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)

Virtual assistants such as Alexa, Google Home, and Siri are quickly moving from niche to mainstream. Streaming audio and video are the cornerstone of a successful skill deployment. This session explores the integration of virtual assistants into the connected home and their non-traditional business model. Attendees will learn about balancing production requirements and return on investment with the potential rewards of tightly integrating their brand into their user's daily routine. Panelists will also share their experiences of managing user expectations while exploring unobtrusive monetization paths.

Today's CDN platforms are upgrading and building out to reach an increasingly larger number of consumer mobile devices and smart TVs across North America, Europe, Asia, and beyond. IBM Cloud Object Storage can provide CDNs long tail and origin storage with the advantages of its patented technology: nearly infinite scalability, 10+ nines of reliability and availability, and an incredibly low total cost of ownership vs on-prem and other cloud storage platforms. This presentation will provide all stakeholders in the digital supply chain with compelling information about how flexible, scalable, and high-performing cloud object storage can be for your CDN.

Immersive media content such as 360-degree video places a unique set of demands on cloud-based infrastructure from a complete end-to-end solution point of view. A key goal for any solution of this nature is to keep costs low while not impacting availability, scale, and compute performance. In this talk we will look at how to solve ingest, processing, storage, and delivery of live and on-demand content for immersive media delivery, and present a reference design for 360-degree streaming using best-practice architectural patterns.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Echo Dot ($50 value)

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.

During the last year, among all the other initiatives on digital, The New York Times invested on reinventing the ingesting and encoding pipeline of their on demand videos. The chosen approach was the built with a set of open source components that leverages cloud services for fast, scalable and reliable encoding jobs. This case study will walk through the new achievements and improvements that were built on the services set, including a thumbnails service for improving the click through rate, closed captions support, on the fly packaging and fragmented MP4's for adaptive streaming formats and analytics integration.

For decades, TV ratings have been the main barometer of commercial television success. But with the instant delivery of programming across all types of devices, content providers need to understand what viewers want before it arrives on their TVs, tablets and phones.  Featuring top executives from the TV industry, this session will explore findings from Altman Vilandrie & Company's annual consumer video survey, which for the first time will feature data on how and why consumers make viewing decisions - including the importance of program themes, networks, actors and creators.

The upcoming support of HEVC on iOS is bringing new dynamics into the video codec world, and by end of the year AV1 is going to be released. At the same time, VP9 gains a lot of popularity among content providers especially for Web browsers as well as Android devices. This panel will discuss what is the status of the different video codecs today, what are benefits and problems, and how this will change in the future. It will also discuss the question if the industry is getting into a codec war again, where content providers will have to support multiple video codecs in parallel to reach all devices.

Live streaming for social media audiences is exploding and brands are getting onboard in a big way. LiveU’s Dan Pisarski will present some tips and tricks to get brands started. He’ll cover the ins and outs of Facebook Live and other platforms, creating content beyond “behind-the-scenes,” and share some live success stories.

Learn how your broadcasts to Facebook Live can reach the high expectations you have for yourself and your brand with unmatched reliability and quality that’s simple to achieve all while creating live content that can be truly dynamic based on the Live Reactions of your followers.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Insta360 Nano ($199 value)

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.

Many content distributors and aggregators still use H.264 as their primary, if not exclusive codec, but the bandwidth savings incident to newer, more powerful codecs are alluring. Those considering a switch must evaluate at least three options; HEVC, VP9, and the Alliance for Open Media’s AV1 codec, which should be close to release by the close of 2017. In this session, codec specialist Jan Ozer evaluates the quality of these codecs and compares them to H.264. Learn how much bandwidth you can save with each and how the newer codecs compare from quality and implementation perspectives.

Not only is 4K streaming here now, it is surprisingly affordable! In this session we will talk about the best tools for the job and the setup needed to ensure an optimal experience for all viewers.

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

As consumers increasingly go online to watch live sporting events, enjoy live video gaming, and participate in online gambling, delivering the lowest-latency live streaming experiences becomes critical for content distributors. In this session, we’ll discuss the motivations, challenges and solutions for delivering live video streams at sub-second latencies at global scale, without sacrificing the video quality your audiences want and expect. We’ll also cover the common use cases for low-latency live streaming and financial benefits driving innovation.

Attend this session for your chance to win: GoPro Hero5 Black 4K Action camera ($400 value)

How To: Live Streaming Without The Big Price Tag

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.

Although the technology keeps getting easier to use, building end-to-end streaming workflows can still be challenging. In this session, we walk you through installing software and building numerous on-demand and live streaming workflows. Along the way, we cover options and best practices for each step. Applicable scenarios include enterprise video, mobile journalism, sporting events, concerts, education use cases, and many more. You learn about streaming formats and architectures (including on-premises vs. cloud vs. hybrid), plus technologies and solutions for specific needs.