Media economist Annie Krukowska, author of the recently published “New TV Economics Report,” joins Streaming Media Connect for an opening keynote fireside chat with Streaming Media’s Nadine Krefetz to explore the key financial trends that will shape streaming in 2027. She also discusses viewing patterns, content licensing, how AI is changing the ways streaming platforms target audiences, and how media consolidation impacts monetization, content licensing, and even ad revenue.

Get in tune with the evolving landscape of video delivery as we explore tunable low-latency architectures and Media over QUIC (MoQ), the emerging protocol poised to recast the future of real-time streaming. This panel explores the trade-offs between latency, quality, and reliability as live streams scale, providing insights into what's next for streamers as they deploy MoQ and map out the future of low-latency video.

While total cost of ownership spans an encyclopedic number of operational touchpoints, managing streaming P&L from CapEx to OpEx ultimately comes down to making targeted, high-impact architectural choices. This panel of streaming ops experts covers practical approaches to optimizing infrastructure, encoding, delivery, and operational costs without compromising the quality and reliability that live audiences demand.

The new generation of autonomous, goal-driven AI agents are poised to reshape ad-buying, ad-decisioning, contextual targeting, and optimized ad insertion across the CTV ecosystem. This panel explores what agentic AI means for advertisers, platforms, and the future of programmatic workflows.

FAST has continued to grow in both scale and engagement, making it an exciting opportunity in CTV. As the market evolves, so too do the expectations of advertisers and distribution partners. Fremantle’s Global Channels unit consists of more than 20 FAST channels worldwide, including BUZZR, Rig TV, and Baywatch. In this keynote fireside chat, Laura Florence, SVP, Global Channels at Fremantle discusses how Fremantle is meeting the needs of advertisers, touch upon some of the common misconceptions around measurement and scale, and explore what is needed to unlock the next phase of growth for this ecosystem.

Connected TV is evolving beyond brand awareness into a measurable, performance-driven channel at the lean-back, living-room epicenter of the entertainment ecosystem. But delivering measurable ad experiences that result in conversions rather than enhanced brand awareness requires rethinking creative, targeting, and attribution actions for the streaming environment. This session breaks down performance advertising strategies and technologies that turn CTV impressions into trackable, revenue-generating outcomes that fuse first- and second-screen engagement into streaming-driven sales.

In an industry buzzing about ways to integrate AI into today’s streaming workflows, strategically positioning the humans in the loop is more critical than ever. How will large-scale streamers in 2027 balance AI automation with human oversight to build workflows that are both efficient and reliable? This panel pinpoints where human judgment still matters most and how to design streamlined pipelines that leverage AI from ingest to processing to observability.

High-performance, redundant, and resilient pipelines are critical to successful, mission-critical sports streams. This panel of seasoned sports streamers explores how sports streaming platforms leverage infrastructure designed to withstand the bursty demands of live sporting events without buckling under pressure. This session covers scaling strategies and failover systems that will keep your high-stakes streams running when your fan base surges in the moments that matter most.

Today’s sports fans are increasingly looking to follow athletes beyond live games and teams and connect with them on a more individual, influencer, day-to-day level. For athletes, this means sharing more of their lifestyles and cultivating and capitalizing on their personal brands. For streamers, this means creating and distributing engaging content from docs to reality TV to health and wellness and more. PlayersTV, a full-service, 360° distribution ecosystem built on ownership-level partnerships with athletes, may be the first channel to approach athlete-centric content as a genre unto itself like cooking or kids & family or anime. It targets fans who want to “follow athletes at a higher clip,” according to PlayersTV co-founder Collin Castellaw. In this exclusive keynote fireside chat, Castellaw discussed the platform’s content and monetization strategy and how PlayersTV sees and aims to define the future of athlete media.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup was the biggest global live sporting event of the year, and streaming was central to its success. The tournament’s 104 matches stress-tested streaming’s reach and resiliency like never before, with record concurrent viewership tuning in across a fragmented landscape of platforms and devices. This panel of expert industry analysts discusses the future of streaming as the primary platform for premium global sports events, what the rights matrix looks like going forward, what worked and what buffered, and lessons learned around localization, personalization, advertising, and subscriber retention and growth.

This session explores how broadcasters and streaming platforms can dramatically accelerate the launch, management, and monetization of FAST channels by automating traditionally manual workflows across content ingestion, scheduling, and ad insertion. We’ll also discuss aspects of channel building where human intervention remains critical. Attendees will learn practical strategies and real-world case studies for compressing channel lifecycle timelines while maintaining quality and scaling operations efficiently across today’s sprawling CTV landscape.

Additional Information Coming Soon!