In this special session, Dan Rayburn demos the latest connected TV platforms from Samsung, Sony, Sharp, Vizio, LG, and TCL. Attendees get a hands-on overview of what each manufacturer has to offer in terms of the latest content apps, user interfaces, and video quality, and hear how these TV platforms are going to evolve over the coming years. (This will take place at the Device Pavilion, on the show floor.)

While broadcasters have largely been hamstrung by TV Everywhere’s structural challenges, programmers are now looking to break free and offer content away from the traditional MVPD bundle. This session discusses the rise of virtual MVPDs that have reimagined the traditional cable bundle, as well as a growing array of stand-alone, niche, direct-to-consumer video offerings. Hear what these services look like, the content they offer, and the impact they are having on the traditional pay TV business model.

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.

Learn how to simplify the process of deploying unified video experiences across all IP-connected devices to produce more content, seek out global audiences, and diversify distribution and revenue streams beyond YouTube. Attendees will learn how to build an effective multiscreen strategy that maximizes revenue and drives audience engagement anytime, everywhere and on any device.

As OTT grows to become a $15 billion a year business and streaming grows every day, consumers are starting to compare and contrast the services they experience—with results that spell opportunity for some, and disaster for others. This talk explores a recent Conviva Consumer Survey, as well as the conclusions from the 2015 Conviva Viewer Experience Report, to identify the increasing impatience of OTT consumers; the ever-growing expectations they bring to the table; and the tough economic realities of failing to execute an effective iterative publishing process.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Conviva grab bag with Conviva Swag items and an Amazon Gift card

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.

2015 is poised to be a huge year for OTT, with HBO and Showtime launching their services. These will join full OTT TV offerings like Dish’s Sling TV and potentially new services from Verizon and Vodafone. However, there are still many questions around how the TV ecosystem will evolve in light of these new services and how broadcasters and content owners will add additional revenue streams from new OTT services. This session discusses the best ways to monetize OTT content using the latest technologies, such as time- shifted television, device management, household management, deep personalization, social tools, and video applications for mobile and connected devices.

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.

This session discusses how broadcasters, advertisers, and OTT providers are using video consumption data to provide the best end- to-end user experience. The discussion centers on identifying which devices are most popular, which ones provide the most engagement, and the impact they have on OTT services. Learn how to gauge the overall success of your content business based on engagement metrics, user segmentation, globalization, and platform partnership.

Time and cost are huge factors when media publishers consider which device platforms they need to support. In this session, a mix of developers and content publishers discuss the strategic view of supporting multiple devices and the realistic cost for deploying across multiple platforms. Learn the logical operations that can easily be repurposed and what must be unique to each platform. Using the context of existing Windows, iOS, and Android applications that the panelists have been involved with, the conversation also covers the most recent Windows 10 announcements and outlines what is required for content owners to deliver their services to connected devices.

Gone are the days of needing a production truck to broadcast a live show, but there are still many challenges producers face when live streaming on the road. In this session you will learn some of the tricks of the trade in addition to some new portable production solutions to make your job easier.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Full copy of vMix 4K software ($700 value)

RTL II, a top German TV station, has over 2 petabytes of videos and creates over 200TB of new content a year. To meet growing market share, online video demand, and a planned move to 4K resolution, RTL II needed to dramatically improve their storage infrastructure performance, density, and efficiency. In this session, you will learn how to evaluate software-defined storage versus traditional storage appliances. You will see the design and architecture of distributed storage software (Scality RING) on industry standard servers (HP ProLiant) over three sites, serving multiple applications and workloads in a single protected environment.

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 discusses how traditional and nontraditional media companies are looking at extending YouTube monetization to other platforms and apps that give them greater control and flexibility. Hear how content owners can diversify their content distribution and convert and seek out a new global audience, and find out what kind of revenue can be garnered from various platforms. Learn how to expand your content distribution and audience for new revenue opportunities using syndication technologies and apps that are facilitating these expansions.

Consumers are increasingly using mobile devices to watch professionally produced content, and video distributors are responding with a variety of offers, including TV Everywhere to enhance traditional pay TV, VOD libraries available over the top (OTT), and even live channel packages available OTT. In many cases, these offers are being targeted primarily to mobile device viewing, but may also be complementary to a TV viewing experience. This session discusses these trends and opportunities to monetize multi-screen viewing, including subscriptions, rentals, electronic sell-through, and advertising.

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.

Learn about the advantages for deploying a virtualized workflow in a private or public cloud powered by Intel architecture to meet needs for growth, quality delivery, and diversified services. Understand how cloud workflows can be used to ingest, transcode, protect, package, stream, and analyze media on-demand or live to multiscreen devices. Benefits for communications providers and large media companies include simplification of equipment design, reduced development costs, and a scalable solution.

The rollout of advanced broadband technologies will usher in 1Gbps bandwidth to the home, enabling multi-screen 4K/UHD video. The internet traffic growth will challenge traditional content delivery models and require big changes for CDNs, carriers, and content providers. Learn about next-generation edge delivery and what it means to subscriber growth and time spent.

Attend this session for your chance to win: A Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 Elite Edition Quadricopter($299 value)

As video continues to proliferate on connected devices, programmatic advertising on this marketing channel is maturing well beyond its real-time bidding roots. Increasingly, automated technologies are empowering buyers and sellers alike to tap into the gold mine of data available to more precisely segment and target audiences, and to optimize spend and revenue across video content. This session explores how advertisers, agencies, and publishers are engaging programmatic platforms to take their video ad strategies to the next level. Learn about the rise of private marketplaces, automation, and premium video content colliding, as well as the economics behind it all.

In this special session, Dan Rayburn presents a hands-on comparison showcasing the leading streaming devices and content platforms. Devices from Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Roku, and Sony are compared, along with content services from Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, MLB, YouTube, NFL, and many others. Attendees also get to see a demo of some of the newest content offerings in the market from Sling TV and HBO, and learn how to stream content from phones and tablets and display it on their TVs. (This will take place at the Device Pavilion, on the show floor.)

The rise of social networks and their role in augmenting our TV and video experiences is quickly taking shape. When you consider the size of addressable audiences (and massive number of video views) on Facebook and Twitter alone, it s no surprise that major network brands look to them as table stakes destinations. In this session, Anvato will explain the value in social syndication and offer suggestions on how you can distribute content in near real-time to these major sites without causing operational headaches or breaking your budget.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Apple TV ($69 value)

Bridging the gap from the traditional video ecosystem to a flexible IP-based OTT platform poses significant technical challenges for content owners and distributors alike. Discover how Comcast confronted some of these challenges and pioneered a transition to a TV Everywhere platform while maintaining the highest level of content quality, expanding audience reach and enabling emerging monetization models.

Attend this session for your chance to win: NBC Universal themed gift basket including SNL memorabilia and USA Olympic branded items ($150 value)

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.

We’re used to thinking of the OTT technology landscape in terms of technology components—transcoders, origin servers, advertising servers, players, DAM systems, and so forth. But these silos are rapidly breaking down. The need for scalability, agility, and automation, coupled with the demand for continuously state-of-the- art systems in an intensively competitive environment, are forcing a change in how the vendor community should be planning, developing, deploying, and marketing their offerings. This talk discusses, from an analyst’s perspective, how the industry and its needs have changed in recent months and how they will change over the next 2–3 years.

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.

We’ll start with a mobile device as our video source, encode the video locally,push it to a cloud-based streaming server, create multiple quality levels to support adaptive bitrate streaming, record the video for later on-demand playback, and deliver the live feed with global any-screen streaming.

Attend this session for your chance to win: A Wowza Elleven Amped Checkpoint-friendly Compu-backpack and a $50 coupon for use with our new service, Wowza Streaming Cloud ($135 value)

This session is all about maximizing revenue in a rapidly evolving hybrid TVE and OTT worlds. How do companies continue to support the TVE ecosystem while taking advantage new OTT opportunities? What are the best options for optimizing OTT revenue? How will a la carte offerings from cable providers impact long term OTT monetization strategies of content owners? What is the future role of TVE authentication in an evolving OTT world? Are new monetization strategies such as membership clubs, paywalls and device based pricing models working in the video world? We'll tackle these and other key questions facing the streaming video industry today.

Attend this session for your chance to win: A $200 Apple gift card and a Zuora SWAG Pack ($300 value)

Existing social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are making substantial investments to bring more video to their users. This panel discusses how these new video platforms differ from established online video providers and how measurement and monetization work for both the content creator and the platform provider. As these platforms become the real-time feeds more consumers use, learn how they are integrating video into their platforms, the role of programmatic algorithms, social discovery, and the competition they are giving traditional broadcast outlets.

It goes without saying that consumption of video is changing as new platforms, formats, and industry dynamics evolve. From the dawn of 4K to Snapchat Discover, the quality, quantity, and sheer variety of video experiences are growing every day. This panel looks at the future of broadcast and video services in a multi-screen world, attempting to peer in to the near future to explore issues both at the fore, such as 4K, and still on the fringe, such as virtual reality.