Building the Perfect Live-Event Operations Playbook
On Thursday, Aug. 13, Bhavesh Upadhyaya, Streaming Technology Strategist | AI, Live Operations & Industry Standards, SVTA, will moderate the Streaming Media Connect panel “Optimizing Streaming Ops: Building the Perfect Live-Event Operations Playbook.” This panel examines how top streaming teams prepare for, monitor, and recover from tentpole live events like sports and concerts, from pre-event capacity planning, load testing, and failover strategies to establishing best practices for managing traffic spikes when the stakes are highest.
Confirmed panelists include:
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Bhavesh Upadhyaya is streaming technology strategist for AI, live operations, and industry standards at SVTA. A veteran of the streaming industry since the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Upadhyaya has experience in product, operations, and professional services from a range of companies such as iStreamPlanet, Verizon Digital Media, Deltatre, and Warner Bros. Discovery. He is a consultant to the streaming industry, co-chairs SVTA’s AI Committee, and helps coordinate the Streaming From the Moon and Beyond project.
“Live streaming has matured beyond simply keeping a stream online,” Upadhyaya shares. “Today’s operations teams must balance resilience, observability, automation, and increasingly AI-assisted workflows while preparing for unpredictable audience behavior and infrastructure failures. I’m looking forward to hearing how our panelists approach everything from load testing and failover to incident response and post-event learning. Whether you’re running global sports, concerts, or corporate events, attendees should leave with practical ideas for building more resilient live operations.”
Zylo Hefferan is head of production at MemeHouse Networks, where he turns culture’s biggest moments such as Coachella and sold-out live events into real-time digital experiences. Homeless in high school and raised in survival rather than structure, he worked his way up from production assistant to producer to the person who now commands entire production ecosystems. Across music videos, digital content, and livestream, Hefferan has helped generate hundreds of millions of views and more than $100 million in earned media value.
“I’m looking forward to participating in the panel and discussing the power of livestreaming, how it creates meaningful opportunities for advertisers, and the ways it drives measurable earned media value,” Hefferan says. “Fail-safe or failover is extremely important in livestream. When you’re live it’s already too late for anything to be fixed—if you missed the kiss in a wedding, then you missed it, versus on a traditional production you would be able to call cut and reset, fix the issue, and do another take. Having a fail-safe isn’t optional; it’s your lifeline. You have to plan for it, prepare for it, and be ready to execute it the moment something goes wrong. No livestream is ever perfect. Bonded cellular transmission packs rely on multiple carrier networks, and without a hardline internet connection as a backup, poor signal conditions, network congestion, or frequency interference can quickly turn a straightforward production into a major technical challenge. Success in live streaming isn’t about preventing every issue! It’s about having the redundancy, contingency plans, and experience to keep the show running when those issues inevitably arise.”
Chris Packard is the global live operations lead at LinkedIn and the founder of Stream Force, a globally distributed team he built to provide high-touch technical onboarding and live-event support for LinkedIn’s largest customers. Stream Force supports complex broadcasts tied to millions of dollars in LinkedIn Event Ads investment, helping customers plan, test, troubleshoot, and deliver reliable live experiences worldwide. Previously, Packard led action-sports content partnerships at Eversport, which was acquired by Pluto TV. He also held business development and production roles at Livestream, which was acquired by Vimeo, and Fox Mobile Group.
“I’m thrilled to dive into this conversation with industry leaders at the forefront of live streaming delivery,” Packard says.“With the rapid rise of AI tooling, our workflows, documentation, and monitoring are evolving at an extraordinary pace. Being at the heart of this transformation at LinkedIn has been a privilege, and I’m eager to exchange lessons learned and practical strategies with this stellar panel—especially around scaling quality of service, intake tools and workflows, accelerating incident response, and turning data into real-time insights for product enhancements.”
Corey Behnke is producer and co-founder at LiveX. He’s been the lead producer of the official worldwide webcast for New Year’s Eve in Times Square for more than 14 years. Behnke was the streaming architect for the 2020 Democratic National Convention as well as the 2020 presidential inauguration. In his former role at Livestream as head of global services and production, Behnke produced more than 3,500 live internet broadcasts. He graduated from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.
“Technology enables great streams, but operations make them reliable,” Behnke notes. During the panel, he’ll focus “on the planning, communication, testing, and monitoring that happen before and during live events to reduce risk and keep productions running smoothly when every second counts.”
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