST sports channels target audiences and satisfy advertisers while breaking ranks with the industry trend of sports rights exclusivity?

As a new generation of highlights-first fans moves into the sports fandom mainstream, sports broadcasters need the agility and tech-savviness to produce and monetize personalized, short-form sports content at scale that meets the experiential demands of Millennial and Gen Z fans. If you’re a sports rightsholder and you’re not gaming out how to bring a personalized SportsCenter to every viewer, you’re looking at where the puck was and not where it’s going. This panel of sports streaming tech experts and programming innovators will explore where sports streaming is heading and how we’re going to get there.

Increasingly, content publishers are finding they need more control over their ad stack. This panel looks beyond the touted monetization-ready feature sets in streaming playback solutions and drills down with key content providers on how well these solutions facilitate ad signaling and ad stitching and integrate with ad servers, discussing what kind of reporting they provide to measure success. We also highlight the differences in ad-based monetization strategies as between CTV platforms, online video players, and mobile apps. And finally, we dig deep into critical emerging standards that are changing SSAI this year.

As generative AI is finding its way into streaming in many ways, this panel looks at two popular use cases: deep fakes and captioning. As synthetic content proliferates and deepfakes undermine trust in the origins and authenticity of media and news, being assured of content validity is more important now than ever before. We discuss initiatives like C2PA to address emerging content authenticities issues. Next up, can AI-generated captions meet government accessibility requirements, or is this still too beta to take seriously? With a multitude of AI captioning services and even encoder captioning, we evaluate the current state of the art and tech.

A recent Antenna State of Subscription report revealed that a streaming superbundle that found Max cohabitating with Disney Plus and Hulu scored an encouraging 80% subscriber retention rate in the first 3 months after activation. Paramount+, AppleTV+, and Amazon Prime are also forming competitor alliances, and indirect subscription sales are on the rise. Are these arrangements becoming the secret to survival in a fatigued SVOD market? Are deeper reservoirs of content likely to slow churn in all cases, or are some catalogs more complementary than others? Who is leading the bundle boom, and who is profiting? Are Tier 2 services gaining a foothold in the superbundle subscription economy or being squeezed out?

With FAST and CTV fill rates slipping throughout 2024 (except for a brief election bump), content owners and their partners are casting about for new and different ways to fill inventory. By clearing the way for advertisers to buy in just before show time rather than having to lock in their campaigns months in advance, so-called “real-time” biddable CTV opens up late-breaking, flexible opportunities to unload unclaimed inventory on an auction basis before it goes to waste. But as bidding on audiences reportedly surges for sports, is auction-based advertising really suitable for other premium content? Is it likely to change the way brands approach media-buying, or is it just another transitory trend?