Trying to engage a live audience is difficult, even more so when that audience is online and not in front of you. Most of the burden for driving this engagement falls on the presenter and the content they’re presenting, but there are many ways a platform can enhance engagement during a webcast or video broadcast. This session provides the perspective from seasoned corporate users of what they want from their webcasting and online video platforms to drive better engagement from their audiences.

With the uncertainty surrounding HEVC, people in the industry are taking another look at H.264, and many cite perceptual quality optimization (PQO) as a potential source of improvement. This talk presents IQ264, EuclidIQ’s technology that integrates PQO directly into H.264 encoding, resulting in over 20% bandwidth savings relative to reference H.264 encoding at equivalent quality.

This session will cover a brief journey of where big data and the data storage industry is headed and how it will impact the Object Storage market.

When thinking about leading-edge technologies and future-proofing, there are many considerations that affect your deployment decisions, from the devices that you want to reach, to the quality level you are trying to deliver. A hot topic this past year has been the debate around Google’s VP9 video codec vs. HEVC for streaming in MPEG-DASH. Which will win out in the end? Is DASH catching on? Will the death of browser plug-ins finally herald the age of HTML5 video streaming, and how does WebRTC fit in? Our panel dives into these and other questions, helping you decipher which technologies are here to stay, and which should be forgotten.

This session explores the current status of HEVC, identifying options for encoding live and on-demand video using HEVC and discussing player options in the streaming and OTT markets. Topics include the comparative quality and usability of HEVC encoders—including encoders from x265 and MainConcept—and techniques for maximizing output quality using both codecs.

Just when we thought the road map for HEVC was crystallizing, a series of disruptions are creating a new set of uncertainties. This talk presents the current state of the HEVC market in terms of point solutions within the end-to-end workflow. It dives deeply into discussing newly emerging challenges, and translates those into implications for HEVC’s value proposition. Attendees also get recommendations on the suggested road map for transitioning to HEVC and what other alternatives are available to content businesses for broadening reach and increasing service profitability.

This presentation helps attendees identify their unique requirements for an effective video management solution. It identifies the mistakes that many video management technology buyers make and provides best-practice advice on how to avoid these mistakes. It looks at the options facing buyers looking for new technology for video review, approval, and delivery. Attendees get advice on how to get to a vendor short list, submitting brief and useful RFPs, what questions need to be asked, and other tips to ensure the right solution is chosen.

In attempt to facilitate new modes of teaching, such as online and flipped classrooms, the behind-the-scenes process of building a course has quickly changed. On-demand video portals, recording studios, and web-conference sessions are working their way into many universities. This session explores the workflow universities have developed to deliver their online and flipped classes, along with the tech they use to make it possible. This session highlights what schools have found to be successful, efficient technologies and highlight lessons learned.

To deliver video ROI, global enterprises need to touch as many people as possible. Increasing video search, reach, access, and engagement are key.  Video captions are proven to increase video views and completions as much as 40%. And getting local culture right is critical for growing new markets, teams and  future revenues. Translated subtitles can connect your company to millions more hearts and minds. This panel of multi-national video pros will discuss what works, and doesn't, and share insider how to on questions like: Where's the most ROI? If quality is critical to your company, what are good enough translations? And what are the risks of missing deadlines, cultural faux pas, and brand damage of bad translations.

Everyone knows delivering your video at broadcast quality to any device, in the right format, globally is hard. But does it have to be? In this session, we’ll challenge conventional wisdom and show how, with the right processes, expertise, and technology in place, secure, monetizable video delivery to any device is easier than you think.

As the world moves to all video, all on demand, all the time, content distributors need to rethink their longer term architecture, content distribution, and storage strategies. Scality's software-defined storage solution, the RING, enables companies to change the way they do business. With the RING, companies like Deluxe OnDemand can use nearly any x86 servers to host their own origin storage with no limitations in performance, reliability, flexibility, and scale. With the new RING-based architecture in place, Deluxe has modernized their delivery workflow, increased their edge distribution options, and will save millions of dollars as a result.

Media customers building for big screens, web experiences, mobile/tablet apps, and content for virtual and augmented reality are redefining the digital media landscape. New hardware and software options are bringing high-end digital cinema workflows to productions of all sizes and budgets. This presentation highlights how to take ProsRes HQ workflow from source to destination in a matter of minutes. Learn how to process videos for new vertical placements on social and mobile media and best practices for getting the most out of your file based workflow.

As momentum behind HEVC/H.265 grows, questions around the readiness of the new technology surface daily. The hype is compelling: better compression and faster/cheaper delivery over lower bitrates. For content distributors distributing content to mobile devices over congested 3G/4G/LTE networks, these traits are highly desirable. 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. Up-to-date examples using FFmpeg with x264 and x265 output are compared for bitrate, compression time, and file size.

We often take for granted the cornerstone that all content services hinge on, which is DRM. Long considered a solved problem, there are significant technology shifts underway that are poised to disrupt the status quo and potentially require reengineering, or even re-architecture, of license servers on the back-end and apps on the front-end. This session discusses the impact of EME and HTML5 and what it means for service providers and app developers. Learn the impact of mandatory hardware-based DRM protection and its impact on OEMs and content owners.

In this session, industry experts share how they've been able to launch live-to-VOD services without a complete overhaul of infrastructure by applying software-defined video solutions to easily migrate from one type of scenario to another. Panelists describe how they use OTT workflows to create catch-up TV assets across existing broadband infrastructures. Among other tips, they share how they've employed JIT packaging for workflow simplification, cost reduction, and content production and how they're combining embedded encryption and decryption with JIT DRM wrapping.

As operators transition to all-IP they are looking at opportunities to conserve access network bandwidth. Multicast-assisted ABR (M-ABR) is a low cost and easy to deploy solution that allows operators to see multicast gains on all in-home devices leveraging their TV Everywhere infrastructure. This panel, organized by CableLabs, will discuss how M-ABR can be deployed over any multicast-capable access network and effectively extends the operator's CDN into the home by caching content on the gateway. Learn how multicast-assisted ABR allows operators to transition to all-IP, which enables it to be used in the short-term or as a long-term solution to bandwidth conservation on the access network.

This session discusses how TV Everywhere and OTT providers are adapting their product roadmaps to meet changing consumer behavior. The discussion focuses on how to manage PC-centric services that are in decline, mobile services that generate high traffic but low monetization, and fragmented connected TV devices where there is no clear winner. We discuss apps vs. web, single vs. multiple apps, hybrid billing models, in-app upgrades, and why competition is a good thing. 

Stream stitching and server-side ad insertion are picking up steam as approaches that let content owners beat ad blockers on the desktop and provide better ad delivery on the mobile web-among other benefits. However, the technology is still early in its adoption curve, with a lot of innovation in the works to drive its deployment across more devices and use cases. This session reviews the data to see where server-side ad insertion and stitching have been helpful to publishers and broadcasters and explore how it is evolving to support analytics, interactivity, programmatic and other components of online video advertising.

For TV Everywhere to reach adoption, the current authentication process needs be made as user friendly as possible, removing any obstacle standing between consumers and their content viewing experience. In this strategic session, we look at the recommended best practices that the OATC (Open Authentication Technology Committee) has proposed to achieve such Friction-free authentication and discuss a set of guidelines that aim to create a seamless user experience in the first instance.

As Microsoft's new Windows 10 operating system begins rolling out to all their devices, what is the impact to media apps, media consumption, and content owners? Client features such as Cortana and system-level notifications combined with new Azure services hope to enable more intelligent, more personalized viewing experiences. This session discusses what the adoption might look like, what new features will be of interest to consumers, and how Windows 10 enables a deeper intelligence in the apps we use to watch our content.

Whether you want to broadcast a company-wide meeting or new employee training, streaming it through your internal network saves on time, travel costs and resources. This session dives into architectures that are commonly used for distributing streams to all screens within an enterprise/EDU setting, plus discuss reaching remote and mobile workers. Walk away with recommendations on achieving the best-possible quality and broadest audience reach, along with best practices and lessons learned. Join us for this information-packed session on building an internal streaming solution to fit your business needs.