As the options for viewing video continue to grow, it becomes increasingly important for programmers and service providers to understand consumer interests: What content do they want to watch? What product features are important? What devices do they use? How much are they willing to pay? And how do these behaviors and priorities vary by consumer segment? This session explores findings from Altman Vilandrie & Co.’s annual consumer video survey, including consumer preferences for specific programs, interest in live sports, video watching through social media, willingness to pay, problems with streaming, account sharing and piracy, and other areas of critical importance to our industry. It includes a panel discussion featuring top executives from the TV industry.

Even companies that are not yet actively operating on a microservices architecture are looking for vendors who at least have a strategy to cater to it for the future. This session examines the core benefits (including redundancy, dev ops, scalability, and self-healing), the different approaches (including containerization and orchestration via Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesos, as well as native microservices models like Erlang), and the complexities of migrating a generic architecture to a microservices architecture.

As video streaming has grown, so too has piracy. Industry sources estimate that as many as 10% of broadband subscribers pirate live streams through technologies like Kodi boxes that are sold online from countries where it is difficult to litigate or police copyright violations. So how can you protect live streaming content? This session explores various methods and technologies in use by some of today's biggest streaming companies to mitigate stream piracy and protect live content.

According to an IAB study, more than half of online viewers prefer free ad-supported content to pay-per-view or subscription, and the best way to reach them is with server-side ad insertion (SSAI). SSAI goes undetected by ad blockers, supports personalization, and provides additional revenue for broadcast content that’s also delivered over-the-top. Come hear how this versatile technology used for live broadcast is now starting to see adoption for VOD and livelinear. If you're delivering ad supported content, you won't want to miss this session.

Get up-to-speed on the latest OTT platforms and enabling technologies. Details announced soon!

In April, Sky Italia became the first Sky subsidiary to offer its full pay TV service including full HD live sport to the same set top boxes over unmanaged IP, while maintaining ARPU. The service has performed well whilst other OTT services struggle with QoS problems. This session will explain how PERSEUS Plus made this possible and compare the readiness of codecs (HEVC, AV1, PERSEUS) to transform the business viability of all streaming services in the US and beyond?

What do you want to do with your data? For too long, the industry has framed data as a means to an end—collect data, compute analytics, interpret, decide, and react. Today, we propose a new mentality: data as an end in itself. Join our panel as we dive deep into the questions video distributors need to ask in order to build a real-time feedback loop to guide their distribution strategies: How does data latency influence its usefulness? What can distributors do to unify their disjointed datasets and systems? What are some examples of automated processes already employed by companies today, and what kind of data infrastructure will it take to develop more automated processes within the video technology stack going forward?

In February 2018, Sky News set out to achieve an ambitious objective: Deliver the Royal Wedding as the world’s first live machine learning viewer experience at scale. Sky News wanted to give viewers the ability to identify and learn more about celebrities in an automated fashion in near real time—all while lacking the official guest list invite. The Sky News Royal Wedding: Who's Who app—built in collaboration with Amazon Web Services, GrayMeta, and UI Centric, and using Amazon Rekognition—allowed Sky News viewers to watch real-time updates of celebrity wedding guests as they entered St. George Chapel. Learn about the workflow and how it can be applied to sports, government, and other future events.

Using real production data from major OTT TV operators to analyze the effect of user interface personalization on engagement KPIs, this presentation busts some of the myths surrounding viewer engagement. Does changing the position of a TV series or movie in the user interface affect views, ratings, and engagement? Does the order in which carousels are presented in the UI affect their conversion rate? Can we use machine learning to isolate clusters of users that respond to UI personalization from those who are indifferent?

Session time changed to 11:30am.