This session examines different methods for ingest, transmission, and backhaul—satellite, fiber, cellular, and even good old-fashioned Ethernet—all of which should have a place in your live streaming toolbox. From small to large events, what are some of the ways we can utilize new technologies without sacrificing time-tested best practices? How do you balance budgetary concerns against redundancy and make sure your event goes off flawlessly? 

Learn what it is like to don a production badge and take a backstage tour with the CTO of TourGigs. In this session, we will review what it takes to pull off a live multi-camera concert film, backhaul a compressed stream from a crazy location, and deliver it at scale to users on multiple screens. We will also cover different monetization models, rights management, policy enforcement, royalties, and why some shows go perfectly well and others go perfectly wrong.

With the explosive popularity of Meerkat and Periscope, Live Streaming has become the new live television while also adding a multidimensional, collaborative one-to-one layer to social media. Now more than ever before, content creators are moving towards becoming media companies that create and broadcast their own content from the palms of their hands. But is anyone really watching?  In this session, a representative from Al Roker Entertainment's Roker Labs discusses who is winning in the world of live streaming. Having created the first-ever index report quantifying live streaming amplification in July of this year, Roker Labs has since released subsequent reports that show how content creators are "owning" their verticals and using technology and social media to enhance their brand.

Live event transcoding used to be simple: you did it all in-house and you needed capacious outbound bandwidth, all of which cost a fortune. Now there are more live encoding schemas than you can shake a stick at, including live cloud transcoding and packaging from traditional encoding vendors as well as OVPs, CDNs, and other service providers. In this session, Jan Ozer will survey the available encoding/transcoding options and service providers, and present a structured comparison that includes critical factors such as cost, stream redundancy, packaging flexibility, bandwidth requirements, DRM and captioning support, scalability, and player and distribution network integration.

There’s much more to producing and pulling off a successful webcast than setting up acquisition gear and pushing the stream. Today’s live webcasts generate significant amounts of metadata that must be synchronized with live streams, and the content itself must be properly protected for live delivery and packaged for VOD syndication. This panel will look at how to best address these challenges without slowing down the live streaming workflow.

Today’s complex content monetization landscape confronts live streaming professionals with more technological and and strategic options than ever before. How can you determine which approach—advertising, subscription, transactional, or even branded—will let you maximize the revenue from your live events and channels? In this panel you’ll find monetization experts who will break down the challenges facing live event monetization and offer insights into innovative ways to make sure you’re not leaving money on the table.

Today’s live streaming viewers are savvy and fickle, and while some tentpole events might be unmissable, you still need to make sure your user experience is compelling enough to keep viewers watching. By putting control in the hands of viewers via interactive, easy-to-use players; giving them the tools to comment and share clips; and most of all, delivering a compelling viewing experience from start to finish, you’ll differentiate your content from the rest of the pack.

Online media and services leaders increasingly are finding that hardware-based infrastructures and other traditional approaches are obstacles when it comes to keeping up with consumer demand and assuring future scaling. During this informal fireside chat, experts from IGN Entertainment, Elemental, and AWS will offer insights and customer deployment anecdotes into the virtualized, software-defined video infrastructures needed to power these experiences.

From the preseason to the Super Bowl, the NFL is making it easy for fans to watch all the action wherever they want, on the device of their choice. The league has been offering live streaming of games to all major connected OTT and mobile devices. This presentation offers a look at how the NFL has embraced digital as a complement to its successful broadcast game.

The final steps in the live streaming workflow—delivery and analytics—are in some ways the most vexing, but they’re crucial measuring the success of your event or channel. Analytics come in all shapes and sizes, from quality of experience (including customer-facing players and authentication tools) to quality of service (including live event CDN redundancy and post-event analytics). We explore all of these areas in this informative session.

Viewers today demand instant-on, HD streaming of live events. What will they demand in the future? 4K? 8K? HDR? VR? What role will services such as Periscope and live streaming on Facebook play? Our panel of experts bring their knowledge of the past and present to bear as they make predictions about what viewers will expect in five or ten years, and which content types, technologies, and monetization models the live streaming industry must embrace to meet those expectations.