Amazon Fire TV can help content creators and developers find new customers by making it easy to create media-based apps for the best-selling Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick. In this presentation, we will dive into the Fire TV platform and show attendees how they can quickly publish their content as media apps using Amazon's open source Web App Starter Kit for Fire TV. Attendees will also hear from Wall Street Journal, a Starter Kit beta partner, about their experience rapidly developing a real-world Fire TV media app that provides a great viewing experience for their customers.

This presentation explores the history of codecs, containers, and protocols and their impact on the present state of streaming. Learn what qt-faststart does, why h264_mp4toannexb is sometimes necessary, and the difference between streaming and pseudo-streaming. The presenter takes a deep dive into the structure of today’s most relevant media formats to discover the advantages and limitations of each and helps you pick and choose the right options.

This panel focuses on benchmarking total propagation and playback times for live and on-demand broadcast video workflows. What are the industry norms for publishing videos from creation to playback? Is there an ROI from increasing speed? What new approaches are happening to lower streaming propagation and publishing times? We discuss approaches to measuring the effectiveness of a video pipeline and how that compares to other companies in your vertical.

This session will introduce you to Amazon Fire TV and what you need to do to get your Android apps ready. What does your app’s 10 foot experience look like, how will your touch controls convert to a controller based experience, how will you sync game progress across all of your players devices, and what are the TV-specific gotchas like overscan. This session will get you started with Amazon’s free Fire TV developer SDK and provide plenty of tips for getting your app up and running.  Both Android Studio and Xamarin Studio will also be covered showing how you can target Fire TV using the same familiar developer environment.

Most enterprises are struggling to deliver high-quality video over their internal network. This session demonstrates a solution to this that uses the viewer’s devices as distribution nodes to create a very cost-efficient and easy-toiimplement solution with minimum impact on the network. 

Attend this session for your chance to win: iPad mini 3 with Retina Display ($400 value)

Storing, preparing, and delivering media content securely involves leveraging systems that can scale and ensure top-of-the-line security. Come find out how AWS can help you implement these workflows in the cloud using highly available, scalable, and secure cloud services such as Amazon S3 (storage), Amazon Elastic Transcoder (transcoding), and Amazon CloudFront (delivery). As part of this session, we will demo how you can build a media stack on AWS and use JW Player to deliver protected HTTP Live Streams (HLS) to various devices, including iOS, Android, and Windows desktops.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Amazon Fire TV — Streaming 1080p media player with voice search, Netflix, Amazon Prime Instant Video, games, and more ($99 value)

Ever wanted to zoom in to a player during a live basketball game, or have your cellular network work with your phone to avoid re-buffering? This session explores some of the new technologies being brought to the table by the next version of MPEG-DASH to address these and other enhancements in OTT delivery. This session covers server and network assisted DASH (SAND), improved DASH streaming using HTTP 2.0, WebSockets, and tile streaming using spatial relationship descriptors.

The case for H.265, like most new video technologies, is compelling: better compression and faster/cheaper delivery over lower bitrates. For any content distributor seeking to distribute content to mobile devices over congested 3G/4G/LTE networks, these traits are highly desirable. However, the reality of real-world choices can quickly deflate any optimistic plans. In this session, learn if and how H.265 compression and deployment options can be utilized in typical online streaming workflows, and more importantly, if your target audiences can benefit. Examples of x264 and x265 output are compared for bitrate, compression time, and file size.

As HEVC begins to find its stride in the industry, operators are grappling with the challenge of whether and how to begin to swap out MPEG-2 and possibly AVC encoders for HEVC codecs. While HEVC is still many months away from mainstream deployment, it is important for companies to take an ROI-centric look at the technology and evaluate where and when it makes sense to incorporate HEVC into transcoding and content delivery workflows. This presentation discusses factors to keep in mind when evaluating HEVC products and while strategically planning future digital media road maps, updated with findings up to NAB 2015.

This session educates attendees on how to develop a channel using Roku’s software developer kit and Roku’s proprietary BrightScript language, from basic VOD channels to full subscription-based services. Attendees learn about the resources and services available to developers to best manage their channel, including integrated billing, and best practices for creating a great streaming channel. The session also looks at the different ways to monetize content through advertising, on-device promotion, and other marketing opportunities.

When streaming is mentioned with regard to education, distance learning is often the only use case that comes to mind. However, there are numerous other uses for live and on-demand video streaming in educational institutions, including sporting events, commencements, concerts, debates, and flipped classrooms. This session dives into detailed educational streaming workflows and gives examples of how streaming can be used to engage students, athletes, fans, alumni, and donors. Top professionals from high school and college-level institutions share their experiences, including successes and pitfalls.

With so many devices, browsers, and operating systems in the market, companies are often left with confusing choices when it comes to their video players. Should you build a player yourself or use an openly available one like JWPlayer or Video.js? What technologies should be used? How do you build a streaming video application without any plugins? Are Flash, Silverlight, and other plugin solutions still a viable answer today? This session explores these questions and digs into the code necessary to build a modern streaming application.

This session takes a deep dive into how some of the leading content owners address redundancy in their live encoding and delivery workflows. Hear what technical challenges keep these video broadcasters up at night and how some of the leading experts mitigate risk through their encoding stack, CDN delivery, scalable authentication methods, and more. Learn the best practices for reacting and responding in real time to issues in your encoding and delivery workflow to ensure a seamless experience for your viewers.

If you thought HEVC was the only UHD codec in town, you've got it wrong. In addition to VP9, which has been in use by YouTube for over 12 months, we have the open source Daala, from Xiph.org, RMVB from RealNetworks, and the new PERSEUS codec from V-Nova. In this session, you'll get an update on where these codecs are in their development life cycle, their comparative performance, where they're being used and their potential for use in streaming to desktops, mobile and OTT.

With the announcement of Windows 10, Microsoft enables the ability to Deploy applications to multiple Windows platforms from a single code base. This technical presentation shows developers how to set up their Visual Studio projects for development and deployment to Xbox, Windows, and Windows Phone.

For the past few years, the manufacturers and content producers have been championing 4K as the latest and greatest technology. This session cuts through the 4K hype and discusses what real-world impact 4K could have and what the requirements really are to stream in 4K. It also tackles the 4K/UHD definition division, physical media versus streaming, and bandwidth requirements to make 4K possible. Hear experts from various corners of the industry tell you what you need to know about 4K, when it will become adopted, and what you should plan for.

The Media Source Extensions and Encrypted Media Extensions are the standardized toolsets that enable browsers to deliver adaptive streaming and digital rights management without plug-ins. This session details what these extensions are, how they’re being supported by the different browser and tools vendors, and how soon those delivering premium content will switch over from plug-in-based technologies to these standards. If you are considering replacing Flash with HTML5 standards-based technologies, this session details how and when you can do it.

Learn how to work around the the potential problems that may arise from streaming live video on location. Topics include security and protection of streaming technology and how infrastructure decisions affect outcomes.

Video streaming hardware has evolved significantly in recent years. With so much on the market, aimed at such a wide variety of applications, it can be difficult to determine which products and features are best suited to your particular needs. This session helps you make sense of it all by explaining each key feature and providing examples. Expect to leave knowing how and when each streaming hardware feature provides good bang for the buck.

Attend this session for your chance to win: DVI2USB 3.0 — High performance video grabber capable of capturing high quality video and images from any device with a DVI/VGA/HDMI signal. Portability and flexibility is why many AV professionals rely on DVI2USB 3.0 to capture high quality video and audio no matter the signal. ($699 value)

The 'brand as publisher' model is increasingly becoming the expectation for marketers and brand teams - forcing many of them to create more content than ever before. Meanwhile the vendor options to generate content are growing exponentially, with more and more brands taking on the responsibility of taking content creation in house. This session will address the challenges and opportunities associated with these options. Learn how brands grow an audience and keep up with the virtually demand for content. How do they choose what platforms and partnerships to strike up to ensure the content is seen? We'll explore all of these questions with our panelists of fortune 500 brand managers, agencies, and publishers.

Is the industry still innovating H.264 encoding techniques? EuclidIQ will demonstrate how to generate more than 20% bandwidth savings without requiring pre-processing and without impacting video quality. The session explains how spatial complexity and temporal contrast measurements mimic the human eye to focus compression on the most watched areas of each video frame.

TV content is and will increasingly continue to be augmented by social interactions, internet content, gaming, streaming, and other video programing. Second screen devices, applications, and services have taken the first steps to provide viewers the personalized content to augment these TV experiences. However, current limitations of the TV have limited the potential of second screen experiences. In this session, Skreens will explain how with Skreens technology, second screen applications and services can radically expand the TV experiences for their customers and potentially open new revenue opportunities.