December 14, 2018
By Tim Siglin Contributing Editor, Steve Nathans-Kelly
Featured Articles

SMW '18: Tim Siglin Recaps Highlights of Streaming Media West

Learn more at Streaming Media's next event.

Read the complete transcript of this interview:

Tim Siglin: Welcome back to the end of Steaming Media West 2018. I wanted to do a quick recap of the interviews we’ve done this week. We've done almost 20 interviews over the last two days. We've talked to people at Twitch. We've talked to people from Microsoft, a number of companies, big companies, and then also small companies. MainStreaming was the company that we talked to and First Tube was a startup that we talked to. We also had representatives from the Women in Streaming Media Group, which we were really happy yesterday to see a very large turnout at their meetup. There were probably 20 or so that were here in the booth.

The numbers kept growing. We had to keep taking pictures of the group as it grew and grew, so really, actually a good show overall. A few trends that came out of it. One, VR, which was a really hot topic a year ago, is pretty much nonexistent. I think our last interview Mark Alamares sort of summed that up. VR has quite a ways to go, but mixed reality is moving forward being driven by eSports. eSports was the second big topic. That is a very large audience, both of content creators and consumers who require very low latencies. Latency, if it's an acceptable issue in the traditional one-to-many streaming, is not an acceptable issue when it comes to bidirectional or interactive.

Interactive is probably the third big trend that was talked about where when you have low latency, you can do things like sports book, auctions, betting, even polls and chats that happen in realtime as opposed to happening 15 or 30 seconds later with the way that traditional streaming used to be.

Finally, microservices was something that was talked about quite a bit. The first day, first half of the first day, there were a number of panels and discussions on microservices. I think it was best described yesterday by Mark Russell at MediaKind who said that an echo system was the way to think about microservices where you can move enhancements rapidly on one module or add features on another module in a way that you couldn't do any old monolithic structures.

The understanding there is that that means that cloud computing has actually reached streaming feature set parity where before it had always been the on premise equipment that had higher features. Then, I guess the last thing that really fascinated me today was we had Roger Pantos from Apple, who was onsite talking about HLS. He's the inventor of HLS and indeed he pointed it out right at the beginning of his presentation, but he gave a mini-school lecture on ways to make HLS work better. Given the fact that it's the de facto standard in the industry for segment-based video delivery, it was really nice to have him come and provide some of the technical details and ways to think about using manifest files and the like.

Once again, this has been Tim Siglin, contributing editor for Streaming Media Magazine, founding and executive director of the not-for-profit Help Me! Stream, wishing all of you who've been at the show safe travels as you go home. For those of you who have been watching online, we hope that you'll get a chance to look through a number of the other videos that we've done for interviews throughout the last two days and then also look at streamingmedia.com over the next few weeks because edited versions of those will go up as well as videos of some of the sessions that were done. Have a good evening all.