The tech world at large believes that we’re ready for a Flash-less world, and that HTML5 has had plenty of time to play catch up and surpass Flash capabilities. In this session, learn which transport technologies from HTTP, WebRTC, RTSP, and even RTMP work best, when to use them, and where to put your development dollars for maximum return.

To date, most corporate implementations of streaming media in the enterprise have focused on corporate communications and training. Now, organizations are starting to use Streaming Media in customer facing environments and in revenue generating opportunities. This will be the next breakthrough in Streaming Media in the enterprise and education. This session will present real world scenarios of how streaming media has been used to improve customer service, gain new customers, and provide additional services – often times through a combination of streaming video and real time video and audio. This can’t miss session will get you thinking about ways to take your streaming implementation to the next level.

Learn the ins and outs of how a professionally produced, live stream, talk show reached 12 million viewers in it's first season strictly through Facebook Live and with no major network. See how the show was pitched, sold, made and how it integrated brands in unique ways for sponsorship. Attendees will hear from NBC's Al Roker who co-produces The Never Settle Show and Mario Armstrong the EP & Host.

This session will present Beamr’s content-adaptive technology and its role as a stand-alone bitrate optimizer for already compressed H.264 files, and Beamr’s content-adaptive rate-control which when integrated with the encoder enables HEVC 1080p at just 1.5Mbps. Attendees will learn why the fixed recipe approach to encoding is not sufficient to achieve the low bitrates that congested networks require with the quality that is being demanded by consumers.

Attend this session for your chance to win: For every qualified OTT content distributor, managed service operator, telco, or media & entertainment company who attends the session, Beamr will grant a free 45-day evaluation license of up to ten (10) Beamr 5 or Beamr Optimizer instances. Beamr 5 is the world’s best HEVC software encoder SDK and Beamr Optimizer, formerly known as Beamr Video, is widely acclaimed for it’s ability to reduce bitrates by up to 50% without video quality degradation. For those looking to experience the benefits of the Beamr optimization process as part of their HEVC encoding workflow, Beamr will grant an upgrade to Beamr 5x which is the world's highest quality HEVC encoder able to produce 4K at less than 10Mbps and 1080p at just 1.5Mbps. A small administrative fee will be required, but qualified customers will have the option of putting these files into their production workflows. Not every company will qualify and Beamr reserves the right to deny any evaluation or upgrade request.

Video is changing the way companies function. Advanced Enterprise Video Platforms (EVPs) power corporate intranets and allow marketers to reach customers via multiple channels. The key element that is changing the market is how content creation has shifted from using professionally designed content to employee-generated content. For this shift to be successful, EVP tools must be easy to use for employees at all levels. Plus, EVPs also must serve as the central integration hub for video-related technologies, from intranet CDNs to 360° VR video. In this presentation, we will focus on how video is changing the way companies like DHL, Volkswagen, Vodafone and Allianz operate, how video can be used to improve the customer experience, key integration challenges and the importance of having added levels of security within the EVP.

Streaming video is exploding as fast as technology and audiences can keep up. Whether originating as social media-based branded content, destination viewing, simple live streaming, or in-the-moment broadcasting; the "new TV" is live and available across multiple devices and platforms. Roker Media and its analytics division Roker Labs dig deep into how live streaming is finding its audience. From broadcasting on social networks to developing OTT-first content, how are broadcasters leveraging social broadcasting to drive viewers to their programming, brands, and content? Which platforms are making philosophical and technological advances to win at live streaming? How will paid boosting of Live on Facebook affect the industry? And what are Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat doing that will make this area competitive for years? 

WebM VP9 has seen adoption by major media companies and has over two billion devices that support playback. This talk will give an update on some of the latest performance benchmarks and discuss some VP9 encoding best practices around high bit-depth and HDR. The talk will also include an update on development of the next-generation AV1 codec by the Alliance for Open Media.

Progressive Web Apps allow websites to offer app-like experiences with offline access, fast loading and immersive user experiences. For media companies, these features make the mobile web an attractive distribution platform with new ways to optimize the viewer experience and the ability to offer new capabilities such as offline playback. This talk will discuss some of the key features of Progressive Web Apps, discuss real-world outcomes, and show an open source application that uses PWA features to offline and pre-cache media for responsive and flexible playback.

Content distributors and aggregators adding HEVC to their delivery pipeline will have plenty of codec options, but who has the time to evaluate their features, output quality, and performance? No worries—codec specialist Jan Ozer has done the work for you. He’s evaluated leading contenders like x265, MainConcept, Beamr, Intel, and NTT and he’ll share his results. You'll walk away from this session with a much clearer picture of the strengths and weaknesses of your HEVC encoding options for VOD streaming.

The industry has made big strides forward in bridging the divides between HLS and DASH, Fragmented MP4s and Transport Streams, CBC and CRT, and the myriad little details that continue to cause fragmentation and chaos in delivery and rendering of DRM-secured content to devices. Achieving cost-effective, cross-platform secure playback remains a critical yet mostly unsolved challenge. While the unified vision of HTML5 and seamless playback across browsers is still several years from potential fruition, there are methods to conquer the madness and implement delightful, yet secure, OTT services. This presentation will provide an update on the state of DRM including insight into the apps vs browsers debate, customer needs, and best practices recommendations.

Social networks have experienced an explosion in video consumption. As a result, they have become increasingly more important to publishers and content owners for discoverability, audience reach and monetization. In this session you will hear about the landscape for video across social platforms and how to take advantage of the opportunities at scale. Learn about how content owners can delight audiences and generate revenue while maintaining brand visibility on social, and the importance of viewing metrics in social distribution during this interactive discussion.

THIS SESSION WAS CANCELLED.

While traditional media delivery is mainly driven by hardware platforms, OTT delivery solutions rely a lot on software processing from ingest, to transcoding and playback especially with the migration of the whole media processing chain to software-dominated cloud compute services. This presentation will go through the pros and cons of software and hardware processing solutions. It will also discuss recommended processing components to build an OTT platform especially with the convergence between OTT and broadcast applications.

The bandwidth savings and encoding performance of HEVC is undeniable, but how does it fit into existing workflows? This discussion will cover the pros and cons of moving to H.265, how to get the most out the new compression standard, and best practices for integrating HEVC without reinventing your workflow.

While the price of success is high, the cost of failure is even higher. Using operational streaming analytics to monitor and support streaming media deployments is as important as—and in many cases more mission critical than—just deploying an in-player streaming analytics solution. In-player and last mile solutions focus on issues as they affect the customers, which is often too late and does little to improve customer retention and minimize churn. Operational streaming analytics alert content distributors and live streaming solution providers to delivery problems as they happen and provide immediate solution responses, before they become end user issues.

Attend this session for your chance to win: GoPro Hero 5 ($399 value)

As services like Sling TV and Direct TV grow in popularity, viewers are becoming accustomed to being able to replicate the lean-back broadcast experience familiar. But live linear streaming presents a daunting array of challenges, from ingest and encoding to DRM, metadata, and ad insertion. This panel will explore these challenges and discuss a range of solutions.

Social media streaming is exploding right now for businesses of all sizes. Learn about the tools needed to deliver a professional production to take advantage of the interactivity and massive subscriber base of Facebook Live, YouTube and other social services. We'll walk you through encoding setups for a budget of any size to include dedicated audio, pro HD cameras, API integration and multi-streaming.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Epiphan Webcaster social media streaming device ($299.95 value)

Today's CDN platforms are upgrading and building out infrastructure to reach increasingly larger numbers of consumers' mobile devices and SmartTVs across North America, Europe and Asia, and extending their reach to the rest of the world. IBM Cloud Object Storage can provide CDN long tail and origin storage with the advantages of its patented object storage: nearly infinite scalability, 10+ nines of reliability and availability, and the lowest total cost of ownership of any storage platform available today. This presentation will provide all stakeholders in the digital supply chain with usable information about your options for CDN storage.

Roku is the creator of a popular way to stream entertainment to the TV and offers a unique platform for developers to distribute content. In this session, Roku will provide an overview its tools available to publishers, how to make the most of them and what monetization strategy is right for your content. Some topics covered will be new enhancements to Roku Direct Publisher, advertising tools and capabilities and some updated features and content discovery tools available to publishers.

As TV viewing moves further and further into digital, cable networks and media companies are searching for the best ways to reach audiences online. How do they find digital audiences, and what’s the best way to reach them? A roundtable of media and brand executives will share their strategies for success, using a mixture of organic and paid media to drive results. This session will discuss how data is the key to unlocking the power of social video strategies.

This session will provide practical methods for reducing bitrate and retaining the full video quality. Hear how streaming service providers and multi-service operators are applying these techniques to reduce network traffic, improve quality of service, and meet today's consumer video quality expectations for 4k, and other advanced video services.

2017 continues to see big disruption in the TV space. The problem that exists with Internet TV and OTT is that the “consumer experience is terrible.” Many believe that hardware platforms and content providers must come together to address the problem of “how do I easily find what I’m looking for?” While some device manufacturers are developing better universal search, there are still huge unresolved problems for viewers, including inconsistent access to content across platforms, a wide variety of user experiences, and getting unbiased recommendations. This panel will include key players - hardware companies, software companies, and publishers - as they talk about how consumers want to watch video and what the future of TV will look like.

The business of TV is continuously shifting toward the internet and viewers are demanding that OTT content be at their fingertips. In this multi-CDN case study, Ed will discuss how one major publisher has been working with Conviva to deliver one of the best streaming experiences available, leveraging the publisher's proprietary technology stack in concert with Conviva’s data. This solution automatically selects the best CDN based on real-time CDN throughput, cost-efficiency, and bandwidth.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Roku Premiere ($80 value)

Starting from scratch, we’ll show how to do 4K live streaming in minutes. Using technologies from Wowza and others, we'll deliver live adaptive bitrate streaming, record the video for on-demand playback, and deliver the live feed with global any-screen streaming. In the remaining time, you’ll see how to leverage 4K to create an immersive VR/360 experience.

Attend this session for your chance to win: Insta360 Nano ($199 value)

Streaming to one live streaming service is so 2016. Today, in addition to streaming to your own website or app, you may want to distribute your live stream to multiple other outlets like Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Livestream, Twitter, and Twitch. Fortunately, there are a variety of products and services that enable streaming to multiple output locations, from desktop encoders and appliances to cloud services. This session will detail the various options and lay out their pros, cons, and pricing models. 

Virtual Reality (VR) and 360-degree are emerging as two of the most innovative live streaming trends, powering events such as sporting events, concerts, corporate meetings, education, medicine, military applications, and many other areas. In this interactive session, you’ll get to try live demos and get more familiar with the technology as we walk through some common 360-degree live streaming workflows, including the Lollapalooza Berlin 2015 music festival that allowed virtual attendees to attend the live concert series and be immersed with the band on stage. Most VR technologies use industry-standard streaming protocols that can be implemented with common streaming servers and platforms. We’ll show a few examples of fresh on the market 360-degree camera examples, and also review how playback is achieved using common player apps.

In recent months, Pay TV carriers and streaming providers like Hulu and YouTube have introduced "skinny bundles" in an effort to prevent cord-cutters and/or attract younger, price conscious consumers. But many of these offerings don't provide much real choice or only leave providers with slim margins due to high carriage fees. This panel of video industry experts will discuss the latest research on consumer channel priorities and pricing analysis and provide perspectives on what types of bundles consumers want to watch.

In this special session, Dan Rayburn presents a hands-on comparison showcasing the leading streaming devices, and OTT content platforms. Devices from Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Roku, and Sony are compared, along with every major OTT service including new live offerings from Hulu, AT&T and others. You also see a demo of the latest 4K and HDR offerings and learn how to stream content from phones and tablets and display it on your TV.

Learn how Twitch accommodates a user base size larger than the population of New York City each day while maintaining service quality for all users. This presentation will go over Twitch's ABR transcoding solution and how it was built as a high-density solution to bring positive feasibility analysis results in terms of cost-density, video quality, reliability, and software architecture. With close to 10 million daily active users and an average of 106 minutes watched per person per day, you’ll learn how Twitch keeps things running smoothly.

You've carefully compressed. You've strategically transcoded. But that still doesn't guarantee the best streaming video experience for your viewers. Get best practices from behind the scenes and make sure your media delivers around the world without interruptions, without degradation, and without fail.

Attend this session for your chance to win: An iPad Mini with a custom skin ($460 value)

Instantaneously delivering high quality video worldwide to every screen typically leads to complex publishing workflows – but it doesn’t have to. In this session, we’ll discuss how to create scalable processes that streamline operations without sacrificing the video quality your audiences want and expect. We’ll also use real-world examples to show how companies are tackling critical workflow challenges.

Attend this session for your chance to win: GoPro Hero5 Black 4K Action camera ($400 value)

Live event streaming lets viewers experience the action with unsurpassed immediacy and interactivity—both of which are ruined if they find out about a key play or big award on social media before they see it in the stream. Learn how to cut down latency on both startup times and lag times, and whether the coveted 1-second mark is within reach.

Learn how Ontario Hospital Association uses video to engage members, create valuable new partnerships and generate new revenue without new staff or fundraising. The non-profit reaches more than twice the number of people using webcasts than it would through face-to-face meetings and achieved a 280% ROI in less than a year.

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Veterans from the military Special Operations Forces (SOF) community are among our nations greatest   untapped economic assets. The skills learned and honed while in service are directly applicable and invaluable when effectively employed in the private sector. This session with former Special Operations veterans and entrepreneurs will explore how the notions of situational awareness, transparency, empathy, adaptability and integrity inherent to the SOF community can and should be incorporated in your life and within business irrespective of industry.

The advent of online video has brought unprecedented opportunities to educational institutions. Educators can now teach, connect and engage with their students at any time and any place using flipped classrooms, online courses and live streaming. What are the real-life use cases, technologies and best practices for video in education? Further, where might it be going from here? Learn directly from experts in the education field with these how-to presentations.

Streaming directly to social media has exploded. Everyone is looking to enhance their content and expand what they produce on these platforms without a large budget or production team. LiveU’s VP of Engineering, Dan Pisarski will conduct a lively presentation where he looks at the ins and outs of live streaming to social media – and how to get broadcast quality productions out of cloud-based streaming solutions. How are brands and production companies producing content and syndicating online? Which software and service offerings are available to produce everything in the cloud? How can we expect the live production to evolve further? What does the live streaming workflow look like today and how can content creators prepare for the future?

Piracy monitoring systems must evolve from sending DMCA whackamole notices to real-time watermark detection. However, pirate content originates from multiple sources using different watermarking technologies. Using new audio/video watermark detection techniques, learn how torrent and cyberlocker monitoring providers can streamline piracy monitoring workflow to curtail the supply of unauthorized content.

Attend this session for your chance to win: DWA-branded mugs

Leaders in live streaming present case studies that take you behind the scenes of some of the industry’s biggest success stories. Details announced soon!

Streaming is undoubtedly the media to showcase UHD with high quality content readily available. It is now widely accepted that HDR is a key addition to differentiate from existing HD services. But there are challenges for supporting UHD with HDR, particularly for live events—namely, which scheme to adopt, how will HDR co-exist with current services, and most importantly, the availability of screens supporting necessary HDMI, signaling and HDR schemes. This session discusses how OTT operators can overcome these challenges when handling various forms of SDR and HDR live content.

Adaptive bitrate (ABR) is a revolutionary technology that has created the ability for over-the-top delivery of video to all screens. But it has one major drawback: The network resources it consumes grow linearly with the audience. This presentation will show how multicast ABR brings true scalability to live multiscreen video distribution; and how it adds some nice extras to the menu: an enhanced Quality of service and a greatly reduced latency.

As 360-degree video proves itself as one of today’s most immersive video technologies, transporting viewers into the middle of the action, this presentation will provide you with all the insights you need to get started with 360 video content creation. Join The Associated Press to learn about 360 video creation basics, from story boarding to post production. Hear about the resources you need to start a 360 video team, and the necessary editorial workflows that need to be incorporated as you get started with 360 video. The presentation will also look at the technologies you can use to get the most out of 360, including sharing their experiences from the field where they have put a lot of the kit through its paces. The AP will also provide insight into the challenges that lie ahead, from the technological (such as 360 sound) to crossing the divide between 360 and true VR.

It’s been five years since Oculus VR launched their Kickstarter campaign for funding, but the 360 and VR landscape is still evolving, and increasingly fragmented. Learn how Vimeo is taking the scattered landscape and helping standardize it for creators and audiences; from cameras, to editing tools, to metadata, to player visual language, to distribution platforms. Learn about Vimeo’s goal to help define and promote standards, best practices, introduce/set a new benchmark for quality and offer tools that help creators showcase their content in the intended way – the highest quality possible.