AI's Streaming Stack: Image Interpretation

The companies covered here have substantially leveraged AI or incorporated it into their currently shipping tech. The representatives I spoke to discuss some very interesting approaches for what essentially is image interpretation, including detecting if content has been tampered with using AI, local AI processing, and automated clip generation such as vertical formatting.

Zero-Sum Game: Calculating and Managing Streaming TCO

While total cost of ownership spans an encyclopedic number of operational touchpoints, managing a video P&L ultimately comes down to making targeted, high-impact architectural choices.

AI's Streaming Stack: Engagement Agents

The three companies covered in this issue's column are all involved in bringing more monetization or engagement to today's streaming content. The key differentiator is using AI to delve deep into content meaning and adjacent data to create new opportunities for content formats that previously did not exist. While we sometimes cover tools that are suitable for smaller publishers, these AI tools require a certain scale of content to … well, work at scale. Two of these companies have been around for 10-plus years. The other one is much newer but already has an impressive connection with a media company.

Streamticker: The Biggest Streaming Mergers and Acquisitions of 2025

Here is a month-by-month roundup of the streaming industry's most momentous mergers and acquisitions of 2025 (excluding the competing Paramount Skydance and Netflix bids for Warner Bros. Discovery—a drama that just turned definitively in Paramount's favor at press time).

The State of Streaming Sustainability 2026

Is it still fashionable to be sustainable, even with AI?

The State of Streaming Codecs 2026

Streaming codec adoption used to be an engineering abstraction governed by RD curves, BD-rate tables, and roadmap slides that no one outside of R&D ever considered. Over the last 15 months, codec adoption decisions have morphed into a much broader discussion, involving C-level execs from finance and legal. While the precursors to this transition occurred pre-2025, the situation coalesced in 2025. During the same period, we saw one codec step to the front (AV1) and another shrink before our eyes (VVC).

AI's Streaming Stack: Meet the Media Workflows

How has AI entered the media workflow? For this new column, we'll look at different applications used in the media industry. For this issue, we'll start with asset management, asset storefronts, and localization. While some of this functionality—speech-to-text transcription, translation, voice synthesis, natural language processing, logo detection, facial recognition, and object detection—has been around for a while, the biggest improvement is that much of it is now available on workflows with live content.

Presenting… The 2025 Streaming Media Top 100

Here we reveal the 2025 Streaming Media Top 100, our list (appropriately enough) of the top 100 companies in the streaming universe outside of Europe. This list complements the 2025 Streaming Media Europe 51, which acclaims Europe's key streaming innovators and high achievers.

Industry Champions Revealed: The 2025 Streaming Media Readers' Choice Awards

The readers have spoken! Here we present 19 top tech solutions of 2025, as chosen by the readers of Streaming Media .

AWS GM of M&E Samira Panah Bakhtiar Talks Gen AI and Interactive Sports Streaming

In this Q&A, Samira Panah Bakhtiar, Amazon Web Services (AWS) general manager of me­­dia, entertainment, games, and sports, talks about how AWS and agentic AI are changing the ways streaming workflows are executed. In her interview, she spoke both to the business side of the house and the underlying tech.

Q&A: Globo Director of Product & Engineering Igor Maciel Macaubas Talks Content Delivery, Discovery, and Build vs. Buy

In this wide-ranging conversation with Globo Director of Product & Engineering for Digital Products Igor Maciel Macaubas, we discussed Grupo Globo digital products that deliver content at scale monthly to 90 million unique Brazilian viewers.

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.