Major media and entertainment companies’ quarterly earnings calls ought to pull back the curtain on what’s really happening in the industry, but they routinely bury unflattering numbers in expert spin, and the press on hand rarely ask questions tough enough to draw out the real story. With 3Q earnings call season upon us, M&E industry cartographer Evan Shapiro pulls no punches in this real-time response, digging deep into the data to hold the spin doctors accountable, and giving Streaming Media Connect attendees an unvarnished view of the industry they won’t get anywhere else.

And stick around the no-spin-zone for a no-holds-barred discussion, where we flip the script, turn on the mics, and invite attendees to join a moderated discussion. 

It’s always been chicken-and-egg with OTT monetization. You can’t launch a service without capital. You can’t sell ads without reach. You can’t build reach without content. Even the top-tier services aren’t relying exclusively on AVOD or SVOD anymore and are tinkering with a hybrid approach. So where is the sweet spot, the magic bullet for making OTT investments pay off? Is there more to innovative OTT monetization than throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks? Or are we all just holding our breath to see if the hybrid models work? It’s hardly an overstatement to say an industry hangs in the balance. In this session, top OTT practitioners and analysts weigh in with real-world answers to OTT monetization’s most pressing concerns.

As the North American FAST ecosystem struggles with channel saturation, other challenges face FAST developers working elsewhere in the world, This includes a less mature market to the challenges of localization and leveraging a network of partnerships with local content providers to ensure FAST content is relevant wherever it plays and finds riches in the niches with more precisely targeted content strategies. But matching the right FAST programming to the right audience remains critical everywhere. Even if FAST is the lean-back wing of streaming from the viewer’s perspective, its ever-shifting demands keep FAST programmers perpetually on their toes.

In this special keynote program, Help Me Stream Research Foundation’s Tim Siglin is joined by our research partner Tulix to talk about changes and trends in the industry in key areas, including live vs. on-demand, latency, scale, monetization, and technology.

Moving broadcast workflows to the cloud promises heightened efficiency, reduced TCO, quicker response times, and other critical efficiency gains. But it also brings substantial challenges all along the supply chain with disruptions to existing technology partnerships and transitions to new vendor relationships. When it comes to vetting and partnering with cloud services companies, how do you get started, and how do you ensure that you end up where you wanted to go in the first place?

Even as WebRTC emerges as the de facto framework for large-scale live streams, the need to maintain optimal quality for live streams grows exponentially as streaming audiences scale into the thousands and millions. The challenges mount as well, with the proliferation of potential points of failure from ingest to edge. Monitoring and QC’ing streams becomes a game of identifying the most crucial points, since you can’t watch all of them all the time. And in areas such as live sports, where low latency is at a premium, trade-offs are inevitable, and optimization becomes less a fixed target than a balancing act of competing priorities. How can large-scale streamers deliver the best possible experiences for the audiences that consume their streams and the brands that support them?

Many owners of codec-related patents feel like streaming services have paid far less than their fair share for the business opportunities that compression technologies have afforded. It’s starting to look like 2024 might be the year that changes. During this session, the participants discuss the equities involved in codec royalties on content, the relevant current and imminent lawsuits, plans by patent owners and patent pools to start collecting their due, and the impact these changes will have on streaming services and the industry going forward.

Making live streams and streaming platforms, players, and apps accessible is a key concern for anyone delivering D2C content as well as those fostering streaming-based communications behind the corporate firewall. Whether meeting broadcast or W3C accessibility standards, providing captions and transcripts is critical. While AI has emerged as a convenient, cost-effective, and widely used vehicle for improving the accessibility of live and VOD content, all AI captioning solutions are not created equal, and content providers’ opinions vary on when and where it’s appropriate to use. This session explores best practices and requirements for making streaming, VOD, and conferencing content more accessible; how the enabling technologies are evolving; and how streaming platform and channel providers and producers are practicing and implementing streaming accessibility today.

What are the most critical business and technical challenges of live streaming in late 2023? What platforms and protocols are in play, from acquisition and ingest to delivery? Is the transition to cloud workflows still a prevailing trend? What are realistic expectations for streaming latency, and where are streamers and audiences prioritizing it highest? And how is the device landscape shaping up for live content consumption? Data takes center stage again at Streaming Media Connect as we report findings from Streaming Media’s latest live streaming survey, conducted in September of this year, so the findings are fresh, and the analysis is even fresher.

Industry leaders discuss and present the latest cutting-edge solutions and strategies to help you maximize efficiencies and minimize costs in your streaming video workflow. ATTEND FOR YOUR CHANCE TO WIN A $50 AMAZON GIFT CARD!

Check back soon for more details.

Check back soon for more details.

Check back soon for more details.

It goes without saying that better data—effectively analyzed—is the key to better ROI, both for streaming services and their advertisers. But what if you’re not among the O&Os of the streaming world, and you don’t control the platform or the data that goes with it? Knowing what makes viewers engage and why and when they disengage (i.e., churn) is the name of the game in streaming analytics, but these are broad categories, and identifying key datapoints and interpreting them effectively are the game itself. How much actionable analytics advice can four Streaming Media Connect panelists cram into 1 hour? Tune in and find out.

Content delivery that leverages edge networks is the obvious solution for large-scale streams to global audiences, but it introduces greater complexity at the far end of the streaming workflow, from intelligent load balancing and distribution to real-time performance assessment involving multiple vendors. What challenges are large-scale streamers facing when it comes to latency, QoE, and more, and how are they solving them?

AI and automation are easily confused when it comes to streaming workflows, and while it’s important to recognize that not all streaming workflow automation is AI-driven, it’s also useful to understand how the two can work hand in hand to streamline key processes, offload mundane and repetitive tasks to learned machines, and put human talents to better use. This panel of streaming workflow innovators discusses current applications and future possibilities that intelligently put AI and automation to work in the streaming world.

Live and VOD streaming piracy continues to jeopardize content security and eat into industry profits, with a summer 2023 Parks Associates report projecting $113 billion in lost revenue by 2027. Single- and multi-DRM, watermarking, secure hosting, and monitoring remain in widespread use as technology-based anti-piracy solutions, but the distribution and consumption of illegal streams continue. How seriously do today’s leading content providers across the spectrum of online and OTT video take ongoing piracy threats, and what are the prevailing strategies they’re using to address them?

From live sports to esports to iGaming to all manner of enhanced interactivity, the demand for “real-time” streaming experiences seems to grow more urgent every day. But so-called real-time streaming has real costs, and it increases the challenges of maintaining uptime and reliability, especially for high-scale, high-visibility streams. What are the ongoing challenges of delivering top-quality, low-latency streams; who’s doing it and why; and what do the experts know about making it work (nearly) every time?

Are the riches really in the niches? Do pinpointing and superserving a narrowly defined audience create a winning strategy in an overcrowded M&E ecosystem? And with the long-predicted Great Rebundling not yet off the table, is identifying aggregation partners as important to niche offering success as great content and knowing and nailing your target demo? Perhaps the path to niche service success is a narrow one, but this panel of innovators offers proven strategies to help you sidestep suspect get-niche-quick schemes.