There’s a lot of talk about VR these days and its potential impact on the entertainment industry. Join us for an in-depth look at exactly how VR works and the market it’s creating. We will also take a look at the content development and distribution process as we all gear up for once again broadening our content reach. Josh Courtney, CEO and Executive Producer at SkyVR—whose career has spanned broadcast TV, advertising and scripted content—will break down the emerging market as it exists today and look at how networks and content creators alike need to start developing content right plans as audiences begin to demand content.

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.

Twitter is redefining mobile video. Through a variety of formats from Native Video to Vine to Periscope, Twitter has become the most effective way to earn attention and drive instant engagement. This presentation will detail the strategic and dynamic ways that brands use Twitter video to move beyond just buying impressions and to capitalize on Twitter's unique, live connection to culture.

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.

This presentation presents an effectiveness model across 16 dimensions for measuring your effectiveness in media, digital, and video asset management. We look at what you need in addition to the right product to ensure the success of your deployment, and how to move from an ad hoc or formative state into a more operational and ultimately, an optimal one.

OTT has grown into a $15 billion a year business and new advertising opportunities have surfaced in the process. Targeting has gone beyond standard demographics and now reaches customers in the middle of their research and decision making process. Learn how cost-efficient multi-platform publishing and TV app development helps publishers build up viewership and inventory, and explore how advertisers can leverage content-targeting to hit customers where they are spending the most: their passion.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Roku 4 Streaming Media Player

The growth of OTT streaming has been remarkable with global revenues up to $12 billion worldwide in 2015 and viewership at 19.4 viewer households. The broadcast and streaming industries are undergoing radical changes as OTT video grows, and the changing market brings both threats and opportunities. In this session Yahoo’s Vice President of Engineering and member of the Streaming Video Alliance, P.P.S. Narayan, will address the current market and where the future of streaming is headed.

In this session you’ll learn how successful enterprise teams balance their creative video messaging with production best practices to engage their customers. We’ll also examine how small changes in your planning, production and review process can improve your video output and productivity. Given its impact in recent years, we’ll discuss how content marketing has affected video performance across your digital channels and audiences. To ensure we don’t overlook your audience’s user experience, we’ll review which video player features have the most impact on enterprise customers and why. Finally, we’ll share how various hosting and sharing platforms are optimized for different video formats.

Consumers are confused. This translates into wallets remaining closed – for new toys and for new services. This panel will attempt to unravel all the acronyms and to put some order into the various phases by which the industry will reach viewing nirvana. Is backward compatibility going to be part of the process or will some buyers of today’s TV sets start planning ways of getting rid of that 4K SDR 2015 TV set up. Will services be available but only be enjoyed by a select few? When will there be enough TV displays capable of one or other of the two forms of “UltraHD Premium”. This roundtable will attempt to shed some light on a complex and perhaps troublesome transition.

With most major television outlets developing some form of over-the-top video application—and countless upstarts developing new programming for the new format—brands are taking note of shifting eyeballs. That said, some industry analysts continue to argue there is still not a sustainable economic model for digital video. Will OTT services be monetized as an extension of digital video with primarily programmatic pre-roll, or should advertisers seek new models to engage consumers in this still-emerging environment? What role can brands play either supporting publishers or becoming publishers in an a la carte channel ecosystem?

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.

Widely hailed a powerful and promising means of improving existing video compression, perceptual quality optimization (PQO) integrates consideration of the human visual system into the video encoding process. How well PQO succeeds in improving human perception of videos is best measured by human subjects, through subjective testing. This talk describes how EuclidIQ uses subjective testing to measure the gains from and inform the further development of IQ264, our technology that integrates PQO directly into H.264 encoding and achieves 25% bandwidth savings on average relative to reference H.264 encoding at equivalent quality.

Attend this session for your chance to win: $100 Amazon Gift Card

60% of all user interactions suffer from video playback issues, yet not much is done to help solve this. Rebuffering and downgrading to subpar video bitrates continues unabated as high-speed broadband and faster cellular networks have reached near ubiquity in the United States and some international markets. So why does video still fail and rebuffer? What is the impact of video stream issues on revenue, brand, and churn? We explore these questions and more.

See how enterprises are able to deliver streaming video at scale, breaking both geographical and volume barriers. This session discusses some of the fundamentals of video playback at Ustream, along with methods for reaching mobiles and overcoming buffering issues. It then covers robust video delivery methods through SD-CDN (Software Defined Content Delivery Network) and how enterprises can scale video assets horizontally.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Rickshaw Commuter Laptop Bag ($199 value)

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.

As OTT monetization strategies diversify, the ways in which subscriptions can be structured have continued to expand. Many companies want to emulate the simple subscription OTT model of Netflix. The past 2 years have seen the launch of HBO Now, Sling TV, WWE Network, Crunchyroll, NFL Game Pass, The Blaze, CBS All Access, and many other subscription services. But how many can the market support? When cord nevers, shavers, and cutters look for single subscription services and skinny bundles, how many are they likely to buy? The simplicity of a straight subscription model is appealing, but in today’s “in app” world, advanced monetization modeling and hybrid approaches can serve as a gateway to your subscription service. What does it take to be chosen by enough people to make a business?

Learn how an innovative, cloud-based solution transformed the delivery and management of The Washington Post’s video content and saved hundreds of thousand dollars in ad revenue sharing fees. Video content is a critical function of The Washington Post’s digital media strategy. Yet its legacy platform was plagued by reliability and support complications, as well as costly ad delivery issues. To address these challenges, The Washington Post set about building an integrated video content management and delivery solution. Based on Java open source technologies and hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud, the solution provided a highly customizable rich-media content and application hosting, processing and delivery platform. Custom-developed with The Washington Post’s challenges in mind, the solution has evolved into a mission critical component of its publishing platform, while future-proofing its digital media strategy for years to come.

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.

Attend this session for your chance to win: GoPro Hero4 Silver

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.

Virtual Reality (VR) and 360-degree are emerging as two of the most innovative live streaming trends, powering events such as sporting matches, concerts, corporate meetings, education, medicine, military applications, and many other areas. In this session, you’ll get hands-on with live demos and get more familiar with the technology as we walk through some common 360-degree live streaming workflows, including the Lollapalooza Berlin 2015 music festival that allowed virtual attendees to attend the live concert series and be immersed with the band on stage. Most VR technologies use industry-standard streaming protocols that can be implemented with common streaming servers and platforms. We’ll discuss a couple of examples, including GIROPTIC and VideoStitch Vahana VR, and also review how playback is achieved using common player apps.

The OTT market is growing rapidly, driven by people’s hunger to watch their favorite shows, anytime, anywhere, on any device, but so far, the time lag with OTT content delivery has prevented its widespread use with live events. In this session we will discuss how media companies can deliver and broadcast live OTT content in sync, anywhere in the world, and how they can harness live events for additional revenues, as people’s evolving content consumption habits continue to disrupt the industry.

You make a huge investment producing events and you only get one shot to get it right when live streaming. You can’t ever risk losing your viewers with poor quality or not having viewers at all because no one knew about your event! This session will address these concerns - how live content is created and how it is shared. Attendees will see firsthand how to capture higher quality and more dynamic live content enhancing the viewer’s experience. Attendees will also learn how to expand their viewership through syndication to leverage multiple subscriber bases. With consistent streams, engaging content and a wide reach, you can increase your viewership and keep your audience coming back for more!