NASA, Google, TiVo, Bally's, Wowza & TwelveLabs to Headline Streaming Media Connect with Must-See Series of Keynote Fireside Chats
On Tuesday, August 11, Streaming Media will launch 20th Streaming Media Connect virtual event with two exclusive fireside chats featuring NASA’s GM & Head of NASA+ Rebecca Sirmons (back by popular demand following NASA's successful Artemis II lunar mission and streams!) and TwelveLabs Head of Field Engineering Simon LeCointe. Each morning of the 3-day event will kick off at 11am ET/8am PT with back-to-back keynote fireside chat featuring a varied array of industry luminaries.
In addition to Sirmons and Lecointe, Streaming Media Connect headliners include:
- Shobana Radhakrishnan, Senior Director Engineering, Google, Android Platforms, and Pixel Software (Wednesday, August 12)
- Krish Kumar, CEO, Wowza (Wednesday, August 12)
- Briana Larsen, VP, Content Partnerships & Business Development, TiVo/Xperi (Thursday, August 13)
- Jon Lin, SVP & GM, Bally’s Media (Thursday, August 13)
Register now for Streaming Media Connect!
Rebecca Sirmons is General Manager and Head of NASA’s streaming service NASA+, NASA’s official home for live and original programming., where she shares NASA’s story for the benefit of all. Currently focused on overall operations of NASA+ and the oversight of executing what will become the world’s largest live streaming event: NASA’s next moon landing.
Sirmons will be joined by Streaming Technology Strategist and SVTA AI Committee Co-Chair Bhavesh Uphadyaya in conversation for a keynote titled “Streaming from the Moon and Beyond with NASA+,” which they describe as follows: “Back by popular demand, Rebecca Sirmons returns to discuss NASA+’s learnings from the agency’s successful Artemis II 10-day lunar fly-by and the agency’s streaming needs for future Artemis missions, including NASA’s Moon Base, and how the agency is using live streams from rovers and astronauts, and the evolving technical challenges of streaming from space.”
Simon Lecointe leads TwelveLabs’ North America and Europe Solutions teams, working at the intersection of media technology and AI. With over 10 years across news, broadcast, streaming, sports, gaming, and live esports, he's led the design of systems spanning live ingest, playout, archive, and search, and now focuses on applying multimodal AI and video understanding models to creative workflows, content discovery, and large-scale media operations. Simon is especially passionate about agentic video workflows and automated editing — using agent-based frameworks to orchestrate analysis and creative decision-making across the video lifecycle — and is known for translating complex technology into architectures teams can confidently build and operate.
Streaming Media Editor-in-Chief Steve Nathans-Kelly will join Lecointe for a keynote fireside chat titled “Streaming Blind Spots: Making Sense of Video Where No One’s Watching.” Expanding on the topic, Lecointe writes, “ NASA+’s work streaming from rovers, astronauts, and now the moon puts a spotlight on a challenge that shows up much closer to home too: blind spots where video outpaces the humans meant to watch it—in stadiums, ad libraries, surveillance networks, and city infrastructure. In this fireside chat, Simon Lecointe discusses how multimodal AI is closing that gap, turning raw, ungoverned video into searchable, structured, actionable data in near-real time, without manual tagging or a research team combing through footage. The conversation covers what “understanding” video actually means to a model; how that same understanding lets teams flag policy risks, sensitive content, and brand-safety issues at scale instead of relying on after-the-fact human review; and where this technology is headed as live and remote video keeps outpacing human review capacity.”
Leading off on Wednesday, August 12 is Shobana Radhakrishnan, who leads Android Platforms and Pixel Software engineering at Google, focusing on experience, personalization, and cloud systems. Prior to this, she led teams that built high-scale streaming platforms enabling personalization at Roku. Her experience also includes engineering leadership roles in companies such as Netflix, Symantec, and Yahoo, as well as startups.
Streaming Media Contributing Editor Nadine Krefetz of Reality Software will join Radhakrishnan for a discussion on “How Agentic AI is Transforming Streaming UX.” Our keynote with longtime Google and Android engineering leader Shobana Radhakrishnan explores how streaming and consumer development is evolving agentic AI and changing the face of streaming UX. Experienced and new developers, as well as managers who need to understand how AI is changing the nature of development, gain new insight into user experience principles and learn about agentic AI-supported engineering practices Shobana and her team are developing and applying at Google.
Krish Kumar leads Wowza in building technology that powers the world’s most demanding streaming applications. Passionate about technology’s impact, he focuses on driving innovation while delivering reliable, mission-critical solutions. He is committed to ensuring Wowza continues to provide the flexible, scalable, and dependable infrastructure that streaming platforms, OVPs, and developers rely on for any stream, any deployment, any protocol, any environment.
Kumar’s keynote, in conversation with Streaming Media’s Nathans-Kelly, is titled “How to Act on Live Video in Real Time, Without Rebuilding Your Stack.” Most video streams end in a VOD archive or OTT streaming app that might get viewed at some point down the line. Video is the richest source of data that most media organizations are too slow to act on. The challenge is ingesting, decoding, sampling, routing, and extracting useful signals from live streams without rebuilding the video stack for every application. Wowza CEO Krish Kumar discusses how Wowza Streaming Engine and the Video Intelligence Framework remove that infrastructure burden, letting developers turn live video into structured events, metadata, and operational signals directly within the infrastructure they already use. Kumar also addresses Wowza's integration of the NVIDIA Synthetic Video Detector for screening advertiser and partner contribution feeds for AI-generated or synthetic content to ensure compliance with global AI content regulations.
Day 3 of Streaming Media Connect, Thursday August 13, opens with Nathans-Kelly sitting down with Briana Larsen, who is Vice President of Content Strategy and Business Development at Xperi. Larsen oversees contract negotiation and partnership management for subscription, transactional, and vMVPD streaming services globally. This includes the integration of these services across Xperi’s product lines for consumers and Pay TV operators worldwide. She manages Tier 1 partnerships with major streaming services including Netflix, Prime Video, MAX, YouTube and Disney. She has played a key role in securing content for TiVo OS, bringing top-tier streaming services to smart TVs Powered by TiVo and expanding entertainment options for consumers. Additionally, she has been instrumental in delivering premium video services to in-car entertainment systems, making it easier for audiences to access high-quality content wherever they are.
Larsen’s keynote, titled “How TiVo Is Redefining the Entertainment Experience in an Increasingly Fragmented Streaming Landscape,” will address the question, how a content-first OS platform demonstrated its uniqueness in the competitive CTV and streaming ecosystem? Larsen will discuss the strategic thinking behind the TiVo UX across CTV, Pay TV, and automotive; how that thinking evolves in response to ever-changing expectations across consumers, content partners, and advertisers; the maturation of various AI technologies and human-driven insights; and shifts in the market itself. The conversation will examine how these trends are reshaping the entertainment experience and what it takes for platforms to differentiate in an increasingly fragmented streaming landscape.
Wrapping up this Connect’s keynotes will be Bally’s Media SVP & GM Jon Lin, who oversees Bally’s Media, the company’s media and sports streaming businesses, including Bally Sports Live apps and the Stadium FAST channel.
Ring Digital llc Principal Analyst Brian Ring will join Lin for the discussion, “FAST, Gamified Live, and L-bars.” Discussing how the conversation will unfold, Ring writes, “From Bally’s Stadium FAST channel to its owned-and-operated mobile app, from poker to boxing to its live MLB baseball feeds, Jon Lin helms one of the most fascinating entities in the streaming space. BallySports.com is where you’ll find it, but parent Bally's isn't a media company. It’s a gaming and hospitality behemoth. This chat covers the gamut, from content acquisition to channel programming, from FAST to L-bars and advanced monetization, to the trend toward verticalized live streams. Learn from a leader who’s previously held executive product slots at CBS Sports and Sling TV.”
Register now for Streaming Media Connect!
Related Articles
On August 12, panelists from AWS, Paramount, Al Jazeera, and TAG Video Systems will join the Streaming Media Connect panel "Optimizing Live Streaming QoS and QoE." From measuring and improving rebuffering, startup time, and bitrate quality to tying QoE metrics directly to retention, this panel focuses on quantifiable streaming metrics that matter, as well as harder-to-measure viewer satisfaction signals that define true QoS (quality of service) and QoE (quality of experience). Come for the real-world war stories from high-stakes live events, where every hiccup costs viewers and revenue, and stay for the real-time QoS/QoE Q&A with live streaming's best and brightest.
24 Jul 2026
On Thursday, Aug. 13, Dataxis Principal Analyst Ophélie Boucaud will moderate the Streaming Media Connect panel "Find It FAST: Leveraging AI in CTV Discovery," with panelists from TiVo, Gracenote, Hub, and Future Today. AI is transforming how viewers find content and the never-ending struggle for visibility in a saturated content ecosystem. This panel unpacks the recommendation engine architectures and real-time personalization pipelines that top streaming platforms and EPGs are using to surface the right content for the right user at the right moment and the increasing shift toward agent-assisted, conversational search.
24 Jul 2026
On Thursday, Aug. 13, Roku's Nicole Fencel, Philo's Steven Chang, Women in Streaming Media's Deepali Narsiker, and Horse & Country's David Guinan will join Chris Pfaff for the Streaming Media Connect panel "The Retention Game: Managing Subscriber Acquisition and Churn." Join this closing panel for a candid discussion on which subscriber acquisition and retention strategies work in 2026 and which ones fail to move the needle. Learn how leading streaming platforms are drawing on data science insights and leveraging personalization to turn one-show drop-ins into long-term, loyal subscribers.
14 Jul 2026
On Thursday, Aug. 13, LinkedIn's Chris Packard, LiveX's Corey Behnke, and MemeHouse's Zylo Hefferan will join the SVTA's Bhavesh Upadhyaya for a Streaming Media Connect panel that examines how top streaming teams prepare for, monitor, and recover from tentpole live events like sports and concerts. The discussion will range from pre-event capacity planning, load testing, and failover strategies to establishing best practices for managing traffic spikes when the stakes are highest.
14 Jul 2026