Over the last 5 years, we’ve transitioned from one codec, H.264, to seven or more (H.264, HEVC, VP9, AV1, VVC, EVC, and LCEVC). Keeping track of the performance, implementation status, and royalty status of these technologies has become exceptionally time-consuming, yet it is mission-critical for all encoding professionals. This 3-hour workshop details the implementation status of AV1, VVC, LCEVC, and EVC; discusses competitive quality/performance; and shows how to encode with available encoders. Attendees leave knowing the implementation status of these codecs and production alternatives for encode/decode.

Free ad-supported television (FAST) has become a must-have for every streaming service, and this workshop takes you through the crucial steps required to set one up. We walk through the types of tools and SaaS you can use to get up and running, creating a FAST service from your existing content library. Using tools covered in Streaming Media’s regular Streaming Toolbox feature, we build a service from encoding to playout, with the end result being a targeted, engaging, 24/7 stream. Steps covered include the following:

At the start of this year, FFmpeg 5.0 (codenamed "Lorentz") was released as a major upgrade from previous versions. This workshop guides you through the changes that might affect your current FFmpeg processes and workflow, as well as introduces you to more challenging FFmpeg features. If you’re already familiar with the basics of FFmpeg operation, you’re ready to tackle more ambitious tasks with one of the most powerful compositing tools available. We explore composition of two video sources with text labels and placement, setting up multiple processes to output multiple bitrates for adaptive delivery, using the “tee muxer” to distribute one encoding process to several outputs, and accessing connected hardware (e.g., webcams, AV capture devices) and networked hardware (e.g., IP cameras) as inputs to FFmpeg processes. Note: A diagnostic test is available for attendees to determine whether they’re prepared for this advanced workshop. Click here for a quick quiz on your FFmpeg knowledge: http://go2sm.com/ffmpegdiagnostic.

Enjoy drinks, tasty bites, and beautiful views from the Hyatt resort lawn while you mix and mingle with other conference attendees, speakers, and exhibitors to kick-off your Streaming Media West experience.

Danielle Carney, Head of NFL Sales at Amazon Ads, will discuss Amazon’s industry-changing move to make Prime Video and Twitch the exclusive streaming home to Thursday Night Football starting this season and for the next 11 years. Danielle will share how Thursday Night Football will feature unique advertising offerings which will enable advertisers to reach audiences at scale, what the deal means for advertisers, and overarching industry trends fueling a new generation of advertising for live sports, via streaming.

Dolby.io’s vision is to power a new generation of online experiences that rival the real world in immersion, interactivity, and social engagement. In this presentation, we discuss how technology is rapidly blurring the lines between physical and virtual, making it easier for creators to bring immersive virtual experiences to life, as well as enhance the in-stadium and in-venue experience for fans around the world. Innovations in volumetric video, extended reality, broadcast workflows, game engines, and 5G reimagine the experience of watching and performing sports, dance, music, and theater through virtual, augmented and mixed reality applications. Using everyday devices such as smartphones, tablets, and TVs, as well as the latest augmented reality (AR) headsets, these highly immersive, personalized experiences enable users to take control of their content in real-time and usher in the next evolution of live streaming.

In this special keynote program, Streaming Media’s Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen and Help Me Stream Research Foundation’s Tim Siglin will be joined by our research partner to present the findings of our fifth State of the Streaming Industry survey. We talk about changes and trends in the industry in key areas, including live vs. on-demand, scale, monetization, and technology.

Compared to broadcast and cable, OTT is the new kid on the block. But compared to the tech startups just up the coast from Huntington Beach—not to mention TikTok—it’s getting a little long in the tooth. This panel of gaming, ad tech, and social media visionaries shares invaluable insights into what’s working (and what’s not) in the increasingly complicated battle for the attention of consumers who have more choices than ever.

Streaming services acquiring sports rights. New lower-priced ad tiers. Service consolidation and bundling. How are these and other changes to the streaming landscape impacting consumer behavior and adoption of pay TV and streaming services? Altman Solon presents highlights of its 6,000-respondent, 13th annual consumer video survey, followed by a panel discussion with leaders in the streaming services space.

Depending on who you listen to, blockchain, NFTs, and other Web3 technologies will either revolutionize streaming video or go down in flames as the latest in a long line of overhyped buzzwords. Should you go all in, or keep your distance? This panel of visionaries and skeptics helps you assess what elements of Web3 can have a real impact on your business and which ones you can ignore.

Viewers don’t like it when OTT services change their user interfaces, but they like it even less when they can’t find the content they want. What makes a good user experience (UX)? How do you keep viewers engaged and encourage them to keep watching? What makes subscription services really resonate with consumers? This panel brings together UX experts who are committed to evaluating engagement metrics and constant A/B testing to figure out what’s working and what’s not.

The rising demand for audio and video content across emerging markets poses unique technological challenges for content providers. In this presentation, we’ll address how advanced architecture and optimal network transmission capabilities can help navigate inefficiencies like weak network environments, resource limitations, and security vulnerabilities to deliver seamless viewing experiences to audiences in emerging markets.

There are three dominant use cases for VoD streaming: fat tail (premium) content, long tail content, and live content. The existing streaming ecosystem works great for long tail “niche” content. It’s exceptionally inefficient for high-demand live and fat-tail content. With specific accommodations, live and fat-tail content could be better served with UDP-based source-specific multicasting. This presentation describes the means to combine these three use cases into an integrated operational framework. This integration preserves the strengths and assets of the current VOD paradigm yet allows the industry to migrate to a dramatically more cost-efficient model.

As the online video industry awakens to the need to assess power consumption in the same way it monitors data transit and end-user delivery costs, this panel covers practical examples of how to reduce power at various points in the media delivery supply chain. We speak to stakeholders at every point in the streaming media workflow to learn real-world best practices for keeping power consumption down without sacrificing user experience.

For many VOD producers, it’s go time for distributing video using AV1, which plays in nearly 75% of available browsers, plus all newer Android phones and many smart TVs and living room dongles. Meanwhile, the Alliance for Open media version 1.0 of the SVT-AV1 codec has joined libaom-av1 as an affordable and increasingly speedy encoding alternative. This session explores encoding with these open-source alternatives, testing key options like presets, threads, available rate control options, and other parameters to arrive at the optimal command string for both encoders.

Facebook has changed its name to Meta. YouTube is devoting significant resources to build virtual reality video experiences. And even Microsoft is working on ways to make workplace collaboration more immersive. Volumetric video in the metaverse is going to require massive encoding and transcoding resources, not to mention more efficient and powerful codecs. Join us to find out what you need to know to make sure your video development strategy is ready to take on the future.

Real-time games and the activities spawned by them (betting, auctions, free-to-play prop games) have largely been delivered by separate screens. What does the latest technology make possible, and where will fans and content owners take these intersections? The panel addresses the creation of new revenue streams and deeper fan engagement, as well as the technical challenges that have not yet been fully addressed.

With all due respect to pristine production value, streamlined workflows, heightened interactivity, and killer content, it’s all for naught if you can deliver a resilient, reliable, high-quality stream. If your stream starts buffering as the ball sails toward the goal or the emcee announces, “The winner is …,” your audience (and your advertisers) won’t give you credit for trying. Having a robust CDN—or even multiple CDNs—as the backbone of your stream is key. This panel discusses the current state of streaming infrastructure and what you need to know to maintain five-nines streaming reliability when it matters most.

If you’re in the business of live streaming, you’re also in the business of knowing how to best serve your audience with the right type of streaming delivery. With variations of HLS, WebRTC, and WebSocket, you have more than one option to deliver a low-latency stream. This session explores how to better define the ideal latency for your audience and learn how the tech stacks have evolved over the last few years—especially during COVID—to serve your customers with the best experience for your content.

More and more sports leagues are launching their own D2C services, including FIFA, which plans to live stream a staggering 40,000 games a year on its AVOD platform. The panel discusses how not just sports but other industries should also consider direct-to-consumer along with their linear partners for a number of compelling business reasons. Industry experts address the challenges faced and how to navigate them in a way that actually strengthens existing media partnerships.

Content and right owners continue to look for ways to monetize their new (or archived) content or generate new revenue from live events. Evertz shows how evertz.io and Ease Live enable content owners to stream their content to any platform by leveraging streaming and digital distribution technologies. In addition, we discuss how customers can deliver unique experiences to millions of users by driving engagement through the gamification of the fan experience.

It may be surprising to find out that some of the largest video streamers have grown in spite of significant content delivery inefficiencies driven by distributed and unpredictable video consumption. In a recent proof of concept with one of these companies, Varnish demonstrated its our next-gen delivery software could help increase requests per second by up to 80X, reduce power consumption by 20%, and deliver the same amount of video with 80% less resources. Adrian Herrera, Varnish’s CMO, gives an overview on the process and results, how the solution can be deployed seamlessly with your existing delivery approaches, and how you can get started with an infrastructure evaluation. Attend this session for your chance to win a $100 Amazon Gift Card.

To thrive in this new era of real-time communication and collaboration, companies need to modernize how they connect to global resources. Zenlayer’s edge cloud platform offers a new approach, eliminating barriers like latency and bandwidth constraints and enabling seamless cloud onramp and offramp. In this session, learn how Zenlayer's Bare Metal Cloud and private global SDN backbone enable seamless streaming media deployments while positioning businesses to support future distributed application architectures with shared data structures. Attend this session for a chance to win $250 Amazon Gift Card.

Low-latency streaming solutions offer promise for new applications and exciting viewer engagement. Monitoring every step of the overall end-to-end workflow from content capturing, encoding, packaging and ultimately delivery to the screen is critical in enabling a low-latency streaming platform. In this session, we cover principals and practical considerations for a successful low-latency streaming deployment and maintenance. Attend this session for a chance to win Wirecast Studio license, a $599 value.

NDI is a de-facto standard technology for creating and processing content in live-production companies. However, remote production may involve multiple locations, so companies often need to combine them together across public networks. SRT technology gives the opportunity to connect remote production locations with a proper level of reliability and security. Nimble Streamer media server allows transforming live streams between NDI and SRT to build efficient processing gateways with low cost of ownership. Attend this session for a chance to win AirPods 3rd generation.

With live sporting events returning to pre-pandemic numbers and content rights being acquired by next-generation platforms, Zixi has released new capabilities in its ZEN Master control plane to help customers dynamically manage the production and distribution. Zixi describes how its major customers are using these new capabilities to distribute thousands of games, with end-to-end control and visibility and how Zixi is providing powerful automation that deploys AWS infrastructure only when it’s needed and releases it after each event is completed to manage costs. Attend this session for your chance to win: $100 Amazon Gift Card.

The live sports streaming market is accelerating fast, as is viewer appetite for engaging content with pristine video quality. But how can you deliver this personalized experience, optimize your content monetization, and achieve all of this at scale to large audiences? Harmonic’s David Ramirez addresses these questions and focuses on aspects such as low latency and UHD HDR, sports features like video-in-video live highlights, and how to deliver live channel variants and targeted ads at scale. He also shares examples of live sports workflows in action. Attend this session for your chance to win: Apple TV 4K.

Grab a drink and visit with our exhibitors in a laid-back atmosphere.

Relax and unwind after a full day of sessions. Our evening reception is the perfect place to network with industry peers while enjoying drinks and hors d'oeuvres. Open to all conference attendees, speakers, and exhibitors.

Celebrate the winners of the annual Streaming Media Magazine Readers’ Choice Awards.

Albert Lai, Director of Media and Entertainment at Google Cloud, discusses how the cloud revolutionizes the entire media supply chain from production to distribution to consumption. Lai shares how Google is helping media companies harness cloud, data, and AI/ML to create content, engage audiences, and monetize experiences. He'll explain how the industry uses Google Cloud to stay innovative and agile in the face of seismic shifts in technology and audience behavior.

Zixi CEO Gordon Brooks sits down with Streaming Media conference chair Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen to discuss global trends that are being seen in the media and entertainment industry. Topics covered include virtualization and the move to IP delivery, looking at how mainstream broadcasters, OTT providers, and others are being affected, and how Zixi customers and partners are solving problems.

Whether they’re defined by the type of content—science fiction, horror, romance—or the type of audience, niche services are the long tail of the OTT universe. But just because their audiences are limited doesn’t mean their revenue opportunities are. Partnerships with aggregators and “mainstream” services offer pathways to bigger viewership numbers, and innovative marketing approaches can turn small services into big successes. Join us as we talk about how.

One of these things is not like the other, but they’re all part of what you do with the data you’re capturing. “Lions” are the executives who want to know how profitable a particular piece of content, a format, or a region is to their business. “Tigers” are the fierce customers you need to please (and get more of), and “bears” are the customers who churn because you’ve let them down. You may be capturing data, but unless you’re bringing great analysis to the party, you’ve just got a lot of meaningless numbers. Find out how to please all your customers by knowing what data matters—and what to do with it.

Everyone knows you can never get back a lost ad opportunity, but how can you minimize the losses? This panel talks about personalization, contextual placement, and other elements you need to have in place. They share how their ad tech stacks operate at peak efficiency, what makes a good advertising workflow, and how to bring in maximum dollars and drop the minimum number of spots. And, of course, they address the evergreen question: server-side or client-side?

It is clear that most organizations are moving to a hybrid environment with a mix of people in the office or classroom and others working remotely. What does this mean for enterprise and education streaming? How can we ensure that users have an outstanding experience from anywhere? This session will first attempt to answer the question, “What is hybrid?” as it relates to the enterprise and education, then consider what it means for video production, distribution, viewing, and enterprise and education video platforms. The panel will kick off with brief highlights of findings from recent Streaming Media surveys on video in education and enterprise.

The broadcast supply chain has myriad moving parts, and as older workflows are depreciated, figuring out how to make the smartest decisions can be a challenge. Many cloud services companies talk about lower total cost of ownership, quicker time to market, faster response times, and reduced delivery costs, but what are the essential questions to ask your vendors? If you've moved your broadcast workflows to the cloud, this panel can help you find new efficiencies. If you haven't, this panel can likely make you wonder what you've been waiting for.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are the result of a growing ecosystem within the daily life of anyone who holds cryptocurrency, and it’s the Wild West for new opportunities with anyone who has content to monetize. The term “Web3” is also increasingly used to differentiate decentralized services compared to very centralized services in a Web2 environment. In this session, learn the basics of tech stacks around Web3 and NFT marketplaces, including IPFS and Arweave storage options. The session also explores the potential that could exist for a new market of video consumers.

Most live-streaming producers were already embracing remote production when the pandemic forced the issue, and since 2020, it’s become the “new normal.” Now that large-scale in-person events from sports to entertainment to trade shows have returned—often as hybrid events with remote audiences that are often larger than in-person—producers need to refine their workflows for a future that includes both onsite and offsite elements and the ability to go fully remote as conditions change. Our panel of experts shares what’s working today and what you need to know to be ready for tomorrow.

Given the explosion of remote and distributed production workflows over the last 2 years, many producers are already ingesting and moving content largely without the assistance of SDI cables and the like. The next logical step is to migrate that entire workflow to the cloud. Join experts in this session to learn about the pros and cons of cloud production, how to choose a cloud production tool, and how to develop a cloud workflow that will work for you.

Live conferences and trade shows are back! But a funny thing happened during the pandemic: The streaming video industry was forced to “drink our own Kool-Aid” and deliver events virtually, only to find that all the virtual event platform bells and whistles didn’t matter if the video wasn’t reliable. This panel offers a no-holds-barred discussion of what works, what doesn’t, and what the future of video-based event technology should look like. The panel will kick off with brief highlights of findings from recent Streaming Media surveys on video in education and enterprise.

This discussion provides an overview of how the growth of a new class of low-latency applications are impacting how infrastructure will be deployed and how the economics associated with these applications are unlike anything previously. As new live-streaming applications become more popular due to their interactive nature, there is upward pressure that will be seen across the board from a codec, network, and overall Infrastructure perspective. Many of these applications will need to be deployed in a more regional or local basis, and this is at odds with the centralized cloud model and trajectory that the industry has been moving toward. Attend this session for your chance to win a $100 Amazon Gift Card.

Big Cartel is an e-commerce platform that makes it easy for artists, musicians, and independent business owners to build unique online stores. As they grew to host one million e-commerce sites, their infrastructure needs evolved. They initially used Amazon for storage and content delivery, but by transitioning to Backblaze B2 for their origin store, they were able to expand their free tier, enhance their platform and invest in their community of independent artists. Join us to learn how Big Cartel made the switch from AWS S3 to Backblaze B2 without any downtime and reduced their OpEx by 50%. Attend this session for your chance to win Synology 2 bay NAS with $50 of B2 Cloud Storage Credits.

With nearly 60 years of television content, spanning over 1,500 episodes and seven TV series, Fred Rogers Productions needed a way to confidently, quickly, and securely access and search its vast, multi-terabyte, video collection to find highly specific video segments and assets. In this session, learn how MediaValet, an intelligent, cloud-based, enterprise digital asset management solution that specializes in managing and unlocking the value of large, high-definition video libraries, solved Fred Rogers Productions’ challenge overnight. Attend this session for a chance to win 2 hours free consulting with DAM expert Meg Morrissey to discuss any content management challenges the winner is experiencing from workflows, metadata challenges, integrations, etc. Morrissey brings a wealth of experience from organizations like Netflix and Walt Disney, as well as leading MediaValet’s Professional Services team, working with many of its 400 customers.

Dolby’s success over the past 57 years has been built on major advancements in sound, imaging, and system-related research resulting in improvements across consumer media including multichannel and immersive sound as well as high dynamic range imaging. Come get a peek at some of the research into the reliability and robustness of delivering media over-the-top along with the implications of reaching five 9’s (99.999) of availability and an early look at what approaches are poised to reach this goal. We share some of our findings and discuss current industry solutions, including some different paths forward to unlock even greater performance required for the future of media experiences. Attend this session for a chance to win $100 Amazon Gift Card.

MainStreaming built the EDGE delivery network behind DAZN’s delivery model. In the presentation, DAZN's business challenges and history, from right owner to streaming broadcaster, will be analyzed, highlighting technical issues and how MainStreaming has succeeded in overcoming them. Attend this session for your chance to win a Iphone 14 PRO.

As the media industry is in an OTT transformation, retaining customers and attracting new customers is becoming a key challenge. Due to customer demands and digital device capabilities, content alone no longer differentiates one offering versus another. Customers seek “always-on," lean-in, personalized experiences with their favorite brands and entertainment options. Gen-Z is now the first generation in history to choose video games versus video as their preferred entertainment option. Further, community-based experiences have proven to show 10x higher audience revenue models than individual engagement models. We explore these industry trends and technologies from Microsoft Gaming and Media to deliver customer-immersive technologies for brands, media, and entertainment companies alike. The first 24 attendees to Microsoft’s Innovation Track session will receive a Black Modern City Backpack. Due to government gift and ethics laws, government employees (including military and employees of public education institutions) are not eligible to participate.

Latency. Codecs. Discovery. Subscription fatigue. Advertising vs. subscription. DRM. These are just a few of the topics that just won’t go away. And then there are the acronyms—so many acronyms. So why is it that we’re still not just talking about all of these, but having virtually the exact same conversations we always have? We’ll gather a group of streaming experts, both grizzled veterans and relative newcomers whose spirits haven’t yet been broken by it all, to cut through the malarkey in a freewheeling, no-holds-barred conversation.