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, 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 VOD adaptive 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.

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. Attendees learn how to use filter effects, proportional crop/resize options, and mapping functions. Harness the power of FFmpeg in your next encoding pipeline upgrade!

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, like how well HEVC plays on hardware supported and nonhardware 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.

This workshop is hands-on and requires the use of an attendee-provided laptop. Laptops will not be provided.

This workshop teaches you how to use and configure the essential (and purposely redundant) components of a live streaming event system. Demonstrations include 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, you learn how to approach different live scenarios to fit the budget you have. And perhaps more importantly, you learn how to properly formulate a budget to avoid any common pitfalls in the process.

In this hands-on lab, you will learn how to prepare, cook and serve an FPGA optimized video kernel. Using a large multi-tap video filter we will demonstrate how you can speed up the cooking time by 10x versus a CPU. For Dessert we will also show you how to generate, profile and optimize an FFmpeg plug-in for your multi-tap filter.  By the end any software engineer will be comfortable generating a simple video function, be able to demonstrate significant acceleration versus traditional software implementation and understand how to generate the corresponding FFmpeg plug-in.

This free workshop is presented by Xilinix, Inc. and attendance is limited. Please note that access to this workshop is not part of any registration pass type that includes Streaming Media University. Workshop is hands-on and requires the use of an attendee provided laptop. Laptops will not be provided by Show Management or the sponsoring company.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Acceptance to this free workshop is subject to qualifying factors and Show Management and/or the workshop Sponsor reserves the right to deny registration at their sole discretion. Acceptance to this workshop doesn't not include access to any other conference events (including the VIP Mixer, regular conference sessions, or the exhibit hall). These events must be registered and paid for separately.

Two years since global rollout, Facebook Live’s product manager shares a look back at the way Live has brought people and communities together via key innovations, and how the interactivity of Live is inspiring new video experiences for people and publishers on Facebook.

Achieving ubiquity in today’s fragmented market is a race against time and resource limitations. Providers must write apps for hundreds of variations of connected devices 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 brings 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.

Online video audiences are fickle. There’s so much content out there, from YouTube to Netflix to Hulu, that viewers have little loyalty to any content provider. But keeping them attached to your service or content is critical to your bottom line. Thankfully, there are strategies you can employ that will help engage your audiences in ways that will keep them watching more, watching longer, and coming back day after day. In this session, attendees will learn about best practices for improving audience engagement with your online video content and how that ultimately affects your opportunities for monetization.

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 panelists tell you what works and recommend crawl-walk-run implementation steps.

While CDN prices have never been lower, OTT delivery continues to weigh heavily on broadcasters’ budgets. Growing audiences, higher resolutions, and more immersive video experiences bring both technical and business challenges at scale. This panel explores how content publishers are working to balance fixed revenue per subscriber models with the varying cost of delivery, while also getting the best quality for their money. This session looks at optimization efforts throughout the delivery workflow, with a special emphasis on CDN, multi-CDN, peer-to-peer, multicast, and in-house delivery solutions.

As video encoding moves to software operating on virtualized architectures across varying computing infrastructures, the complexities of evaluating a video encoder have never been greater. Attendees hear from service providers, encoding solution vendors, and the creator of the industry’s best-known quality measures, all discussing how video encoding engineers can ensure a successful evaluation, from video quality assessment to performance, content selection, and operational considerations.

Many content distributors and aggregators still use H.264 as their primary, if not exclusive, codec, but the bandwidth savings promised by newer, more powerful codecs are alluring. Those considering a switch must evaluate at least three options: HEVC, VP9, and AV1, which is being released in early 2018. 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.

4K has gotten most of the headlines, but there are other ways to improve the quality of your streaming video that have even more visual impact. This talk explores video colorimetry, ranging from video quality concepts to the latest trends in the industry: High Dynamic Range (HDR), Wide Color Gamut (WCG), and next-generation devices. Vimeo’s experience is used as a practical implementation example and showcases how new compression technologies are deployed for the benefit of creators and their audiences.

Companies are starting to feel pain and a sense of urgency as size of media content, number of devices consuming the content, and the need for rich metadata grow. They need centralized media workflow automation that can handle all processing, for all content, in all their clouds. During this session we review some rock-solid strategies for enhancing media asset management, from production to playback, in an efficient and automated fashion. Increase your library ingest throughput while decreasing the need for more hands on deck.

Live streaming should provide not just the same quality of experience as TV broadcasts, but even higher quality, with lower latency, and enable new live video use cases not possible with broadcast TV. Also critical is support of the myriad connected devices consumers use to view that content. In this session, learn about the pros and cons of various technologies on both the contribution and delivery side of lowlatency streaming, including small chunk size HLS/DASH, WebRTC, WebSockets, QUIC, SRT, and CMAF.

Artificial intelligence holds great promise for the media industry, and its use cases today are especially applicable across the content lifecycle. From content creation, production, and distribution to delivery and recommendation, AI is streamlining process and improving existing execution methods. In this session, panelists discuss how to leverage AI to enhance content value and performance, as well as unveil and maximize new opportunities for monetization.

The promise of artificial intelligence is undeniable—unprecedented personalization, efficiencies that reduce costs and increased revenue. This all works in on-demand video, but is there a role for AI in livestreaming linear channels? This case study from Ooyala and Zone.tv discusses how the two companies are working together to bring AI to TV to automate the curation of content in a first-of-its-kind, customizable, and highly personalized experience in a suite of linear TV channels.

Streaming video analytics have become mainstream for almost all OTT publishers, who have found the need to make the data and analytics available to operational and business teams, both in real time and actionable, increasingly important. The massive volume of data makes finding the signal in the noise very difficult for traditional reporting and alerting systems and workflows. Data-driven AI and machine learning techniques are increasingly being used to address these requirements. In this presentation we cover both the business/operational use cases and the algorithms used to solve these problems.

With social media algorithms constantly changing, it’s time for news publishers to regain control of their audiences. Using AI and machine learning, publishers can program contextually relevant and personalized content down to the viewer level on their owned-andoperated sites for both breaking news and day-to-day operations. IRIS. TV and Gannett demonstrate how AI is helping to provide prescriptive insights into audience engagement and fueling future content strategies and video distribution on owned-and-operated sites.

Personalization is one of the main focus areas of CMOs and CTOs across various industries, including media. This case study presents how Microsoft Research has spearheaded content personalization through the Azure Custom Decision Service using innovative online learning techniques founded in a very prominent area of machine learning called Reinforcement Learning, providing increased engagement for publishers.

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.

We are living a new era in live streaming, where ultra-low latency live playback on any device plays the most important role for audience engagement. Oliver Lietz, nanocosmos CEO, will explain how nanoStream Cloud with the integrated nanoStream H5Live Player will rock your interactive live streams on all HTML5 browsers. Go live around the world in 1 second!Attend this session for your chance to win: One month of Nanocosmos's medium nanoStream Cloud package ($499 value)

The ability to register, discover, and configure endpoint devices are all important aspects in the ongoing management of streams in live IP-based video transport solutions and complex post workflows. This becomes especially important for remote contribution scenarios where WAN and Cloud configurations are involved. However, to date, existing standards have paid little attention to the on-boarding and long-term management aspects of video over IP. Aspera will outline and demonstrate an architecture for stream management, device discovery and centralized device configuration using several standards based technologies. The goal is to enable a device to be shipped between locations and automatically “call home” to obtain its configuration from a central location such as a broadcast center—thus reducing or eliminating the need for manual intervention and skilled personnel onsite."

Video streaming is in transition towards the next generation of video codecs, offering to double the quality while lowering the required bandwidth. As the successor crown to the ubiquitous AVC/H.264 is still up for grabs, major content providers and device manufacturers are throwing their weights behind competing formats - HEVC/VP9/AV1 - leading to market fragmentation, specifically within web environments. To deal with this challenge, OTT services need to support multiple codecs in an efficient way. In this presentation, we will discuss how to evaluate the benefits and the tradeoffs of embracing these next generation compression technologies in your media workflow.Attend this session for your chance to win: Fitbit Versa Watch ($200 value)

For content owners, it is crucially important to have full control of their content in order to be efficiently monetized. One common loss of revenue is caused by piracy but there are different protection mechanisms that can protect your content. In this presentation we will explore practices and advancements which can simplify content protection.Attend this session and receive a: Notebook

LiveU’s Director of Channel Sales, George Klippel and Professional Services Engineer, Sebastian Alvarez-Ring demonstrate LiveU Solo, the company’s plug-and-play solution for streaming live to social media. See how easy it is to produce high-quality live content from anywhere using the Solo encoder with Solo Studio - Cloud Graphics, providing the ability to add lower thirds and logos to your social media streams. Attendees will walk away with a better understanding of how they can accomplish better mobile live streams without a large crew or investment.

Broadcasters around the world are streaming on Facebook Live, and more are using the Wowza ClearCaster to ensure stream success. Learn how the ClearCaster delivers unmatched reliability and broadcast quality, and how content creators, broadcasters, talent and producers are creating dynamic live content based on the audience’s Live Reactions. Attend this session for your chance to win: Insta360 ONE action camera ($299 value)

Learn what it takes to create target viewer quality based bitrate ladders for Live content and Video on Demand assets. Send the bits only when they are needed. Control viewer experience and efficiently stream a LIVE or VOD title with a ladder tailor-made to its specific characteristics and complexity.Attend this session for your chance to win: Streaming video gift card package ($200 value)

Think you know everything about IP video? Jon Landman, VP of Sales for Teradek, thinks otherwise. Join us for an in-depth discussion of the latest technologies in the IP video world and how Teradek products solve some of the key challenges broadcasters face. Specific topics will include HEVC, SRT, cloud platforms, and cellular bonding.

Today’s viewers are impatient. No longer do they sit on the couch and watch whatever is tossed at them. The provider who can anticipate viewer desires, and position the right content at the right time, has a far greater chance of keeping their viewers engaged - and monetizing that extended engagement. Join Kurt Michel to learn more about this increasingly important topic, including what “personalized video” is, and how video providers can position themselves to offer it.Attend this session for your chance to win:Fire TV with 4K Ultra HD and Alexa Voice Remote (Pendant Design) ($50 value)

OTT shouldn't just be an alternative to broadcast and cable—it needs to be an improvement. In addition to matching broadcast and cable video quality, it needs to offer viewers what broadcast and cable can't, things like interactivity, personalized advertising, engaging user interfaces, and access anytime, anywhere. In this session, we will discuss how to modernize video distribution with Anvato and Google Cloud Machine Learning. Attend this session and receive a: Google Home ($129)

Combining the world’s biggest watch party with the natural fear of missing out, and social live video is today’s must-see TV. The new normal is the ability to watch everything everywhere, just as it happens and in real time. As more audiences cut the cord and viewing habits gravitate toward social media, the question to ask is: Are social platforms becoming the new cable? This panel looks beyond the white noise to talk social live programming and the media partnerships that shape how video is consumed.

With OTT viewership set to surpass cable in the next few years, it has never been more important to learn to navigate the challenges of delivering live linear programming. With the headaches of automation, ingest, encoding, metadata, and ad insertion, linear content strategy must also include a conversation of getting it there and keeping it running around the clock. This discussion centers around how to properly package and integrate live linear content for OTT distribution.

Streaming to multiple destinations has become the rule more than the exception. The increased availability of hardware encoders and cloud distribution solutions has made it easier than ever to stream to multiple viewing points and platforms. From white label websites and apps to platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Twitch, getting your content to appear all over the web has never been easier. This session discusses current technologies and the costs associated with the multidistribution of live video.

Packets, cache, edge, GO! How live is your live stream? Being behind is no fun. Live blogs, Twitter feeds, and the speed of television delivery can ruin the live experience for everyone online. From live events and entertainment to esports and online gaming, nearly every live stream can benefit from reducing latency. But with so many contributing factors, there’s only so much you can control. Don’t let roundtrip time keep you up at night. Learn why latency matters, from the masters of low-latency streaming.

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

Every piece of content tells two stories. There’s the story that’s told when a viewer presses “play,” and there’s the story that each piece of content tells about where it can be played. That second story is told within its metadata. This presentation will examine the myriad factors that must be addressed to deliver the right programing with associated information from machine to machine, and a mature content delivery strategy to account for each factor. It’s a critical, increasingly complex function, and today there are more factors to consider than ever before. Content providers must perform a flawless balancing act to optimize content monetization in an ocean of mobile screens, contractual limitations, live events, and targeted regional programming.

Discussion topics include:

- Alternate content feeds—not just for sports anymore

- Solving the complexity of terrestrial linear delivery

- SCTE 224: Modern metadata management

- Normalizing and automating linear metadata workflows

- Auditing and validating using SCTE 224

In the course of Chris Fetner’s 25 year media career he has been a cameraman, editor, producer and technology leader for some of the world’s most influential entertainment companies. In his role at Netflix he led the transformation of their 4K and HDR production pipelines. For this keynote, Chris has assembled a panel of creative & technology professionals to discuss bridging the technical divide between creative storytelling and innovations in consumer consumption on streaming platforms. It will be an exciting session covering hot production topics like HDR, 4K, immersive audio, and wider color gamut. Don’t miss this in-depth discussion about the challenges of bringing new technologies to the creative ecosystem.

Content creators, multichannel providers, cable networks, and broadcast stations are creating streaming options that reach consumers directly. These entrants face challenges navigating a market dominated by titans like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu. This session starts with a review of crucial data points from Altman Vilandrie & Co.’s latest Consumer Video Survey on device usage, subscription rates, content preferences, and more. Then, a panel of industry experts discuss strategies for how new and existing players can best reach more viewers.

DRM is a crucial part of any premium OTT service’s monetization strategy. In this session, representatives from studios and operators discuss how to identify your DRM needs and capabilities, how to complete the studio “DRM questionnaire,” how to deploy encryption and license delivery APIs, best practices for key management and authentication, why you need premium SDKs for device playback, and understanding unique aspects of Apple FairPlay.

360° streaming is a fantastic way to virtually experience live music and sporting events. But is it just a fad, as 3D TV turned out to be, or is it starting to enable and democratize some of the most immersive experiences possible for folks who can’t be there in person? Come find out how companies are using VR/360° today, and decide whether it’s a flash in the pan or here for the long-term.

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. Blockchain technology was initially lauded for its revolutionary way of handling financial transactions, but it can be used for far more. Ethereum, NEO, and other decentralized ledgers can make bigger waves in the future by enabling developers to build applications and platforms that bolster the sharing economy. 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.

NASA explains the steps it took to launch NASA TV UHD, North America’s first consumer satellite UHD channel, soon to be available for streaming on internet browsers and OTT devices. Get a close-up look at the end-to-end UHD video delivery system for OTT and the implementation process for showcasing the breathtaking beauty of UHD. The session also provides an overview of the challenges encountered with streaming 2160p60 resolution video, lessons learned about the UHD environment, and future technology innovations on the horizon for UHD, including HDR support.

The Interoperable Master Format (IMF) holds the promise of drastically reducing the number of different versions of a file that a video publisher needs to deliver to viewers. So what is it, and what can it do? One answer lies in Interoperable Master Packages, which use IMF for interchange, complex versioning, and mezzanine workflows. In this presentation, a digital processing firm identifies gaps in current workflows and proposes ways to close them to move toward an IMF pipeline that supports seamless creation-to-distribution workflows.

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.

Per-title encoding techniques customize the encoding ladder to match the encoding complexity of the source, saving bandwidth on easy-tocompress videos and ensuring the quality of more complex footage. Codec specialist Jan Ozer compares the efficiency, implementation issues, and costs of multiple commercially available and open-source alternatives, like Capella Systems Cambria Encoder, compression optimization from multiple vendors, and the alternatives available using FFmpeg. Learn what per-title encoding is, how the various options work, and which is the best option for you.

With the release of AV1 and support for HEVC in HLS, new dynamics are unfolding in the video codec world. VP9 is still gaining popularity among content providers, especially for web browsers and Android devices. This panel discusses the status of video codecs today, the benefits and drawbacks of each, and how these things will change in the future. It also discusses whether the industry is getting into yet another codec war, meaning that content providers will have to support multiple video codecs in parallel to reach all devices.

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. Attend this session for your chance to win: $100 Amazon gift card

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. Attend this session for your chance to win: $100 Amazon gift card

How to automate media publishing and simplify workflows for your production and media departments. Get more done in less time and publish to more platforms, websites and apps through a CMS. Monitor and track viewerships across all platforms in a single place. Manage all your live-events, linear streams, on-demand archives, graphics, closed captions, subtitles, audio files and metadata for all your websites, apps and social platforms in one place.Attend this session for your chance to win: A Roku Express ($30 value) and a $5,000 OTT/connected TV ad campaign

Live streaming video is expensive and never a simple task, until now. Using simple workflows and advanced features, produce live events with perfectly synced slides in real-time, update slides on the fly, and deliver it to thousands of viewers. And if viewers arrive late, they can start from the beginning without missing a beat using a DVR option called NeverLate. Attend this session to see how you can simplify your production process, wow your viewers, and track engagement beginning to end.Attend this session for your chance to win: One free live streaming event with Knovio Live ($5000 value)

A great user experience and good quality are key to retaining customers and growing market share for live streaming services. Yet there can be a mis-perception that cloud streaming is simple, and because it’s software there shouldn’t be issues. This session will explore the types of issues that can occur in live streaming workflows, and how proactive monitoring can help operators attain the highest quality to compete and reduce churn for the streaming service customer and protects your investment.Attend this session for your chance to win: Amazon All-New Fire HD 10 Tablet ($150 value)

As video delivery moves to hybrid appliance, cloud and virtualized infrastructures, monitoring has to follow. It also becomes essential rather than optional. Real-time passive and active monitoring provides an effective early warning system and prevents unnecessary customer churn and brand damage. It also provides the foundation for future self-healing networks.Attend this session for your chance to win: Telestream Switch Pro software ($500 value)

In the new world of ubiquitous video consumption, viewers can watch TV content on many devices via various OTT outlets. Content rights, however, are not universal. Broadcasters have to provide sophisticated content access rules to their distribution partners. SCTE-224 or ESNI (Event Scheduling and Notification Interface) defines a web interface to distribute sophisticated schedules and content policies. Used in tandem with SCTE-35, ESNI can drive programmatic decisions, at scale, in the distributors' OTT platforms. This presentation will give an overview of the main ESNI concepts and describe several implementation scenarios, some of which are in production today, that combine on-premises smart appliances and public cloud media processing. During this session, broadcasters will gain a greater understanding of how their traditional scheduling and playout operations connects to a SCTE-224 workflow, as well as strategies for managing and monetizing a growing number of OTT delivery platforms.Attend this session for your chance to win: DJI Spark Portable Mini Drone Quadcopter Starters Bundle (Alpine White) ($400 retail value)

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!

For years, broadcasters and content distributors have searched for fully proven methods of streaming live events and video on demand content globally at the highest quality over commodity Internet. However, existing solutions are not reliable (or possible!) on challenging and unpredictable network conditions; latency and distance dramatically impaired performance. Until now. Come learn how IBM Aspera Streaming for Video solutions, powered by FASPStream, can deliver the high quality transmission experience of satellite and fiber, but over more affordable and widely available standard IP networks, and with "zero-delay." As a result, many are seeing benefits of always on bidirectional circuits, significantly lower distribution costs, and enabling more flexible workflow integrations.

You know it, I know it, we all know it: Live streaming to multiple destinations facilitates great audience engagement. But have you evaluated the value of simulcasting beyond the surface level of “likes,” “thumbs-up,” and “shares?" They generate more value than one may think. Let’s dig deeper and discuss the power simulcasting has in creating a more inclusive online environment, as well as curating stronger external and internal relationships. By examining diverse use cases, we earn a better understanding of why this phenomenon continues to take various industries by storm.

Kludgy design and implementation is the enemy of good content. No matter how much your audience wants to watch your OTT content, it’s the interactive tools and easy-to-use players that keep them coming back. Getting users to download an app or visit your website is only half the battle. What will they see and feel once they get there? Building a compelling user experience can be a huge challenge. This panel explores digital platform and player design proven to drive viewer engagement and brand loyalty.

Social platforms are constantly combatting low-quality experiences for their users. But in their efforts to fight fake news, spam, and less meaningful content, their algorithm changes can have unintended consequences. With the unpredictability and viral nature of live video, it can be difficult to find the balance between what to block, protect, or let pass through to their network of viewers. Too much text on screen, the wrong keyword, or the painfully slow review process to boost a post—all can set you back when trying to engage with your audience. This panel discusses ways in which shifting social algorithms, ranking systems, and quality evaluations have an impact on live video.

Social media may have won the day, but new capture-and-display technologies are bringing forward new live experiences. The idea of dedicated streaming apps may seem old-fashioned, but that hasn’t stopped media companies and publishers from investing lots of time and resources into developing the next generation of destination viewing. Being everywhere at once doesn’t hurt, but will social networks continue to dominate and replace traditional viewing habits? Or will people get lost in content overload and move back to a more premium and focused environment? Join this panel as they try to predict the future of live streaming.

2018 is a critical year for video marketers: With years of experience behind us, we know what works and what doesn’t. With new technologies ahead, we know where the industry is going. Now it’s time to spring off, to take the crucial leap to greatness. This session includes two presentations from major players designed to get you energized for the future. 

2017 was a hell of a year, wasn't it? With ad fraud rampant, well-publicized brand safety debacles, and too little transparency, it's a wonder anyone uses online video advertising at all. But there's good news: Better systems are being created and the ecosystem is healthier than ever. This session will lead off with fresh research from the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) on the TAG Certified Against Fraud Program to reduce fraud across the digital advertising supply chain, then offer a panel discussion on Ads.txt, blockchain, and the other technologies that will shape the future.

How are you going to know you’ve pushed the envelope as far as it will go unless you push it just a little too far? In this panel discussion, leading brand video storytellers show clips from their bravest and boldest work, then tell you how to experiment in form, voice, subject, and technology to surprise and delight prospective customers. Viewers are tired of the same-old, same-old, so grab their attention and don’t let go.

Video marketing is about reaching consumers on every screen they own. Broadcast TV, connected TV, mobile, desktop, tablets: They all have a role to play, and the trick is to use them in the right combination. This session starts with a presentation by Nielsen called, "How Digital Video and Advertising are Revolutionizing the TV Screen," which will present fresh research from Nielsen. It then offers a panel discussion with brands and agencies explaining how to do cross-screen marketing the right way.

The screen is no longer a flat panel, as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), 360° video, and other hybrid systems give marketers new ways to play and new platforms to reach viewers. But how much of this is hype, and how much is real (not virtual) reality? In this panel, experts explain how these areas will take off and how to reach connected viewers.

People are increasingly consuming content in new formats via new channels. Join Google’s Rachel Berk to learn more about Google’s efforts in providing new experiences in entertainment and to gain insights on where video is headed next. 

ATTENTION ALL ATTENDEES: Attend the Closing Keynote Session for your chance to win a LiveU Solo and SlingStudio Prize Package valued at over $3,500, courtesy of LiveU. Must be present to win! Learn more.