The 2025 Streaming Media All-Stars

After a 12-year hiatus, Streaming Media is bringing back the Streaming Media All-Stars for 2025 to pay tribute to a select group of key technology innovators who are driving and disrupting the streaming industry.

Streamticker: The Biggest Streaming Mergers and Acquisitions of 2024

The 2024 edition of Streamticker, recapping the streaming industry's most momentous mergers and acquisitions of 2023, kicked off with Disney's gobbling up the last extant portions of Hulu, as Comcast ceded its re­maining 33% stake. But if the late-2023 deal marked only the quiet conclusion of an already-silent part­nership, the much noisier news of Jan. 6, 2025, found Disney absorbing sports-centric streamer Fubo and merging it with Hulu Live + TV. Here we'll review this and other done (or more nearly done) M&A deals that reshuffled the stream­ing industry in 2024.

The State of Streaming Sustainability 2025

In this article, I'm going to look at a few of the un­derlying issues facing the industry when it comes to sustainability, starting with one of the biggest pow­er consumption challenges of our generation: the explosion in data center growth.

Cloud Control: How to Meet the Challenges of Cloud Migration and Operation

COVID accelerated the push to IP-based streaming workflows for many companies, proving that live streaming at scale via the cloud was possible, although not always in tip-top form. Live streaming has been something we've been covering since this publication started, but here we are looking at content that has traditionally been delivered via production trucks, satellites, and a lot of on-prem resources.

The 2024 Streaming Media Readers' Choice Awards

The readers have spoken! We've counted all of the votes in the 2024 Streaming Media Readers' Choice Awards, and—drumroll, please—it is now my pleasure and sworn duty to present winners and runners-up in each of our 17 categories.

Q&A: Simon Crownshaw, Microsoft’s Worldwide Media and Entertainment Strategy Director, Talks Gen AI

In this expansive interview with Simon Crownshaw, Microsoft's worldwide media and entertainment strategy director, we discuss how Microsoft customers are leveraging generative AI in all stages of the streaming workflow and how they're using it in content delivery and to enhance user experiences in a range of use cases. Crownshaw also digs deep into how Microsoft is building asset management architecture and the critical role metadata plays in effective large-language models (LLMs), maximizing the value of available data.

The Generative AI Industrial Revolution

Generative AI may prove even more divisive to society than the Indus­trial Revolution. There are many questions well worth examining re­garding gen AI's impact on the streaming in­dustry, the media and entertainment world, and more. In this article, I'm going to focus on a few streaming use cases in the hope of pro­viding a broader perspective on the changes happening in our world now and those we can expect going forward.

Presenting the 2024 Streaming Media 100

Here we reveal the 2024 Streaming Media 100, our list of the top 100 companies in the streaming universe outside of Europe. This list complements the Streaming Media Europe 51, which recognizes Europe's key streaming innovators, exemplars, and disruptors.

AI and Streaming Media

This article explores the current state of AI in the streaming encoding, delivery, playback, and monetization ecosystems. By understanding the developments and considering key questions when evaluating AI-powered solutions, streaming professionals can make informed decisions about incorporating AI into their video processing pipelines and prepare for the future of AI-driven video technologies.

Streaming Media's Trendsetting Products and Services of 2024

A detailed guide to Streaming Media's Trendsetting Products and Services of 2024.

Q&A: Google Cloud's Anil Jain Explains How Generative AI Is Driving Digital Transformation for M&E and DTC

For Anil Jain, leading the Strategic Consumer Industries team for Google Cloud has meant helping traditional media companies embrace cloud and AI, move to an OpEx-centric business model, and adapt to a more development-oriented mindset in engineering and product management. In this interview, Jain discusses the global shift to cloud-based operations in the media industry, the ways generative AI is disrupting everything from production to packaging to all aspects of the user experience, and what media companies should be afraid of if they're not already.

The State of Streaming Sustainability 2024

How do others see us, and how do we measure our progress? New data on streaming power consumption will al­low the industry to target further reductions in power consumption while working toward longer-term solu­tions that reuse old technologies alongside current best practices as a way to extend the life of streaming tech for years to come.

Buyers' Guide: Live Streaming Software

This article takes a look at 12 options you can pick from when looking to produce live-switched video: Boinx mimoLive, Broadcast Pix ChurchPix, Ecamm Live, ManyCam, OBS Studio, PRISM Live Studio, Vizrt TriCaster, Telestream Wirecast, vMix, Vimeo Livestream Studio, and XSplit Broadcaster

Streamticker: The Biggest Streaming Mergers & Acquisitions of 2023

When it comes to mergers and acquisitions in the streaming industry and M&E marketplace in 2023 and an accounting of the year's most consequential deals, it makes the most sense to open at the close: Disney's early-November announcement that it would fully subsume Hulu into its empire with a buyout that completed an acquisition initiated in pre-pandemic 2019.

How to Meet the Challenges of Cloud-Based Media Creation

Nadine Krefetz writes about the ways of how to best meet the challenges of cloud media creation.

The 2023 Streaming Media Readers' Choice Awards

The readers have spoken! Here we present North America's top tech solutions of 2023, as chosen by the readers of Streaming Media.

Cloud Atlas: MovieLabs’ 2030 Vision Roadmap for Industry-Wide M & E Interoperability

MovieLabs' CTO Jim Helman discusses his experience creating standards for content classification for the Hollywood studios, as well as the MovieLabs ten-year strategy to bring interoperability to as many vendors as possible. The Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR) Helman helped create is a content ID which now holds more than 2.8 million records modernizing many aspects of production and operations. He'll also update us on the industry's response to the 2030 Vision strategy to bring interoperability to media creation technologies, requiring less custom engineering and better communications between software, infrastructure, and services.

The 2023 Streaming Media 100: The Top 100 Companies in the Streaming Media Universe

The Streaming Media 100 is back—welcome once again to Streaming Media's annual list that foregrounds the industry's most innovative and influential technology suppliers, service providers, platforms, and media and content companies, as acclaimed by our editorial team. Some are large and established industry standard-bearers, while others are comparably small and relatively new arrivals that are just beginning to make a splash. All set themselves apart from the crowd with their innovative approach and their contribution to the expansion and maturation of the streaming media universe.

Practical Approaches to Sustainable Streaming

In this article I'll expand on prior sustainability approaches, detail reasons to consider additional areas of power-consumption optimization, and invite diverse stakeholders across streaming workflows to engage with Streaming Media magazine, GoS, and like-minded stakeholders in a mid- to late-2023 initiative around the LESS Accord, with an overall goal of readers recommending measurable best practices for consideration by September 2023.

A Broadcaster’s Cloud Migration Primer

This article offers a primer on how a traditional broadcaster could start to move services to a cloud provider.