Virtual assistants such as Alexa, Google Home, and Siri are quickly moving from niche to mainstream. Streaming audio and video are the cornerstone of a successful skill deployment. This session explores the integration of virtual assistants into the connected home and their non-traditional business model. Attendees will learn about balancing production requirements and return on investment with the potential rewards of tightly integrating their brand into their user's daily routine. Panelists will also share their experiences of managing user expectations while exploring unobtrusive monetization paths.

If content is King, then user experience is God. Many of the best practices from data driven video companies can be boiled down to simple concepts you don’t have to be a data scientist to understand. This presentation will showcase how entertainment brands can make better use of their data in 2017 and beyond. The session will present actionable strategies for entertainment brands to effectively use data to compete in digital spaces. Topics covered will include A/B experimentation, thumbnail optimization, and social media KPIs.

For decades, TV ratings have been the main barometer of commercial television success. But with the instant delivery of programming across all types of devices, content providers need to understand what viewers want before it arrives on their TVs, tablets and phones.  Featuring top executives from the TV industry, this session will explore findings from Altman Vilandrie & Company's annual consumer video survey, which for the first time will feature data on how and why consumers make viewing decisions - including the importance of program themes, networks, actors and creators.

Many content distributors and aggregators still use H.264 as their primary, if not exclusive codec, but the bandwidth savings incident to newer, more powerful codecs are alluring. Those considering a switch must evaluate at least three options; HEVC, VP9, and the Alliance for Open Media’s AV1 codec, which should be close to release by the close of 2017. 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.

In this presentation, attendees will learn how NASA and Amazon Web Services engineered a complete, resilient, and repeatable workflow that brought this industry-first event to viewers everywhere using scalable cloud and software enabled workflows. Among the many insights that will be shared: live 4K transcoding in the cloud; the role compression efficiency plays in on-going deep space discovery; overcoming bandwidth constraints on the ISS and on Earth; the implication of cloud-enabled live 4K video streaming for public sector applications in defense, security, first responders, law enforcement, energy and other segments; even how to get an encoder into orbit.