Having the right tools for the job allows you to work smarter, not just harder. When developing for and supporting some of the biggest live streaming events such as the Super Bowl, Olympics, and the World Cup, we have beefed up and refined the arsenal of tools we bring. This session covers some of the tools to monitor, debug, and identify to solve problems quickly and effectively for live and on-demand streaming content, then dives deeper into some key, often overlooked use cases.

Many streaming producers are attempting to enable viewers to interact with live streamers in relative real time through chat, Q&A, betting, bidding, and more. They all encounter the same challenge: reducing latency while syncing interactions between the live streamer and viewers. There’s currently a race between WebRTCbased approaches, which are very low in latency but hard to scale, and HTTP-based approaches, which are easy to scale but higher in latency. Neither is ideal. This session details approaches to achieving interactivity at scale using existing technologies.

This discussion details how video engineers should set up their CDNs for optimal delivery around the world. From multi-CDN to optimizing encoding and transcoding efforts, we provide actionable recommendations based on real, unbiased testing. Attendees walk away with insights regarding how to optimize their CDN(s) for media delivery.

This presentation details how to implement CMAF into a VOD workflow, and how CMAF saves storage space, reduces latency, and improves cache efficiency, which leads to better performance and the simplification of content encryption.

Per-title encoding techniques have progressed from theory to reality with real-world statistics to verify effectiveness. In this roundtable, panelists discuss how their technologies work and the overall impact on their encoding ecosystem and share case studies about how per-title encoding has saved bandwidth and/or improved quality of experience.

Quality of experience (QoE) is critical to all successful streaming services. Using worldwide benchmark data, this talk identifies the most important QoE KPIs for VOD services and discusses their regional impact. For example, in the U.S., buffering issues drive user churn, while in Asia, managing device fragmentation is key. It also reviews a number of metrics, explores benchmark data, and details how to best understand and leverage the relationship between QoE and data.

Hardware codecs in FFmpeg, like those from Intel and NVIDIA, deliver significant performance gains over x264/x265, but have a reputation for lower quality and use a completely different command set. This session benchmarks the performance and quality of these codecs and details the FFmpeg command syntax. Attendees learn when and how to use these hardware codecs in VOD and live encoding workflows.

Consumer devices have many different operating systems, firmware, and chipsets, which often require different codecs, packaging formats, and DRM schemes. To achieve optimal QoE for all viewers, distributors should customize delivery for each device. This session details how companies can leverage intelligence built into technology to understand the differences between platforms and automatically modify content as it’s delivered to achieve optimal QoE while minimizing encoding, packaging, and storage costs.

Heard of MPEG-5 part 2 (LCEVC)? And EVC? VVC, AV1, AVS2? Anyone getting an acronym headache? Alongside VP9 and HEVC, these next-generation standards are vying to be the successor to H.264, but will there ever be a single leader again? With the single-standard, single-resolution media delivery chain broken, operators and service providers are looking for the best tool for the job in every part of their ecosystem. Compression experts from Facebook and V-Nova discuss the reasons why and reveal some of the secrets of the latest standard in the MPEG family, LCEVC—a low-complexity enhancement for all codecs, even non-MPEG ones.