In this exclusive keynote fireside chat, NBA VP, Global Media Insights Michelle Auguste discusses how the league turns deep fan understanding into a powerful engine for global brand growth. Learn how data-driven insights across different platforms fuel smarter content, stronger partnerships, and deeper connections with NBA fans around the world.

In this keynote from Michelle Munson, CEO and co-founder of Eluvio, you’ll learn about the very latest in next-gen video distribution and monetization at scale globally, powered by the Eluvio Content Fabric and Application Suite. Eluvio users include Amazon Studios/MGM, European Professional Club Rugby, FOX, Gladius Sports, SONY Pictures, Telstra Broadcast Services, UEFA, United Rugby Championships, Warner Bros., WWE, and others. Hear about the newest advancements for live broadcast feed distribution with SMPTE-2022-7 multipath distribution, sub-500 millisecond latency, low jitter, and end-to-end security. You’ll also hear how about frame-accurate, first-of-a-kind, real-time modal AI on the live feeds coincident with the live edge allowing for a fully converged and dynamic personalization of the live distribution for business and consumer audiences such as virtual signage, personalized highlights and shorts, interactive stats, next-generation ad insertion, and more.

Live linear FAST lives or dies in the middle mile, where ingest, encoding, packaging, and routing determine whether channels can contend with increased traffic as audiences scale. This session explores how to forge resilient, flexible infrastructure that keeps FAST channels humming, costs controlled, and viewers engaged.

As more advertising budget trends toward CTV, proving performance across fragmented platforms is critical to the success of the brands that invest in it. This panel of measurement and metrics experts from the ad-supported streaming ecosystem breaks down how marketers and publishers are reaching responsive audiences, moving from exposure to engagement to measurable outcomes, and identifying what truly moves the needle in CTV advertising.

Traditional ad breaks are a drag on premium sports streaming experiences for engaged fans, especially in sports that don’t lend themselves to frequent interruption. This session explores how SGAI and the innovative squeezeback ad formats it enables are reshaping live sports advertising by unlocking new revenue opportunities, enhancing audience targeting, and squeezing more value from every high-stakes impression.

As free streaming audiences grow, platforms must deliver reliable, high-uptime streams while managing latency and sync expectations and keeping infrastructure costs in check. This panel of streaming infrastructure and operations experts explores robust architectures, workflow strategies, and operational trade-offs that enable resilient, high-volume streams without compromising viewer experiences or allowing runaway costs.

When the biggest moments in live sports hit, traffic surges coming from unexpected directions can stymie even the most mature streaming stacks. This panel of live streaming and content delivery pros breaks down how top platforms prepare to manage peak demand—using smart load-balancing, real-time monitoring, and advanced failover strategies to maximize uptimes when streams scale globally.

As ad-supported and branded streams scale and become targets for pirates, protecting content and revenue is as critical as delivering great quality. This session explores the ever-evolving state of DRM, forensic watermarking, ad fraud prevention, and maintaining stream integrity—offering best practices for securing and protecting investments in monetized streams.

A Streaming Media Connect keynoter and adtech expert once answered the question, “What breaks in live stream ad insertion” with a single word: “Everything.” Everything that breaks in premium live event streaming comes at a steep cost. Any disruption in signaling, manifest manipulation, or ad delivery is immediately apparent to audiences and advertisers. This panel of ad tech aces examines the technical challenges of monetizing high-stakes, low-latency live streams and explores resilient ad insertion architectures, including SSAI/CSAI/SGAI trade-offs, sync and drift issues, and real-time decisioning.

Shoppable CTV is edging toward the mainstream as platforms, brands, and retailers converge. This session dives into the strategies, tech, and partnerships shaping “shopified” CTV and integrating it into streaming programming in 2026: what sells, what scales, and what’s more hype than reality.

Non-targeted ads waste attention. Contextualized ads earn it through the targeting trilogy: right ad, right person, right time. This panel of content monetization pros explores how AI-powered audience data, metrics analysis, and real-time decisioning propel tailored targeted CTV ad experiences that boost relevance, heighten engagement, and grow revenue.

Curating the right content mix is the foundation of scalable streaming channel monetization. This session breaks down the art and science of building a content library that draws and engages viewers and shows how data-driven programming decisions impact ad fill rates and cultivate sustainable growth across platforms.

In this era of constant content proliferation and channel saturation, discovery is critical to content monetization. This panel explores how structured metadata and machine learning-powered discovery tools bring great content to light, improving relevance, boosting engagement, and driving measurable revenue impact.

GAMELOOP, recently launched on Samsung Gaming Hub, combines Twitch-style “watch and play” gaming with a FAST-style CTV monetization model. In this exclusive Fireside Chat, new GAMELOOP CEO Kimmy Li joins Streaming Media’s Nadine Krefetz to discuss gaming-CTV convergence, and how her previous roles at Activision, Sony, Verizon, and Nekcom inform GAMELOOP’s on-demand cloud gaming freemium model for ad-supported monetization and scalability.

Vertical drama is exploding on free streaming platforms, driven by mobile-first viewing, bingeable formats, and a new generation of viewers and global creators. This session breaks down the business models, distribution strategies, and monetization tactics driving the vertical drama boom—and how to scale it effectively.