Programming in UHD has gone up tenfold, although only a relatively small amount is still available.  More media enterprises are coming online with UHD broadcasts and standards have arrived to a certain degree, with initial support for content and devices. But we are still far from pervasive UHD-ready facilities and end-to-end workflows. This session will cut through the hype to look at what realistically can be accomplished in UHD today and experiences thus far in deploying UHD. The panelists also will cast an eye to the future, with discussion around topics such as live UHD event production and streaming and the potential for high dynamic range (HDR).

This session explores the current status of HEVC, including an update on the proposed royalty terms and status of High Dynamic Range Specifications, and the status of competitive technologies such as PERSEUS, VP9, and the codec from the Alliance for Open Media. The presentation then examines who’s using HEVC in 2016 and for which type of applications. The session concludes by presenting the key similarities and differences between H.264 and H.265, and techniques for optimizing the quality of HEVC encoding, particularly for those using the x265 codec.

Using operational streaming analytics to monitor and support streaming media deployments is as important as—and in many cases more mission critical than—just deploying an in-player streaming analytics solution. In-player and last mile solutions focus on issues as they affect the customers, which is often too late and does little to improve customer retention and minimise churn. Operational streaming analytics alert content distributors and live streaming solution providers to delivery problems as they happen and provide immediate solution responses, before they become end user issues.

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As a content creator or service provider, value in your application is determined by how quickly and easily the digital assets you create are delivered to your audience. A poor end-user experience causes lost viewers; while spending too much on infrastructure can quickly deplete capital. Learn how to solve these issues with object storage that combines massively scalable, searchable storage with direct HTTP access to radically simplify content storage and delivery infrastructure while reducing costs.

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Led by the popularity of video games, virtual reality (VR) will, over the next several years, become a pop cultural phenomenon. It has few rivals in terms of its potential to provide a low-cost, portable, and yet highly immersive experience. Of course, none of this means that VR’s future as a mainstream platform is certain. This session addresses key questions including these: When will there be a meaningful market for VR video? How will marketers and advertisers influence this new medium? How should operators and networks (linear or on-demand) view the potential of VR? To what extent will VR impact the viewing of TV and movies?

Thanks to their experience serving over 1500 production houses as customers in 50 countries, VideoStitch, the pioneer in live VR video production, has developed an integrated solution to capture, stitch, and live stream VR content.

As video production and consumption increases within global enterprises, it has become imperative for IT departments to assess whether or not their networks are adaptable and controllable enough to accommodate the additional load and complexity. This presentation will discuss the latest network delivery technologies available, with a focus on those that best support the future evolution of video within the enterprise, including software-defined enterprise content delivery network (SD ECDN) technology, opportunistic multicast, and Web RTC.

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In attempts to facilitate new modes of teaching, such as online and flipped classrooms, the behind-the-scenes process of building a course has quickly changed. On-demand video portals, recording studios, and web-conference sessions are working their way into many universities. This session explores the workflow universities have developed to deliver their online and flipped classes, along with the tech they use to make it possible. This session highlights what schools have found to be successful, efficient technologies and highlight lessons learned.

Whether you want to broadcast a company-wide meeting or new employee training, streaming it through your internal network saves on time, travel costs and resources. This session looks at real-world architectures being used for distributing streams to all screens within an enterprise setting. Are newer peer-to-peer (p2p) or multicast technologies part of the answer? How do you also reach remote and mobile workers? You’ll walk away with recommendations on achieving the best-possible quality and broadest audience reach, along with best practices and lessons learned. Join us for this information-packed session on building an internal streaming solution to fit your business needs.

Content owners and distributors increasingly focus more around the engagement around content, than pure consumption of any one piece of content. Unique views are no longer the most important metric around media consumption. Increasing engagement with your audience is paramount to the success of the content business. What are big media companies doing to increase engagement from seconds into minutes and hours? What impact does engagement have upon content strategy? Join us for this panel produced by the Television Academy as we discuss and share valuable insights around the business of content engagement.

This panel is presented by the Interactive Media Peer Group of the Television Academy

Touchdown! tweets your friend, but you haven't seen a completion yet watching the big game on your tablet. That's because your video stream has fallen behind clock time. This can be due to a number of factors that affect the timing of live video streams. Content processing, content delivery, buffering, decryption, decoding and other factors can cause video streams to get behind clock time. This panel will offer an insightful look at the factors that can affect the timing of streaming of live video. Learn how can you get video delivered effectively over the Internet and other operator's networks without incurring significant delay. You'll also hear about integrating video with social media and learn how to give your viewers a consistent user experience.

This panel discusses the latest developments in DASH, both in standardization as well as consortia adoption, particularly new developments in MPEG, DASH-IF, ATSC 3.0, and the CTA GIVE projects. The panelists talk about these new developments, recent DASH commercial deployments, challenges and lesson learns from previous ones, and how the streaming industry is evolving around DASH deployments.

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 session 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.

Lately we’re seeing the rise of brand integration as a means to help fund content creation. Brands now have their own successful production studios, and companies like Yahoo have launched brand-integrated video series. This session will discuss what these and other content creators are doing to gain great audience traction with sponsored digital projects. Hear from original content leaders how brands can best integrate with entertaining video programming to tell a compelling story, proven strategies and partnerships to broaden audience reach, and ultimately how to bring together the consumer, brand, platform and idea to create a formula that works best.

Competition for viewers in the fast growing OTT market is fierce, so providers must seek ways to improve their OTT experience. But how can they make their platforms bigger, badder, and better to not only attract new subscribers but retain them? We’ll discuss this question as well as market trends, viewing behaviors, and habits that are helping to shape OTT offerings.

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Delivering seamless content experiences to consumers is no easy task, particularly if you're attempting to stream content live. While CDN is a key part of the solution, it's not the only piece of the puzzle that you to consider when building a robust, highly agile, and high-performing streaming platform. In this track, you will learn the secrets to building and delivering a high-quality content experience to end users in multiple regions, at scale.

As consumers continue to view content on multiple devices, cut the cord, binge TV and seek new ways to watch, a Great OTT Migration is afoot among the largest providers around the globe. This panel will discuss the hurdles in front of the Great OTT Migration, everything from tech behemoths bidding for sports streaming rights, costs, publishers phasing into broadcasters, technical hurdles, meeting consumer expectations, and a general debate about what will decide the winners from the losers.