As video resolutions increase and target playback platforms multiply, video producers must leave their H.264/HLS/HDS comfort zone and expand into HEVC, VP9, AV1, and MPEG-DASH. This workshop is divided into multiple segments by target platform to teach you the applicable standards and best strategies for delivering live and VODadaptive video to viewers on that platform, both with and without DRM. Along the way, attendees learn options for producing H.264, HEVC, VP9, and AV1; the status of standards such as the Media Source Extensions (MSE) and Encrypted Media Extensions (EME); and how and when to utilize them. Attendees walk away knowing the technical requirements for delivering to all key platforms and the best practices for making it happen.

This workshop teaches you how to use and configure the essential (and purposely redundant) components of a live streaming event system. Demonstrations feature hardware from various vendors including cameras, H.264 encoders/streamers, video mixers, video signal conversion, recorders, and more. The workshop also discusses how to best deploy the live stream to your audience: Do you utilize free social media outlets, work with a premium third-party streaming service, or build your own live streaming infrastructure? Whether it’s multi-camera switching, dedicated hardware encoders, hardware and software mixers, OBS, or FFmpeg roulette, learn how to approach different live scenarios to fit the budget you have. And perhaps more importantly, learn how to properly formulate a budget to avoid any common pitfalls in the process.

Videocentric artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have come a long way over the last couple years. You can now leverage AI to enhance your video discoverability, automatically generate transcripts and translations, and even look for specific faces within your live surveillance streams. The key to harnessing this power is to learn to code against the numerous video AI APIs that are out there. During this workshop, attendees are taken step-by-step through coding walkthroughs, resulting in several video AI reference applications. Attendees walk away with completed applications and an understanding of how to harness the power of AI in their media processing pipelines!

Apple’s support for HEVC in HLS is a groundbreaking event that opens up hundreds of millions of HEVC capable players. If supporting this spec is on your short-term development schedule, check out this workshop. The workshop starts by reviewing the new spec and sharing playback details, such as how well HEVC plays on hardware supported and non-hardware supported devices. Then it focuses on the HEVC codec itself, describing encoding options, royalty costs, and other implementation details. Learn how to create the necessary files and manifest files for mixed H.264/HEVC encoding ladders and finish with a look at how to produce live content compatible with the new specification.

Encoding workflows for both small and medium-sized businesses and the enterprise can utilize powerful and free open source options, such as FFmpeg, which appeal to startups and established businesses for the flexibility in customization that it offers. The presentation explores extended encoding options for FFmpeg including libx264 (AVC/H.264) and libx265 (HEVC/H.265) to maximize compatibility with a wide range of mobile and desktop browsers, as well as streaming media servers. Learn how to use filter effects, proportional crop/resize options, and mapping functions. Harness the power of FFmpeg in your next encoding pipeline upgrade!

As more and more TV consumers cut the cord, over-the-top (OTT) is increasingly becoming America’s favorite new way to watch television. Now more than ever, OTT providers have a unique advantage in engaging targeted audiences, personalizing their experiences, and last but definitely not least, monetizing their service. In this presentation, Sling TV President Warren Schlichting will dive into Sling TV’s overall strategy of prioritizing a consumer-based experience and how it pays off.

Who is really cutting the video cord? What is the impact on virtual multichannel video services? What is the consumer appetite for subscription VOD services? How is mobile video viewing changing both in and out of home? How are consumers viewing OTT video in the living room? A presentation of Kagan data from consumer insights surveys will discuss those questions and more.

Immersive VR is a powerful tool for storytelling and creating emotional engagement with customers when selling complex, futuristic visions of products and enterprises. So VR needs to be incorporated when trying to secure stakeholder buy-in and alignment where human imagination can be limited and biases are strong. The key is to know how to design the immersive experience to really connect with the viewer. Further, VR can also be a tool for rapid iterative product development and concept/viability design testing. It’s definitely here to stay, and this session provides examples of how to make it work for you.

Traditionally, streaming and videoconferencing have been deployed as two separate solutions, but companies are realizing that integrating these solutions provides tremendous value. This trend is increasing as new platforms such as Slack, Cisco Spark, and Microsoft Teams are taking off. Learn how organizations leverage existing videoconferencing infrastructure as production studios when integrated with a video streaming system, how video conferencing allows presenters in multiple locations to participate jointly in webcasts, and how streaming solutions can be budgeted as part of a larger video communications budget.

Using video as a training tool both inside and outside the classroom is no longer just an option, but rather table stakes for any educational institution. The tools and processes for creating, managing, and delivering live and on-demand content keep evolving, getting easier to use, and providing more functionality. In the midst of this cultural and technical change, what are some of the best practices among schools that have been successful? Our education panelists tell you what works, recommend crawl-walk-run implementation steps, and share their lessons learned.

With the right media architecture, viewers and content producers alike can save time on content discovery. Automating the discovery process frees up viewers to spend more time consuming; and it gives producers more time to create content for those viewers to find. This panel examines the business decisions and impacts of AI to streaming applications; the ways in which consumers will get content faster, more seamlessly and without extensive searching; and the technical requirements to build smarter, AI-powered streaming applications.

Choosing the number of streams in an adaptive group and configuring them is usually a subjective, touchy-feely exercise, with no way to really gauge the effectiveness and efficiency of the streams. However, by measuring stream quality via metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, and VQM, you can precisely assess the quality delivered by each stream and its relevancy to the adaptive group. This presentation identifies several key objective quality metrics, teaches how to apply them, and provides an objective framework for analyzing which streams are absolutely required in your adaptive group and their optimal configuration.

Given the fractured delivery landscape faced by most video distributors, few develop their players from scratch. Rather, most distributors choose from an array of off-the-shelf (OTS) players from vendors like Bitmovin, JW Player, OpenTelly, and Flowplayer or from open-source options such as Shaka Player or Video.js. This session covers the factors you should consider when evaluating and selecting the best OTS player for your video stack and, in particular, when and how open source players provide the best alternative.

With the speed of technology today, one of the most important parts of software is adaptability. By taking control of your own encoding and packaging, you can greatly reduce cost and maintain high adaptability and agility to meet your needs now and in the future. When working with cloud encoding, there are several transcoding and packaging options, and the APIs for these options will change over time. We talk about how to build a more dynamic cloud encoder that can use the best tool for a specific job by decoupling the tools from the core application, as well as how to mix and match multiple operations concurrently on a single encoding task. Operations include WebVTT and AAC sidecar manifests, DASH assets, metadata, video quality, and stream muxing/demuxing. This session covers some of the strategies we’ve used to handle dynamic cloud encoding and packaging for live and VOD delivery.

Ensuring a great user experience is key to retaining customers and growing market share. This session explores points along video workflows that are ideal for quality checks, including various types of monitoring from ingest to playout, and real-world examples of operational benefits of each. This discussion covers the impact of machine learning on improving accuracy of monitoring and the importance of getting ad insertion right.

The SRT video transport protocol enables the delivery of secure, high-quality, and low-latency video across the public internet. This presentation will explore the SRT protocol and its open source software stack, explaining how it works and how it accounts for latency, packet loss recovery, jitter, security, firewall traversal, and bandwidth optimization. It will also provide data on real-world network behavior, as well as several examples of SRT’s performance in existing live video workflows.

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?

Developing for and supporting live streaming events like the Super Bowl, the Olympics, and the World Cup require several must-have tools for monitoring, debugging, and identifying and solving problems quickly and effectively. These tools include freeware, open-source solutions, paid products, and some custom tools that RealEyes has developed and shares with the community. This session also discusses some of the “gotchas” and key issues to look for when dealing with major events.

The Alliance for Open Media’s (AOMedia) AV1 codec launched with much ballyhoo at NAB in April 2018, but also with many questions about comparative quality, encoding time, and when the first streams will be deployed by actual services. In this session, AOMedia member Netflix details its comparative results, as well as how and when AV1 was/will be deployed to Netflix viewers.

As more video distribution and consumption mechanisms come online, detailed playback metrics are becoming a video engineer’s go-to tool for validation of platform quality and health. But when quality of experience is key, how can these metrics be used in a way to create timely and actionable solutions to issues? In this presentation, the lead video playback engineer at Vimeo discusses some real-world use cases where utilizing detailed playback metrics led to quickly identifying and solving complex video playback issues.

In this panel discussion, industry experts look at how machine learning is used in video quality measurement, per-title encoding, ABR algorithms, delivery optimization, and more. We include realworld publisher stories of machine learning in action, focused on the actual impact to end users. Attendees get a glimpse of the cutting edge of video technology and take away tactics they can use immediately.

Companies on the cutting edge of video engineering and development share the latest technologies that are pushing the industry forward. Details announced soon!

At Twitch, we have been studying how to move from a single codec (H.264) to multiple codecs to provide our viewers the optimal viewing experience. In this session, we will share our findings about VP9’s suitability for live streaming and the technical and industrial challenges such move involves. We will cover VP9 encoding performance, device and player support, and provide an overview of how the transcoding platform need to change to enable VP9 encoding and delivery at scale. Speaker: Tarek Amara, Senior Video Specialist, Twitch TV/Amazon

Building your audience for a sports broadcast is as important as producing quality content, and it’s not as simple as “Stream it, and they will come.” Learn some of the best practices for identifying, reaching, and growing your audiences from industry leaders in network broadcasting, college, and high school sports.

The serial digital interface (SDI) has been the standard for many years, but that’s changing. Internet protocol (IP) video is rapidly displacing the trusty SDI cable with Ethernet, giving producers considerably more flexibility when they design the workflow for their broadcast. Learn from the pioneers of IP video how you can move your broadcasts into the IP world.

Every major network and sports league knows that you must have a solid social strategy to ensure maximum reach for their broadcasts. Whether you’re delivering Major League Baseball, high school soccer, or anything in between, you can learn tips, tricks, and best practices from the top social sites, including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

When it comes to live broadcasting, it doesn't matter how great your show looks if no one can see it. Bonded cellular transmission is rapidly replacing traditional satellite and microwave as the preferred workflow to get your broadcast back to the studio or out to the world. This technology is also being leveraged to save travel costs by transmitting multiple cameras back to a centralized studio. This panel covers all aspects of adding bonded cellular transmission to your sports broadcasting workflow.

Go behind the scenes at some of the biggest sports streaming events and learn about the technologies that made them happen. Details announced soon!

Learn how sports broadcasters can maximize the revenues from their rights ownership for sports leagues. Today, technology has emerged to allow sports broadcasters to use one- or two-person production crews to create more high quality sports content at lower costs for more platforms.

It’s not always about how many eyeballs are on your streams. Sometimes you just need the right audience and the right platform to monetize live shows. But who is willing to pay? Social media can boost total viewer numbers, but social monetization is still taking shape. Premium content paired with a premium experience can lead to a loyal viewership and more targeted native and branded content advertisers. This group of innovators shares their stories and discusses the successes and failures in monetizing live video.

Learn how to build a toolbox for successful streaming, no matter what constraints or timelines you may face. Productions are often put together in days or even several hours. With shrinking budgets and shifting quality expectations, productions have to be more nimble and cost-effective than ever before. Still, you never know what’s coming until the phone rings. With change being the one certainty, how can you prepare for what’s next? This panel discusses spinning up a show quickly and making sure it goes off without a hitch!

Take your production off-site and online, as this panel talks about solutions for production in the cloud. No longer is it necessary to own every piece of hardware and software needed to produce professional live shows. Redundancy, automation, switching, and graphics can now be done online rather than on location. Sending to multiple destinations, adding overlays, and interactive elements are just some of the options available to today’s live streamers. Learn how to make live streaming easier and more cost effective by leveraging today’s cloud solutions.

The next generation of live streaming applications is bringing in the new breed of OTT networks. No matter how many options there are, viewers just seem to want more content. Today’s audiences are becoming an active part of the live experience. Interacting with hosts and chatting in the comments can often be just as entertaining as the show itself. Many OTT applications are finding interactivity and low latency more of a requirement than a wish-list item. Today’s OTT players are reimagining what it means to be a platform.

Leaders in live streaming present case studies that take you behind the scenes of some of the industry’s biggest success stories. Details announced soon!

When it comes to live video, it’s hard to deliver an actual, real live streaming experience, mainly because of latency. Chunked CMAF comes with a low latency mode, allowing a significant reduction of the end-to-end latency. In this presentation we will explore this standard and how it can be leveraged to deliver a low latency streaming experience. Attend this session for your chance to win: Paper notebooks for all attendees ($6 value each)

Discover processes and methodologies to build and launch high-performing, custom OTT channels across all device platforms. GlobalLogic shares its experience developing OTT channels and iOS/Android mobile applications for some of the leading media brands. Attendees can also win a streaming stick from our partner, Roku! Attend this session for your chance to win: Roku Streaming Stick + devices ($69.99 value, 3 winners)

Many of today’s live video encoding solutions require extensive compute resources, limiting the ability of live streaming business models to economically scale. This session will introduce a new real-time video encoding solution, combining the performance of System-on-Chip (SoC) encoding, with innovations from NVMe-based cloud infrastructure, which together provides an economical and high quality solution to deliver encoding at scale for live video streaming. Attend this session for your chance to win: Bose QuietComfort 35 Wireless, Noise-Cancelling, Headphones ($349.95 value)

Over The Top streaming poses challenges while offering growth opportunities to companies in the Media and Entertainment industry. Voluminous content, wide variety in audience across different geographies, and localized regulations necessitate video providers to look for comprehensive and scalable classification, QC, and monitoring solutions. There is a growing number of tools and products available to help manage media - from content preparation to delivery. In this session we will look at what type of solutions and technologies are required to assure quality and compliance for next-generation streaming media workflow. Attend this session for your chance to win: Google Home Hub ($149 value)

Streaming media is constantly evolving, solving for new use cases through advances in technology. The demand for interactivity is currently driving the increased adoption of live streaming, and specifically the need for lower latency: that is, a shorter delay between when live content is captured and when it appears on a user’s screen. In this session, we’ll have an engaging conversation about what latency is and why it exists; the context for where latency matters; a brief history of latency reduction; and why innovation is required to truly get closer to real-time. Attend this session for your chance to win:$200 Amazon gift card

Sending live video from location over IP presents certain challenges including bandwidth limitation, latency, and packet loss. This session explains error correction (QoS), connections bonding, and other techniques to assure professional video quality and uninterrupted delivery. The discussion will cover hardware and software products for successful video over IP delivery to social networks and local cable channels. Attend this session for your chance to win:JVC Wireless Noise Cancelling Over Ear Headphones ($129.95 value)

The amount of processing needed to run video workloads is growing rapidly. This stems from higher resolutions, higher frames rates, migration to higher bit-depths, and newer more complex codecs like VP9, HEVC and AV1. Considering all of these factors, the industry is facing 10-50x higher demand on its infrastructure compute needs for video workloads. This is happening while the volume of live video streams that require processing is growing exponentially. This session will explore the value proposition of adaptable video acceleration. 

It has been established that the need for acceleration for video workloads is becoming crucial from an operational point-of-view. In this presentation we will show how Xilinx All Programmable FPGAs are the perfect solution to accelerate these workloads. FPGAs offer full flexibility and configurability, while maintaining substantial performance density and performance per watt increases over non-accelerated solutions. In this session we will provide examples of how an FPGA can be programmed through regular C/C++ languages and how video encode acceleration is established. We will show benchmark comparisons of alternative implementations and examples of how Xilinx’s accelerated video transcoding ecosystem plugs seamlessly and transparently into common video frameworks like FFmpeg.

Service providers face the technical challenge of onboarding incoming transport streams from multiple providers across the globe. For delivery on unified OTT platforms, manipulation and transcoding of transport streams requires complex and overlapping workflows to accommodate multiple formats, necessitating Service Providers to implement multiple time consuming and hardware intensive workflows. Evertz’ MediaFlow solution enables a single, integrated COTS IP workflow for all incoming transport streams. The MediaFlow solution, enables agile operational workflows associated with onboarding, normalizing and transcoding of incoming live production transport streams and 24/7 onboarding of channels for use in over-the-top (OTT) applications. Ingest, transcoding, capture and global retransmission can seamlessly be done anywhere in the world. Attend this session for your chance to win: Evertz Golf shirt and tumbler

Delivering true realtime global online streaming requires a new approach. This session will cover ways to deliver broadcast quality low-latency live streams, including the ability for viewers to watch live video with less than one second of latency on standard web browsers—without special plug-ins. In addition, we will discuss how to integrate live video and interactive data to open up new workflows in sports, gaming, auctions, and more and make live viewing a more interactive social experience. Attend this session for your chance to win: GoPro HERO5 Session ($200 value)

Grab a drink and visit with our exhibitors in a laidback atmosphere.

Join us for a fun night on the lawn as you network with industry peers while enjoying a selection of good brews and eats. Open to all attendees, speakers, and vendors.

Celebrate the winners of the 11th annual Streaming Media Magazine Readers’ Choice Awards. Nominations are open. Find out more here!

Presented by one of the architects of HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), this session explores the latest features of HLS and shows how they advance the delivery of compelling media experiences to global audiences.

Streaming technologies disrupted our ideas of how consumers tune in, listen, and watch, and yet we are still far from perfect in terms of distribution, access, and profitability for content creators. These business models are now again ripe for disruption. This talk examines some of the emerging business models that have embraced blockchain technologies, how blockchain satisfies challenges for media, and how to spur growth and further media consumption with greater control.

While CDN prices have never been lower, OTT delivery continues to weigh heavily on broadcasters’ budgets. On the eve of the zettabyte era, growing audiences, higher resolutions and more immersive video experiences bring both technical and business challenges. This panel explores how content publishers are working to scale their infrastructure to growing audiences while getting the best quality for their money. We look at optimization efforts throughout the delivery workflow, with a special emphasis on CDN, multi-CDN, mesh network, multicast, and in-house delivery solutions.

While video gets most of the attention, streaming audio is more established and likely even more popular. Timed to coincide with a two-part feature in Streaming Media magazine celebrating the 25th anniversary of internet radio, this panel talks about where the audio and radio streaming market is heading and how publishers can successfully monetize internet radio, surveying the technologies that have made internet radio so successful and will carry it into the future.

In a few clicks, viewers have more video choice than ever before, and the precise location of the viewer has serious implications. Where previously geo-gating might have been enough, now customers have many more locations and methods to view content. Buying or renting? Mobile, desktop, or connected TV? Streaming or downloadable? SD or HD? AVOD, TVOD, or SVOD? Are there content blackout rights? Subtitles or dubbed? This session explores the complicated world of content rights and licensing, as well as discusses ways publishers can manage it.

VMAF (Video Multi-Assessment Fusion) is a quality metric that combines human vision modeling with machine learning. It demonstrates high correlation to human perception and gives a score that is consistent across content. VMAF was released on Github in 2016 and has had considerable updates since that time. This talk focuses on the latest VMAF improvements and enrichments, such as speed optimization, accurate models to predict mobile and 4K TV viewing conditions, and adding a confidence interval to quantify the level of confidence in the quality prediction. In addition, we discuss VMAF use cases and look at the VMAF road map for the near future.

Given the now-certain “end of life” date for Flash, you need to be ready for a Flash-less world. For those who deliver live video within a web browser, HTML5 has had plenty of time to play catch-up and surpass Flash capabilities—or has it? In this session, learn which transport technologies from HTTP, WebRTC, RTSP, and even RTMP work best, when to use them, and where to put your development dollars for maximum return.

A number of cloud providers have launched video-centric services to gain all manner of AI/machine learning-based insights and autogenerated sidecar information on your video assets. This session compares and contrasts Microsoft Azure Video Indexer, IBM’s Watson Media, AWS Rekognition, and Google Cloud Video Intelligence. We cover the basics and give you an unbiased look into which service will be the best bet for your needs. Whether it’s speech-to-text, object recognition, scene detection, or even speech sentiment, there’s a service out there for you. Let’s find it.

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) bring a new tool to any publisher's belt, allowing them to more easily deliver the power of native apps through the web. Easy to install and bringing advanced features compared to normal web apps, PWAs open up new business cases and possibilities to the media industry. This presentation looks at the advantages of PWAs and how they can best be leveraged to unlock their full potential.

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. 

The Common Media Application Format (CMAF) has the potential to be the converged media container for HLS, DASH, and other ABR formats to follow. But how soon can companies start to leverage this format and in what ways? This presentation provides an overview of the spec, the benefits, and presents some short case studies that describe how companies are using CMAF today.

Companies on the cutting edge of video engineering and development share the latest technologies that are pushing the industry forward. Details announced soon!

While codecs have been defined for a wide array of video applications, Adaptive Bit Rate characteristics enable significant further performance and quality gains. This session identifies enhancements such as deep profile re-use and fast latency-free live per-scene intelligence to further improve performance and quality in both existing as well as next generation codecs.

HLS and MPEG-DASH are the current standards for HTTP-based live streaming, but these designs are inherently slow and add delays to live feeds. Sub-second latency is critical for scenarios such as gambling, auctions, interactive communications, VR, sports, and gaming. WebRTC is touted for its sub-second latency but couldn’t scale to the volume needed by CDNs and couldn’t reach Apple devices. In this session, learn about a novel WebRTC-based solution that would match current CDNs in terms of reach (all devices), quality, cost, and scale, while providing sub-500 milliseconds latency.

Perhaps one of the more popular use cases for ultra-low latency (ULL) streaming is the live trivia space. With restricted targets that only include smartphones and leave browser dependencies behind, low latency game producers can choose from a range of SDKs for native app streaming capabilities. In this session, learn more about the critical elements needed to successfully pull off predictable and regular broadcasts with cloud-based services.

Learn how live video fits into your content strategy and how brands and publishers are using live video to reach their audiences. In a mobile-first, socially driven landscape, live streaming can be the best way to connect products with experiences. Finding the right approach and the right partners, can enable you to create live content at scale. This panel discusses what it takes to reach your audience wherever they may be and how to deliver a successful marketing campaign through live streaming.

Leaders in live streaming present case studies that take you behind the scenes of some of the industry’s biggest success stories. Details announced soon!

Captions continue to expand well beyond traditional television, reaching new audiences every day via screens, tablets, and smartphones. With an hour of video uploaded to YouTube every second, and 85% of Facebook video viewed without sound, companies have taken notice as content providers seek every competitive edge in the battle for viewership. Accessible online video is the key to reaching, and expanding, audiences. John Capobianco explains the many approaches to accessible live-streamed media.

Today’s solo streamers can stream every minute of their lives and form deep connections with their fans. Many events and series seek out social influencers to join in, star, or even host in an attempt to build off their personal following. It’s important to find someone that fits the brand and culture so naturally. Learn how to leverage the talent and the following of a solo streamer, as well as what it means to be always-on with sometimes multiple live appearances in a single day.

Learn how to approach a live production from both the creative and technical sides, as this panel dives deep into what it means to be a live producer. Successful live shows start with a solid plan, but they’re only as good as their final result. Producers balance stakeholder demands with technical concerns in order to deliver on time and on budget. Learn from live producers as they talk about how they prepare, document, and deliver a live show.

An objective picture quality measurement is an extremely useful tool in the streaming video engineer’s toolbox, to assist making encoding and network optimizations that improve the viewer’s experience. Traditional PQ measurements have required a reference video from which a comparison measurement can be made. This presentation describes a machine learning algorithm that produces a model from which a non-reference measurement can be made in real-time.

Trivia Quiz Shows, Live Auctions, iGaming, eSports, Webcastings… Interactive live streaming use cases are definitely taking off. Are you prepared to engage your global audience on any device? In this session, Oliver Lietz, nanocosmos CEO, will discuss the best practices in Interactive Live Streaming and describe to you how nanoStream Cloud and H5Live Player will deliver your live streams in any HTML5 browser incl. Safari on iOS with ultra-low-latency around the world! Attend this session for your chance to win:nanoStream Cloud Medium Package for 1 month ($580 value)

The TV industry’s losses from password sharing are expected to rise to nearly $10 billion by 2021, and one-third of all viewers already admit to using someone else’s login for TV viewing. Learn how to curb password sharing with new authentication services like device management and concurrency monitoring. Attend this session for your chance to win: Apple TV 4K, 64GB ($199 value)

Personalization has become crucial to building and retaining viewership. The need for personalization impacts many elements of the video distribution and delivery system, including content management, video advertising, content search and discovery, session management, and UX/UI design. In this session, Mark will walk through what video personalization means today, and how the integration of technologies like AI could change tomorrow’s personalized viewer experience. Attend this session for your chance to win: Xiaomi Mi 4K HDR streaming box ($99 value)

The traditional rules of the road for implementing business streaming solutions are changing. Alternatives are emerging to the market’s time-tested approach of implementing single end-to-end streaming platforms. It’s a market evolution that promises more flexibility in implementing cost-effective video solutions that are better suited to addressing organization’s communications objectives.

In a short time period, we’ve seen a wide range of live streaming platforms and markets emerge – social media (i.e. Facebook and Youtube Live), eSports, church services, and more. Providing new tools for this essential technology, Panasonic presents its full lineup of network enabled PTZ cameras, controllers, and our new streaming switcher, utilizing NewTek NDI technology.

This session will discuss how to optimize your video services for today, and the future. We'll discuss how you can leverage Data and Machine Learning across the content creation, distribution and monetization workflows. Also, learn about tools that help you to create a personalized experience for viewers, delivered in a seamless cross platform experience.

With 2.52 billion ‘Gen Z’ers wielding an increasing amount of purchasing power, it is vital for businesses to recognize and study their habits, values and beliefs. YouTube thrives as the number one brand for this upcoming generation, but how do they help companies reach a mobile generation using video? In this session Tom Broxton will discuss how YouTube uses ads to reach a generation who relies on brands and video to shape their world. 

ATTENTION ALL ATTENDEES: Attend the Wrap-up Session for your chance to win a Blackmagic Web Presenter with Teranex Mini Smart Panel (Value $580). Must be present to win! Learn more.