Streaming video traffic is soaring, putting an increasing strain on the operator network as it tries to provide a great experience for its subscribers. But just throwing more caches at the problem isn’t fixing the underlying issue: the old way of delivering video through traditional CDNs is inadequate to meet the demand. A different approach is needed, one that combines CDN technologies with edge compute to create a new kind of cloud which can tackle the challenges facing streaming video services today: provide faster start-up times, reduce buffering, ensure higher quality bitrates, and analyze more data to provide a better video experience. This talk will discuss the current state of video delivery, how it is evolving to require edge compute, some examples of applications that might run in the new cloud edge, and how operators can take early advantage of this innovative transition.

Today's online video audiences require a seamless experience that allows them to be able to enjoy their video content wherever/whenever they want, whether that’s streaming from a plane or watching when off the grid. This talk will discuss how an algorithmic approach to streaming video delivery can enhance the video experience by anticipating, and even pre-downloading content for when viewers are in locations with bad, or no, connectivity.

As OTT increases in popularity, it’s critically important that providers and operators understand the fundamental differences between quality of service (QoS, a network measurement) and quality of experience (QoE, a measurement of the end-user’s video experience). This talk will discuss these differences and focus on the need for increased attention to QoE including how non-intrusive, active monitoring technologies can identify bottlenecks in the IP delivery chain and alert operations teams to potential future buffering events which might be mitigated before they have a significant impact on the video experience and potential customer churn.

Pay TV penetration is down in U.S. homes, which means that multi-system operators (MSOs) are working overtime to prevent even deeper video subscriber losses by launching IP-based services like TV Everywhere and OTT platforms. But just adopting an anytime, anywhere delivery strategy isn’t enough. MSOs must innovate further to battle against pure-play OTT providers like Netflix, Hulu, and others. This talk will discuss how content packaging may be the innovation MSOs need. By employing recommendation engines and other personalization technologies, MSOs could provide subscribers with a value proposition that might persuade them to stick with a traditional pay TV service. MSOs would be able to open additional revenue streams with minimal risk by diversifying their content offerings and possibly decreasing subscriber loss.

The Service Provider Edge Cloud has emerged as a new model for content delivery that extends commercial or private CDN infrastructure deep into last mile networks of mobile, telco and cable service providers. When integrated with upstream CDNs through Streaming Video Alliance-approved open APIs, the Service Provider Edge Cloud creates the ultimate content delivery network, leveraging the reach and scale of the last mile networks to offer low latency, high capacity, high QoE and optimal economics. This session will review how this new, web-scale model for content delivery works, and how it has proved irresistible for those CDNs who use it today.

Cloud-native video services can not only scale and provide instant redundancy, but also connect to systems that can leverage a huge amount of big data to automate tasks that traditionally required a human manual intervention. This can enable service operators and content providers the opportunity to easily implement innovation video experiences. This talk will discuss how cutting-edge cloud offerings like Amazon Rekognition and AWS Media Services can provide unique solutions such as automatically creating frame-accurate clips, learning from audience preferences to enrich viewing experiences by inserting personalized, server-side ads, and other use cases.

Applications and services are being pressed to deliver more secure content and solutions while still competing on performance, leading many content providers to bespoke, DIY, and implement complex operational solutions for delivering content to their audiences. This talk will discuss how Microsoft faces this challenge with a diversity of consumer applications like Bing and multi-tenant enterprise applications like Office 365 while bringing a unique, innovative, and different CDN to the market: one built jointly with a global WAN for private connectivity to content, focused on end-to-end security, attack readiness, and balancing performance with reliability.

Consumers expect high-quality, reliable video delivery, regardless of where or how they view video. With every second of delivery time bringing potential signal disruptions, latency, and buffering, having a robust and resilient CDN strategy is critical for any business looking to deliver video at scale. In this session, panelists will discuss how higher volume, new platforms, and emerging formats like 4K effect video delivery and related requirements; how multi-CDN approaches and new traffic routing technologies can deliver quality video cost-effectively; and how companies can avoid costly, large-scale infrastructure buildouts and employ flexible, video-first CDN strategies.

The complexity for video providers continues to increase, while the options for handling it continue to grow. Cloud, Hybrid, DIY, OVP, etc - there are as many platform architectures as there are platforms. Open, multivendor solutions can yield many benefits: choice, accelerated service creation, cost management, and more. However, integrating and hardening these platforms can be challenging. Platforms leveraging a core set of pre-integrated capabilities can offer greater stability and reduced deployment time, allowing new video services to be launched with minimal risk. Kurt Michel of SeaChange and Howard Barouxis of Broadpeak will discuss their latest thoughts on video platform adoption strategies.

Many content publishers encode and package their content with little regard for the impact on the delivery experience. Although consumers are buying 4K and HDR-enabled TVs and mobile device resolution continues to increase, does it make sense for every piece of content to be encoded in those higher-end bitrates? And, how can a publisher measure their encoding quality? This talk will discuss the present and future of video encoding, the impact publisher decisions have on video delivery, and how real publishers are using next generation codes, and a variety of measurement metrics, to ensure a great quality of experience for their audience.

As the popularity of online video increases, network congestion and delivery latency are becoming major impediments to a seamless end user experience. And although technologies like WebRTC can potentially solve some of these challenges, it’s a relatively new approach for streaming. This talk will discuss how P2P networks might be able to accelerate adoption and use of alternative streaming approaches like WebRTC by analyzing deep insights from Strive Media’s P2P network, the underlying infrastructure, and how this innovative network has worked to mitigate congestion and latency for a popular Asian sports provider.

CDN providers often must implement extra ordinary solutions to build high performance systems which usually come at the cost of power and rack space. While processor performance continues to increase generation after generation, storage and memory fundamentally have not evolved for decades. This talk will discuss how entirely new classes of storage and memory might hold the promise to remove historical system bottlenecks and streamline CDN architectures.

Companies have many options today when it comes to selecting or building a CDN for video delivery and OTT services. They can roll their own, partner with providers, or choose a combination of multiple approaches. ATN International faced a tough decision in deciding on their OTT delivery strategy, ultimately selecting a multi-operator solution. This talk discusses how and why they selected that approach, the challenges they faced, and some of the new technology features, like orchestration and edge computing, that they hope to capitalize on in the near future.

Online video is growing rapidly, and although that sounds like great news for the industry, this growth is causing a lot of stress for video service providers and OTT platforms worldwide because of the growing set of challenges it brings in an uncertain future. To meet the demands of today’s video-hungry subscribers, operators and content providers need video OTT and CDN platforms that are based on software architecture that is open and agile, and has the capability to scale to peak demand within seconds. Operators must look to new on-premise and hybrid implementations that reduce costs and increase the speed of implementation. The ability to add new features or services within days rather than months is now vital. This panel will discuss how architectural approaches like Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC), NFV, and software-defined components are vital to optimize delivery, storage, and processing at the network operator’s edge and throughout the video delivery chain.

Streaming media infrastructure is rapidly evolving, and no one is putting the future into practice more than China's OTT services. Chinese OTT providers have had to quickly develop solutions for both dense metro areas facing bandwidth overload and rural areas facing slow and spotty broadband connections. These challenges have led to leading-edge solutions being rolled out on a broad scale. This talk will discuss how the Chinese market is integrating proprietary codecs for a more streamlined system that performs well in challenging environments and how companies globally can take a cue from these efforts to provide a better, more-cost-effective content viewing experience.

With the arrival of 4K, 8K, and VR, we’re seeing rapidly increased need to deliver more content in numerous formats for multi-platform distribution, file sizes, and the volume of content that media organizations need to exchange. At the same time, they face shorter turnaround times and must collaborate both internally and externally to survive in today’s highly competitive media industry. Through a case study with Technicolor, this talk will discuss the challenges that media organizations face in dealing with today’s larger file sizes and soaring volumes of content, the role of digital media and data services in addressing these challenges, the tools and techniques that have been implemented to achieve fast, secure and collaborative workflows, and how emerging technologies will impact future workflows.

By 2020, 20 billion “things” will be connected to the Internet, according to a recent prediction by Gartner, which will generate volumes of data beyond comprehension as they sense, communicate, and interact with their environments and people. It's impractical to transmit the voluminous data generated by IoT over the internet to centralized public clouds for real-time analysis as it’s expensive, places unrealistic demands on the network (bandwidth & latency), and presents security challenges. This talk will discuss how offloading interactive application functionality such as real-time analysis to edge compute, real-time analysis, and data aggregation makes technical and economic sense as well as how highly secure edge computing strategies for delay sensitive applications can prevent an environmental disaster, reduce costs, spawn innovation, and even save lives.

China faces some unique challenges when it comes to delivering live streaming, but none more so than concurrency and latency. Providing massive live events with extremely low latency through a variety of networks can prove very problematic. This talk will present an analysis of the underlying challenges in delivering large-scale, live events (latency, buffering, time-to-first-byte, scale) and how the delivery architecture design must evolve to meet the needs of a geographically-diverse, highly-demanding audience.

Internet usage has been steadily expanding across the globe. And although consumers employ it for a lot of different activities, video keeps rising to the top. In fact, by 2021, 82% of all traffic on the internet will be video. But just because people are using smaller and smaller screens to watch their video content doesn’t mean their expectations are any different from watching traditional television. They want a consistent, high-quality, interruption-free experience. And to do that, you need the right network. This talk presents tips, tricks, and insights for meeting the world’s growing video consumption with a network built for media.

The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) had been streaming on-demand video to consumers for years. Last year, the venerable organization was tasked with launching a 24/7 live stream “broadcast channel” ofPBS Kids’content into a host of applications and devices. This talk will discuss how PBS had to quickly learn the nuts and bolts of live streaming and how it differed from on-demand streaming; how to get content from a cable in a data center out to the cloud; how to best transcode data, stitch in local “ad” spots, and incorporate time delays for the various U.S. time zones; how to establish high availability and failover in case the live source went down; and so much more.

To compete with pureplay OTT providers and other streaming services, cable operators are clamoring for content to populate their burgeoning online video platforms. But therein lies the challenge: they don't often have the resources or expertise to manage individual licensing deals across a variety of distributors and content owners. That's where companies like TeleUP can help. This talk explores how cable operators can tackle that challenge and develop streaming service revenue without the headaches of managing a variety of content providers.

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