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 VMAF, SSIMPlus, and others, 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, teaching how to apply them using commercial and open source tools and how to use them to fine-tune your adaptive bitrate ladders and encoding settings.

If content is king, then graphics are one of the most important technologies in streaming media. While sharp producers have been using graphical overlays forever, the Chromium Embedded Format and the rapidly growing esports market have thrust cloud graphics—which don’t require expensive on-prem servers—into the view of major broadcasters and OTT streamers globally. This workshop will feature a live technical demo, viewer research, and an overview of the vendors in the cloud graphics space.

The discussion around microservices has moved from theory and planning to looking at optimization for deployment for streaming within a microservices/services-oriented architecture. A year ago many were thinking about deployment in this new highly available, scalable and agile way; today, it has emerged as common practice, or at the least as a common strategy. This session examines some examples of microservices in action in a discussion with leading content publishers and goes deep into some realworld microservices architectures, exploring introspection, orchestration, containerization, and wider virtualization strategies.

In this session, we review every stage of the live- and on-demand streaming workflow and explore how open source options can be used in real-world implementations. We’ll examine tools such as FFmpeg, VLC, and NGINX, as well as open source codecs, and discuss our panelists favorites for solving specific challenges, the pros and cons of each, and compare them to some commercial offerings. While this session is of use for technicians and developers, the emphasis is on higher-level strategic questions about where and when open source tools can replace commercial offerings and thus reduce costs.

The promise of ATSC 3.0 is the ability to multicast not only audio and video, but data as well. If ATSC 3.0 can achieve this, plus allow for targeted personalized advertising, the broadcast world will have combined the digital promise of targeting with the scale of broadcast, essentially changing the broadcast vs. streaming playing field. How will this work with legacy CDNs and new 5G pipes? What does broadcast-as-a service mean? How do converged OTT-OTA apps work in the future? How does this help deliver the right content to the right audience?

This presentation will fundamentally shift the way attendees think of playout in the cloud. Rather than building a schedule and expensively re-encoding assets in real time for broadcast, learn how to decouple the monolith of playout software into discrete components on top of AWS services. The approach discussed will open new possibilities of channel customization, personalization, and end-user quality, while also dramatically reducing running costs.

IP multicast is 31 years old this year. This session takes a rapid tour through multicast’s history; looks at some deployments and their successes and failures; and examines the emergence of IPTV, operator CDN, and application-layer P2P models. It then looks at why multicast adoption has been difficult, along with some of the technical and commercial challenges it has faced. Finally, it looks to the future and the re-emergence of interest with the hot new technologies in the space, including multicast-ABR, LTE-B, and BIER.

Is latency impacting your customers’ experiences and your business? The good news is sub-second latency is within reach. In this session, you learn about WebRTC, what it takes to support it and the available APIs from MediaStream to RTCDataChannel and more, as well as the protocols that make it real time such as UDP, DTLS, SCTP and everything in-between. This session also addresses workflow best practices and implementation options.

Ultra-low latency for live is the most important challenge that ABR streaming faces. THEO Technologies' HESP is a new streaming protocol, an alternative to HLS and DASH and streams over HTTP, that enables streaming services to be delivered with sub second latency, with a significantly reduced streaming bandwidth, at scale. Join the conversation to get the latest straight out of the THEO Innovation Lab.

5G marks a new era of cellular network connectivity. In this presentation, Jon Landman, VP of sales at Teradek, describes how 5G will make a difference for live streaming. Learn how you can use 5G to optimize your connectivity for more reliable broadcasts. Explore what exactly is 5G and how it differs from our current 4G LTE networks. Discover how you can combine 5G connectivity and HEVC compression to deliver higher-quality video while using less bandwidth.