While CDN prices have never been lower, OTT delivery continues to weigh heavily on broadcasters’ budgets. Growing audiences, higher resolutions and more immersive video experiences bring both technical and business challenges at scale. This panel explores how content publishers are working to balance fixed revenue per subscriber models with the varying cost of delivery, while also getting the best quality for their money. The session will look at optimization efforts throughout the delivery workflow, with a special emphasis on CDN, multi-CDN, peer-to-peer, multicast and in-house delivery solutions.

As operators and media companies navigate through the growing mix of technologies and the changing TV environment, content owners continue to experiment with new TV services and OTT solutions. With the goal of finding new revenue streams, and retaining audiences, service providers are continuously introducing new engaging features that cater to today’s personalized viewing habits. This panel will dive into the technology landscape for scalable Next Generation TV deployments as well as how content owners can tackle scalable content distribution in a cost effective manner.

There’s a growing number of vendor options when it comes to encoding video, but each one is different in terms of feature sets, distribution functions, audience reach, monetization opportunities, interactivity and many other factors. This session will compare the panelists offerings, discuss the technical features they are bringing to market, and where they see demand for new capabilities from their customers. This panel will help you understand which platforms and approaches are best suited for specific video content and consumer use-cases as well as overall business goals. It will also discuss how the market for encoding services is evolving and what we should we expect to see in the next 6 to 12 months.

You’re at a venue with poor Internet connectivity and need to get your HD contribution feed to the cloud for live streaming delivery. What are your options? Join our panel for an interactive discussion about how to plan for and get around such hurdles, using bonded cellular devices, inexpensive satellite solutions, and networking technologies such as FEC, QUIC, SRT, Zixi, and others. We’ll compare the pros and cons of each, and answer your questions.

Successfully stream high-quality near-live content over the Internet can quickly become a near impossible task. Bad network conditions, latency and distance are known to dramatically impair video streaming. Various products and services have been introduced, such as forward error correction over UDP, peer-to-peer distribution and CDNs. However, none provide the same universal quality and "zero-delay" transmission needed for a great experience. Aspera FASPStream is the first open video transport solution capable of live streaming high-quality video globally over commodity Internet networks with low buffering and negligible start-up time. This session will outline how to integrate the Aspera fasp.io software suite with standard RTMP, HLS and DASH workflows on browser, desktop, mobile and set-top box platforms.

The Socionext “Media Cloud” is designed to deliver a 10-fold increase in video server speeds and efficiency, resulting in new levels of server performance and optimal user streaming experience. The initiative integrates a “Sea of Transcoders” for real-time transcoding up to 256 bundles of AVC/ HEVC adaptive bit rate (ABR) streams for a variety of inputs, up to 4Kp60. The dense transcode solution provides maximum server performance for video processing.

Attend this session for your chance to win: GoPro Hero6 Action Camera ($499 value)

WebRTC is an emerging technology supported by the majority of web browser that helps solve the latency issue but introduces its own set of challenges. This session will discuss what makes a successful deployment of WebRTC. Learn what open source and proprietary technologies can be used to jump-start a deployment and what the impact of NAT traversal for peer-to-peer deployments of WebRTC (STUN, TURN, ICE) has. Hear what tools enable WebRTC in a plugin-based architecture that is composed of fully open source software and how you can put it to use.

Learn how Microsoft is applying intelligence to media to improve the user experience and automate the production process. This session provides an overview of how Microsoft is using the power of the cloud to apply machine learning to video. Demonstrations include improving live streaming video with automated closed captions, as well as extracting metadata from VOD libraries, making it extremely easy to index and search hours and hours of content.

The industry is very comfortable getting the best quality and highest encoding operational efficiency out of H.264, but with the newness of HEVC, video encoding engineers may be struggling to maximize operational performance with this advanced codec. Questions of how to implement a live 4K encoding solution, or best practices for encoding HDR, in software, are top of mind. In this session you will hear from video distributors the lessons learned building and deploying HEVC encoding operations, as well as secrets to obtaining the highest performance with HEVC.

If content is King, then user experience is God. Many of the best practices from data driven video companies can be boiled down to simple concepts you don’t have to be a data scientist to understand. This presentation will showcase how entertainment brands can make better use of their data in 2017 and beyond. The session will present actionable strategies for entertainment brands to effectively use data to compete in digital spaces. Topics covered will include A/B experimentation, thumbnail optimization, and social media KPIs.

Think you know everything about encoding? Teradek’s Jon Landman thinks otherwise. Dive deeply into the world of hardware codecs, from compression technologies such as HEVC to transport protocols and delivery. If you’re still unsure about joining the cutting edge of IP video before the broader industry, Jon Landman is here to show you the way.

VAST 4.0 represents the first opportunity for a fully integrated, standards-based, server-side ad insertion workflow. Join this sessions to learn how it will impact your workflows and enable you to maximize your revenue by circumventing ad blockers, reaching more devices, and improving viewers' experience.

Attend this session for your chance to win: GoPro Hero Session Camera with Handler Hand Grip and SD card ($230 value)

Despite all the vendor marketing hype and so-called “objective” white paper publications, there is no one “best” system: There’s one that’s right for you, your business needs, your technical requirements, your integration points, and your budget. This presentation helps attendees identify their unique requirements for an effective video management solution. We identify the mistakes that many technology buyers make and provide best practice advice on how to avoid these mistakes. We discuss 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 useful RFPs, what questions need to be asked, and other tips to ensure you choose the right solution.

This panel will feature participants from Harmonic, Nokia, and PCCW to discuss the challenges that PCCW Global faced to deliver an immersive 360-degree, VR sports experience during the 2017 Cathay Pacific/HSBC Hong Kong Sevens rugby tournament. Speakers will detail the workflow used, revealing how PCCW Global delivered exceptional UHD quality to VR head-mounted devices. By the end of the presentation, attendees will have a greater understanding of how they can elevate the sports fan experience, unveiling each and every angle of the action in exceptional UHD quality with stunning 360-degree, VR visuals on any device.

For content providers, achieving ubiquitous reach in today’s fragmented market often is a race against time and resource limitations. Unlike the simpler early days of web video, providers must write apps for hundreds of variations of mobile and streaming devices, gaming consoles and smart TVs, or risk losing market share to larger or more aggressive competitors. At the same time, many digital-first content providers are focusing on social media video experiences, further disrupting the landscape. This panel will bring together traditional and internet content providers to discuss strategies that can be used to quickly and efficiently extend cross platform reach and streamline app store certification processes.

Amazon has been investing deeply in artificial intelligence for over 20 years, and many of the capabilities customers experience are driven by machine learning. Within AWS, we’re focused on bringing that knowledge and capability to customers through three layers of the AI stack: Frameworks and Infrastructure, API-driven Services, and Machine Learning platforms. A common question often asked is how to best integrate these capabilities into media-based solutions. In this session, we’ll take a look at how Amazon AI and Deep Learning-based services such as Amazon Rekognition can be applied to media workflows such as metadata enrichment, image classification, live and VOD media processing, sentiment analysis, facial recognition and content moderation.

Facebook, Twitch, Periscope and YouTube Live. This session will demonstrate how to publish a video stream to multiple social media networks, simultaneously. We will explore common pitfalls and uncover the best practices and tools that will make sure your stream arrives properly, in compliance, and is configured with the proper codec and streaming profile. You will leave with an understanding of how to deliver a consistent and reliable experience for your social media audience.

Video content today is consumed on a wide variety of devices and the most common approach for reaching all these devices typically involves the creation of a dedicated application containing a dedicated native video player for every platform. While great for their viewers, most of the companies following this approach since discovered that each new device that they support introduces new technical and operational challenges. Although these challenges almost feel inevitable, there is a different approach available in the Universal Video Player, where one video player is used in all applications.

Using a Universal Video Player enables content owners to deliver a high-quality video viewing experience without any of the downsides associated with a native video player approach.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Three bags of Chokotoff Belgian chocolates ($15 value)

Hybrik powers some the largest video operations in the world, including Sony, Vevo, and Technicolor. Hybrik delivers a complete media processing solution including transcoding, quality control, and media analysis. And Hybrik is 90% less expensive than other cloud solutions. Come see why Streaming Media named Hybrik "Best of Show" at NAB!

Attend this session for your chance to win: iPad Mini ($350 value)

The market is thirsty for an open source, freely available, low-latency, UDP-like approach for streaming over the internet. This session will bring together SRT Alliance members and industry experts to discuss the SRT open source video transport protocol and how it optimizes streaming performance across unpredictable networks with secure streams and easy firewall traversal, bringing the best quality live video over the worst networks. The session will also discuss how UDP coupled with SRT is an ideal transport for video contribution and distribution and detail how the alliance is accelerating interoperability of video streaming solutions and fostering collaboration with industry leaders to achieve lower latency internet video transport.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.

Over the past year, videos depicting acts of violence and social injustice were captured live and shared on social media and news platforms highlighting the impact real-time news can have. Live video is playing an increasing role in the editorial strategies of digital publishers and broadcasters – their audiences expect a range of live coverage on multiple devices and platforms. They are still looking for breaking and key news events but now they also want to see political, cultural and religious events, red carpet coverage, product launches, technology shows, sports news and more. This presentation by the AP will highlight what audiences want from live video, how news organizations are incorporating it into their daily editorial strategy and how live video fits into a wider news agenda.

In a world of ubiquitous OTT video consumption, tracking and matching content rights with viewers locations, subscriptions or devices, is a much taller order than for traditional set-top box based broadcast or pay TV. OTT TV also promises better monetization via the untapped potential of dynamic and targeted insertions. For broadcast linear channels in particular, rights resolution and smarter insertions require that channel providers deliver video with clean and reliable metadata to their OTT partners. This new distribution and decoration of linear channels is a key component of the OTT value chain.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Triple function flashlight/stylus pens

As ultra high-definition content is becoming available in streaming services, getting ready to protect this highly valuable content is more important than ever. Deploying forensic watermarking solutions is a key component of protecting this content. Hear about the different ways watermarking can be deployed into streaming workflows and how taking a 360° approach achieves the targeted security outcome.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Color-changing coffee mugs ($10 value)

Roku is the pioneer of streaming to the TV and offers a unique platform for content publishers and developers. In this session, Roku will provide an overview of tools available to publishers, how to make the most of them and what monetization strategy is right for your content. Some topics covered will be new enhancements to Roku Direct Publisher, advertising tools and capabilities and some updated features and content discovery.

Microsoft has been extremely busy this year with announcements on its collaboration strategy. So what does this mean for your enterprise video streaming strategy? This session will detail the features and functionality of Microsoft Stream as it exists today, the roadmap for Microsoft Stream, and how it may differ from your current implementation. Special detail will focus on Microsoft Stream live streaming functionality as well as integration Microsoft Teams.

Low latency and fast startup times are KPIs for most streaming video producers, particularly for live events. Though a series of structured tests that measure startup time, latency, and network overhead, this session documents the results achieved by reducing fragment sizes, using hybrid fragment sizes, adjusting player parameters like first variant retrieved and the number of fragments retrieved before playback starts, opening a persistent connection between player and server, and other experiments. Results will be shown for computer playback as well as tvOS and Roku. You'll learn the most effective strategies for minimizing startup time and latency without swamping your network with additional HTTP requests, and what you'll need to do to implement them in your encoding and delivery workflows.