November/December 2025

Magazine Features

5G Without the Hype: Taking Control of Live Sports Production

For years, 5G has been sold as the technology that would transform live broadcasting. Network slicing, guaranteed quality of service, zero latency—all promised, few delivered. What's really changing the game now isn't another operator trial. It's private 5G, giving broadcasters the ability to design, deploy, and control the network themselves.

AI's Streaming Stack: Meet the Media Workflows

How has AI entered the media workflow? For this new column, we'll look at different applications used in the media industry. For this issue, we'll start with asset management, asset storefronts, and localization. While some of this functionality—speech-to-text transcription, translation, voice synthesis, natural language processing, logo detection, facial recognition, and object detection—has been around for a while, the biggest improvement is that much of it is now available on workflows with live content.

Litigating and Monetizing Content Licensing to LLMs

Licensing data to LLMs is a potential revenue stream for streamers much like advertising on CTV platforms: it is an opportunity that didn't exist until recently that has the potential to deliver dividends for years to come. But as with CTV advertising, its viability and profitability won't happen overnight.

Losing the Feed, but Owning the Story

For decades, broadcasters were the heartbeat of live sports. They owned the feed, shaped the story, and set the standard. But today, that control is slipping, not because audiences have abandoned them, but because the definition of "live" has changed.

Mining for Riches in the Niches: Dynamic Approaches for Targeted Growth

What does niche streaming mean in 2025? With the vast abundance of content available to TV audiences, how can niche programming be targeted adequately toward specific audiences, and what are some of the best ways these audiences can discover that content?

Presenting… The 2025 Streaming Media Top 100

Here we reveal the 2025 Streaming Media Top 100, our list (appropriately enough) of the top 100 companies in the streaming universe outside of Europe. This list complements the 2025 Streaming Media Europe 51, which acclaims Europe's key streaming innovators and high achievers.

Review: Media Excel HERO 6000

This review will highlight Media Excel's HERO 6000 and walk readers through the process of configuring streaming using the HERO platform. You'll learn how to deliver live streams, create encoding presets, add audio presets, create channels, and add outputs for playback. The article will also cover how to add roles and play streams.

Editor's Note

Farm to Table

One of the overarching themes of Streaming Media 2025, which took place October 6-8 in Santa Monica, Calif., was the rise of the creator economy. Discussions centered around the changing economics of content creation, delivery, distribution, and curation (with AI playing an ever-larger role in leveling the playing field to varying degrees at all stages); evolving business models for creators looking to leverage and grow their brands and survive and thrive; and the ongoing, unignorable convergence of creator channels and "traditional" streaming platforms. The last topic seems like a particularly noteworthy sign of the times—how many conversations carried on just down the 405 in Huntington Beach in the heyday of Streaming Media West concerned the convergence (or divergence) of streaming upstarts and traditional linear broadcast?

Spotlights

A View From the Top: BuyDRM

Today we live in a DRM-driven streaming video landscape. DRM is the sole studio-mandated streaming security technology in use across every major streaming video and audio platform in existence. While part of a broad-spectrum approach to security, DRM is the one technology standing between your content and your enemies. Thankfully, our industry has evolved DRM into a thin, scalable, nearly silent component of the streaming ecosystem with broad support on the industry's leading encoders, servers, and playback platforms.

View From the Top: EZDRM | Thinking Security for 2026

As 2025 comes to a close, we can see that the landscape is presenting new growth opportunities in revenue security. Without losing sight of our core values of future-facing innovation and ease of use, we can respond with media solution architectures that offer a more sophisticated baseline for the video services business.

View from the Top: LTN | The time is now

LTN's Exec. Chairman & Co-Founder Malik Khan on the IP-first future for live sports and news

The Producer's View

Content Creation Consolidation: Bending Spoons Strikes Again

There are a few tools that many streaming pros have used through the years, from WeTransfer to Brightcove to Vimeo. Some are essential to content creation, OTT delivery, and live streaming. All of these tools have one important thing in common now: their recent acquisition by the Italian company Bending Spoons.