2019 Streaming Summit Videos – Las Vegas (April 8/9)

Amazon Video Fireside Chat: A New Ballgame: The Tech Behind Amazon’s LIVE Sports

Amazon kicked off live sports on Prime Video in 2017 with a ground-breaking NFL partnership that brought 11 Thursday Night Football games to Prime members worldwide. While Amazon Prime Video has continued the NFL partnership for 2018 and 2019, Amazon has launched AVP, PGA Tour, NBA League Pass, and more. This is just the beginning. During this fireside chat, learn how Amazon Prime Video built their live platform from the ground up and are tackling the future of live programming with innovative experiences and high quality at scale.

Speakers:

BA Winston – Global Head of Digital Video Playback and Delivery, Amazon Prime Video
Dan Rayburn – Conference Chairman, Streaming Summit

Fireside Chat: Hulu’s Live TV Service – What We Did, What We Learned, And What’s Next

It’s been two years since Hulu launched its live service and the television industry has changed dramatically in this time. With 33 million adults cutting the cord in 2018 alone, there’s been a massive shift in demand as more viewers turn towards television that’s delivered over the internet as their main channel for live sports, news, and episodes of their favorite shows. Hear how Hulu’s tech team is scaling for its rapid growth, managing its metadata, and supporting a growing list of devices across the ecosystem.

Speakers:

Rafael Soltanovich – VP, Software Development, Hulu
Dan Rayburn – Conference Chairman, Streaming Summit

The Business of Sports Streaming: Challenges and Opportunities

A fraying pay TV bundle and consumer adoption of over-the-top streaming opens opportunities for sports brands to build direct-to-consumer models. But with the wholesale broadcast and pay TV model still generating much bigger and better economics than streaming, challenges remain for monetizing video online. This session discusses the rising cost of content, how rights holders are analyzing streaming media services, and where additional revenue can be generated online, be it subscription and/or advertising.

Speakers:

Brian Ring – Principal Analyst, Ring Digital
Scott Sonnenberg – Chief Global Partnerships Officer, L.A. Clippers
Erik Schwartz – Head of Tech, AAF
Blake Stuchin – VP, Digital Media Business Development, National Football League
Mark Floreani – CEO, Co-Founder, FloSports

Best Practices for Deploying CMAF, DASH and HLS at Scale

Fragmented MP4 was the first step in the emergence of the future of HTTP streaming and the realization of the Common Media Application Format (CMAF). At its core it offers the ability to decouple segments from the manifest specification and use HLS or DASH without duplicating your video bits. CMAF truly offers much more and promises to solve the cache efficiency issues of the past, offer truly scalable low latency solutions, and provide real solutions for DRM across devices and platforms. This panel dives into some of the challenges, benefits, and real world timing considerations to keep in mind as some of the major brands in the industry start taking steps to roll out CMAF to the masses.

Speakers:

David Hassoun – CEO, RealEyes
David McLary – VP, Video Technology, NBC Sports Digital
Cooper Pope – Director, Multi-Platform Video Solutions, WarnerMedia
Will Law – Chief Architect, Media Cloud Engineering, Akamai Technologies

Roku Fireside Chat: The Future of TV is Fueled by Free Ad-Supported Streaming

Cord-cutting is accelerating at a rapid pace and streaming has become mainstream. Subscription services remain an important driver but consumers are demanding more – they want free content that comes with a better ad experience. Scott Rosenberg, GM of Platform Business at Roku, will share perspective on what is driving the rise of free, ad-supported streaming, how Roku is improving the TV ad experience and why all TV and TV ads will be streamed.

Speakers:

Dan Rayburn – Conference Chairman, Streaming Summit
Scott Rosenberg – GM, Platform Business, Roku

Free, Subscription TVOD and Ad Supported: Hybrid Next-Gen OTT Business Models

New OTT entrants are tiering their offerings, with multiple tiers and differing price points, combining advertising with subscriptions, and developing innovative new packages and bundles. As business models get more complex, and the cost of content licensing on the rise, what will the next generation of OTT services looks like? Can subscription and advertising business models support and enhance one another? Will new tiering models delight or confuse audiences? A diverse panel of business leaders explore the latest developments and discuss the challenges and success OTT services are having with free, ad supported and subscription OTT business models.

Speakers:

Jon Watts – Managing Partner, MTM
Gideon Gilboa – SVP, Product Marketing, Kaltura
Alok Gera – CTO, Synamedia
Cameron Douglas – VP, Home Entertainment, Fandango
Peter Gibson – Executive Director, Comcast Technology Solutions

Eros Digital Fireside Chat: Binge Watching India: How The Number One OTT Platform in India Is Revolutionizing the Market

India is playing a key role in changing the dynamics of the world’s entertainment consumption story as OTT platforms gain huge popularity. With 15.9 million paying subscribers and 142 million registered users worldwide, Eros Now is the number one SVOD platform in India and the fourth largest OTT platform globally. Hear about the evolution of the market in India and learn how the Eros Now platform caters to various audiences, with a library of over 11,000 films across ten different languages.

Speakers:

Dan Rayburn – Conference Chairman, Streaming Summit
Rishika Lulla – CEO, Eros Digital

Case Study: Taking the World TeamTennis to OTT in 50 days

TeamTennis was founded in 1974 by Billie Jean King and is the world’s most renowned professional tennis league, with eight coed teams based around the US playing a three-week season every summer. Heading into the 2018 season, WTT’s new ownership sought to create a comprehensive direct-to-consumer video offering and position WTT as a digital-first sports property. This presentation discusses the challenges faced with a timetable of only 50 days, to create a workflow and design an OTT platform, to produce and deliver all 43 matches.

Speakers:

Doug Sicchitano – Founder, TDS Media

Project OAR, Making Addressable Ads On TV A Reality

A new consortium, led by TV manufacturer VIZIO, is promising to assemble the right technology platform and media partners to make addressable ads on television a reality, as soon as early 2020. The group, dubbed “Project OAR” (for “Open Addressable Ready”), will define technical standards for TV programmers and platforms to deliver targeted advertising in linear and on-demand formats on smart TVs. The founding members include Disney Media Networks (which includes ABC, ESPN and Freeform), Comcast’s FreeWheel and NBCUniversal, Discovery, CBS, AT&T’s Xandr and WarnerMedia’s Turner, Hearst Television and AMC Networks. Members of the OAR consortium talk about the deployment of a new, open standard for addressable advertising on connected TVs.

Speakers:

Alan Wolk – Co-Founder/Lead Analyst, TV[R]EV
Mike Rosellini – VP, Digital Operations, Hearst
Geoff Wolinetz – SVP, Client Relationships, FreeWheel
Rob Gill – VP, Data Strategy & Operations, WarnerMedia
Jodie McAfee – SVP, Sales and Marketing, Inscape

Google Cloud and fuboTV Fireside Chat: Building An OTT Platform In Under 24 months

TT viewership continues to expand, but successfully streaming low latency live sports, entertainment and news remains a complex endeavor. Yet fuboTV, a sports-focused live TV streaming service, has emerged as a cable replacement by building a scalable cloud-native streaming platform from the ground up in less than two years, delivering great audience experiences with +100% YoY subscriber growth. In this fireside chat, learn how fuboTV and Google Cloud are partnering to accelerate their global reach and subscriber growth in pursuit of a better live stream viewing experience.

Speakers:

Geir Magnusson – CTO, fuboTV
Anil Jain – Managing Director Telecommunications, Media and Entertainment, Google Cloud

Presentation: The Latest Technical and Business Progress With AV1

The Alliance for Open Media made headlines last year with the announcement of the next-generation video codec AV1 at NAB 2018. Since then a lot has happened. This talk will review both the technical progress and business developments that have impacted the broadcast industry. We will look at improvements in encoder performance, the broad availability of AV1 decoders, new product announcements, independent quality evaluations and AV1 deployment at scale.

Speakers:

Nathan Edge – Senior Research Engineer, Mozilla

Improving The End-User Experience For Video Advertising

In this session, the experts weigh in on at what has gone right in the execution and user-experienceof video advertising and what’s being done to increase targeting for brands and decrease repetitious or otherwise poor ad experiences for users. Are there breakdowns in communication between parties in the video ad tech ecosystem What are they, what is causing them and what progress is being made to address them? This panel explores how challenges in areas like device fragmentation, format evolution, and live at scale are being solved.

Speakers:

Mike Green – VP, Product Marketing & Technology Partnerships, Brightcove
Kevin Schaum – VP, Advanced Solutions Group, SpotX
Katherine Conklin – Director of Network Partnerships and Live Operations, FOX
Andre Swanston – CEO, Tru Optik

Best Practices for Video Packaging, Playback and Low-Latency Delivery

Delivering media content at scale for local, regional and global audiences requires content to be made available for successful consumption on many devices and in a range of different user environments. This session focuses on the options and best practices for packaging media for the best playback and delivery to the end user. Providing insight into the options available in media delivery workflows, panelists will discuss questions such as: what formats and frameworks are available and the benefits they offer, how latency can be reduced for live and time sensitive applications, how to achieve high quality, un-interrupted playback and how incorporating services like security and advertising into stream delivery affects packaging and playback.

Speakers:

Rob Dillon – Digital Operations Manager, Tribune Media
Massimo Bertolotti – Broadband CTO, SKY Italia
Steve Miller-Jones – VP, Product Strategy, Limelight Networks
David Heppe – GM, Imagine Communications
Darren Lepke – Head of Video Product Management, Verizon Digital Media Services

How Streaming News Services are Disrupting Cable News Networks

Forget about the cable news network wars. The big battle for market position these days is over the new breed of streaming video news networks. With Fox News having just launched Fox Nation late last year and NBC News planning to debut NBC News Signal this spring, the market will soon have major entries from all the big broadcasters and news networks, plus OTT-only services like Cheddar and Vice. This session looks at the rapid growth of the streaming video news market, the drivers of that growth, the jockeying for position among the services, and the opportunities and challenges they face.

Speakers:

Alan Breznick – Cable/Video Practice Leader, Light Reading
Nick Sallon – Head of US News Partnerships, Twitter
Adam Wiener – EVP, GM, CBS Local Digital Media
Blake Sabatinelli – CEO, Newsy
Rebekah Dopp – Principal, News & Local Media, Global Partnerships, Google

SRT Technical Panel: Implementations and Best Practices

This session encourages dialogue amongst SRT developers and prospective developers related to the implementation of SRT. Specifically, the panel will outline the status of SRT, the target applications and workflows that SRT solves, the roadmap for enhancements of the technology, and implementation stories from various developers. SRT developers will describe why they implemented the protocol, the challenges they faced, the benefits of the effort, and recommendations for progressing the protocol and technology for future development.

Speakers:

Marc Cymontkowski – VP, Engineering, Haivision
Ty Bekiares – Director Engineering, Proof of Concept, Gogo
Martin Smole – Director, Encoding, Bitmovin
Charlie Good – CTO, Co-Founder, Wowza Media Systems
Konstantin Wilms – SVP, Media & Cloud Architect, Deluxe

NBC Sports Fireside Chat: Live Sports Streaming, Building a Platform at Quality and Scale

NBC Sports Digital and Playmaker Media regularly stream some of the most prestigious properties in sports and have focused on both high concurrent traffic and scale, and now operate on more than 20,000 events per year, resulting in billions of consumed minutes. Eric Black highlights NBC Sports Group’s successful development of NBC Sports Digital and Playmaker Media, as well as discusses NBC Sport’s ongoing efforts to provide best-in-class products that include live video streaming, short-form videos, sport-specific websites, and fantasy sports information.

Speakers:

Dan Rayburn – Conference Chairman, Streaming Summit
Eric Black – SVP, US Operations & Video Streaming, NBCUniversal Direct to Consumer, Peacock
David McLary – VP, Video Technology, NBC Sports Digital

Amazon Fire TV Fireside Chat: Building Partner Relationships By Working Back From the Customer

Learn how Amazon manages partner relationships to build products and services that delight customers and drive partner success. During the conversation, Matt will discuss the different trends that are guiding the SMP and Smart TV market, providing insights on how those are impacting some of the long-standing traditions and relationships within the industry. As part of the discussion Matt discusses Amazon’s ongoing work with third parties—from top OTT video services to traditional cable companies—sharing his vision for the business, and addressing some of the challenges the industry faces moving forward.

Speakers:

Dan Rayburn – Conference Chairman, Streaming Summit
Matt Clark – Director of Business Development, Fire TV

Key Tech Requirements for Building and Managing An OTT Service

OTT offerings are proliferating, as major studio-broadcasters and other industry participants look for new ways to monetize their content assets, responding to growing consumer demand. However, developing, launching and operating a high-quality OTT offering remains challenging, in terms of technology and operations. Hear the key requirements for building and managing an OTT service and learn how to critically evaluate the capabilities of the supplier base and the balance between insourcing and outsourcing and assessing the future evolution of the video workflow.

Speakers:

Jon Watts – Managing Partner, MTM
Bart Spriester – VP, GM, Comcast Technology Solutions
Igor Macaubas – Head Of Online Video Platform, Product and Engineering, Grupo Globo
Anil Jain – Managing Director Telecommunications, Media and Entertainment, Google Cloud
Ashutosh Nayak – VP, Engineering, CBS News Digital

Presentation: X-Ray, Discover What Amazon Prime Members Can’t Stream Without

Have you ever wondered ‘who’s that actor?’ or ‘what’s that song?’ while watching TV? Amazon Prime Video instantly answers these questions and more with X-Ray, their magical IMDb-powered feature that customers love! X-Ray enhances customer’s viewing experiences by making a rich suite of contextually relevant information such as cast, music, trivia, and curated bonus material available at their fingertips while they watch. Learn about the evolution of X-Ray, how Amazon Prime Video is driving streaming engagement through interactive experiences on everything from movies to live sports, and how they work with creators to enhance their storytelling.

Speakers:

Alex Kravis – Head of Product, Prime Video X-Ray, Amazon Prime Video

Presentation: How The Worlds Largest Esports Company Delivers More For Less With Their Live Streaming Workflow

ESL is the worlds largest esports company and hosts some of the highest profile events in the industry, including a 2 week esports festival every year in Katowice, Poland. Hear how ESL’s unique approach to live streaming delivers the scale and quality of traditional sports broadcasts using only a fraction of the resources and budget. This presentation discusses both the challenges faced, and the innovative technical solutions used to tackle them as well as the differences between traditional sports and esports broadcasting, and what they can potentially learn from each other.

Speakers:

Steven “Claw” Jalicy – Director of Streaming, ESL

Fireside Chat: Embracing the Evolution, Accelerating Innovation through the Cloud

In today’s increasingly connected digital world, viewers expect instant access to content in multiple formats and languages, forcing media and entertainment companies to rethink their business models in order to respond to these changes and be successful in this new landscape. In this fireside chat, industry experts from AWS and Deluxe discuss changes in the market, the future workflows of content creators and distributors, and how the cloud will be the key to helping companies secure, transform, scale and rapidly deliver content.

Speakers:

Andy Shenkler – Chief Product Officer, Deluxe
Ian McPherson – Head of M&E Partnerships – Americas, Amazon Web Services

Presentation: Integrating TV and OTT Into A Single User Experience

Over the top streaming video is the fastest growing entertainment category for both traditional pay TV subscribers and for cord-cutters and consumers are increasingly finding it difficult to get an overview of all the content available to them and deciding what to watch. What are the biggest consumer challenges and what will create successful experiences for consumers in this new world? This presentation presents how new tools like deep metadata integration, live OTT guide, cross channel search, browse and resume points create a better entertainment experience and drive the usage that both AVOD and SVOD providers need to be successful.

Speakers:

Christian Petersen – Sr. Director, Product Management, Comcast

Best Practices for Encoding and Packaging for Live Event Streams

Today’s live event ecosystem includes a wide range of destination targets, from Facebook to YouTube to customized playback experiences in web browsers, mobile apps, and smart TVs. The vast majority of deployment systems require RTMP ingest and use a combination of HLS/DASH/CMAF for packaging. In this session, learn which encoders can best assist a live stream producer with the best bitrate-to-quality ratio as well as server technologies that can distribute in multiple packaging formats to multiple destinations.

Speakers:

Robert Reinhardt – Video Solutions Architect, VideoRx

Comcast and EPIX Fireside Chat: How an Aggregated User Experience Drives Content Discovery

Comcast’s X1 platform offers all ranges of content partners – both established and emerging – the ability to seamlessly integrate their programming into X1’s award-winning user experience and bring it directly to the biggest screen in the home, where most video consumption is still happening. EPIX, the premium TV network owned by MGM, joined the platform last June and is already seeing great benefits from the aggregated user experience. Join us for an engaging conversation on what this means for consumers and hear how Comcast’s X1 platform helps content owners reach a wider audience.

Speakers:

Monty Sarhan – EVP, GM, EPIX
Daniel Spinosa – VP, Entertainment Services, Comcast Cable

Disney, Apple, WarnerMedia: Carving Out A Niche In a Crowded Market

While the OTT video market may already look pretty crowded now, it’s about to become even more congested. With new streaming services on their way from the likes of Disney, WarnerMedia, Apple, Discovery, Viacom and other major video players this year, the market will soon be more glutted than ever. What are these services’ strategies for carving out market share? What impact will they have on the overall streaming video market?

Speakers:

Alan Breznick – Cable/Video Practice Leader, Light Reading
Nii Addy – Head of Marketing, Philo
Mitch Weinraub – Director of Product Development, AirTV and Director of Advanced Video Products, Dish Network
Brett Sappington – Senior Director of Research, Parks Associates
Adam Lewinson – CCO, Tubi

Bringing OTT Advertising and Innovation to Local Markets

75% of U.S. households consume some form of streaming video via connected TVs. With local advertisers making up 60% of all total ad budgets, broadcasters who predicate their business on selling advertising in local-markets, OTT and connected TV platforms have equally presented new opportunities and challenges. This session discusses how linear first broadcasters should be thinking about OTT and connected TV, particularly as it pertains to part of their distribution and advertising strategies in today’s media landscape.

Speakers:

Aman Sareen – CEO, ZypMedia
Adam Ware – GM, Sinclair Broadcast Group/STIRR
Tom Sly – VP, Revenue National Media, E.W. Scripps Company
Gregory Raifman – President, Nexstar Digital
Adam Lowy – Chief Commercial Officer, Telaria

CBS and Google Fireside Chat: Advanced TV Trends, Opportunities, and Solutions for The Future Of TV

Advanced TV presents new opportunities to streamline and enhance multiple areas of a broadcaster’s business, across content development, distribution, monetization, and more. Whether it’s the ability to reach viewers across screens with new direct-to-consumer apps or engage viewers with more personalized content and ads, the opportunities are endless. Learn what trends and opportunities are impacting the media and entertainment industry and hear best practices for delivering a great viewing experience everywhere, today and in the future.

Speakers:

Domenic DiMeglio – EVP Distribution, Marketing & Operations, CBS Interactive
Dave Healy – Head of Broadcast & Cable Partnerships, Google

Engineering A Modern Super Bowl Streaming Workflow From The Ground Up

This presentation details all the components of the end-to-end video streaming workflow, used to stream Super Bowl 53 across both the CBS Sports & CBS All Access platforms. Learn how CBS Interactive setup signal acquisition, encoding for maximum reliability and visual quality, ad workflow, private network interconnects for delivering content to origins in multiple locations, and how a multi-CDN strategy was implemented, including the importance of doing CDN decisioning in a manner that can react to real-time changes in network conditions.

Speakers:

Zac Shenker – Director of Engineering, Video Delivery, Optimization & Experience, CBS Interactive

Roundtable Session: QoE and Last Mile Video Delivery

With millions of consumers switching to OTT, and resolutions and screen sizes growing faster than ever before, can the current CDN-centric model for streaming scale to meet the demand? And more importantly, how can video delivery continue to grow while focusing on providing a good quality of experience for viewers? This session discusses the different approaches to content delivery being deployed today with the goal of providing significant price and performance advantages across live and on-demand use cases.

Speakers:

Rob Malnati – Sr. Director, Strategic Business Development, Citrix
Lacques Le Mancq – CEO, President, Broadpeak
Jeff Gilbert – VP, Strategy and Business Development, Qwilt
Wolfgang Zeller – Head of Video, Consumer Product & Services, Vodafone
Rob Tomkins – Senior Director, Innovations, Blue Planet

Optimizing Advertising Content Workflows Across TV and Online Video

Managing and executing advertising campaigns across TV and online has a distinct set of challenges. From format, technology, and metadata incongruences, there are frequent obstacles on both the buy- and sell-side of digital advertising. On the buy-side, creating assets and metadata that are compatible across TV and online, while maintaining quality, can seem laborious. On the sell-side, optimizing publisher performance to maximize fill, without compromising quality, is a delicate balancing act. Learn about the most common issues encountered while optimizing advertising content workflows across TV and online video and hear potential solutions for avoiding common pitfalls.

Speakers:

Joel Korpi – Senior Product Manager, Xandr
Vik Kathuria – CEO, Operam Media
Tal Chalozin – CTO, Co-Founder, Innovid
Josh Boaz – Co-Founder, Managing Director, Direct Agents
Tyler Fitch – VP, Programmatic Partnerships, Tubi

How To Make Codec Choices When Platform Support Is Unknown

Gone are the days where H.264 covered all devices and platforms. Today, 1080p is required for mobile devices, with 4K HDR content increasing to the TV, and not far over the horizon for even advanced phones with OLED displays. This means video distributors must deliver the same quality and experience across all devices which requires them to navigate multiple codecs and video standards. This panel discusses how an OTT service can maximize their technology investment while providing the best consumer experience possible when it comes to the video codecs they support.

Speakers:

Mark Donnigan – VP, Marketing, Beamr
Ed Silvester – Head of Video R&D, DAZN
Dan Pisarski – VP, Engineering, LiveU
Stefan Lietsch – CTO, Zattoo
Chris Fehring – Manager, Solutions Architecture, Pac-12 Networks

Using VMAF, Netflix’s Video Encoding Metric to Measure QoE

Netflix uses video quality metric VMAF that combines human vision modeling with machine learning, to make automated encoding decisions in their per-title/per-scene encoding workflow. This presentation will cover what VMAF is, how to compute it with free and commercial tools, and how to use VMAF to configure your encoding ladder and make better informed encoding decisions. Learn how VMAF can capture larger differences between codecs, as well as scaling artifacts, in a way that’s better correlated with perceptual quality.

Speakers:

Jan Ozer – Principal, Streaming Learning Center