The keynote first draws on Omdia’s research by laying out the market picture in the content delivery landscape. Building on this, observations of key trends such as open caching and edge delivery highlight how CDN vendors can combat the prevailing forces of commoditization by providing services—beyond purely selling volume—to a cross-section of stakeholders in the media and entertainment space and beyond.

Now that we've reached OTT subscriber saturation in the "easy to reach areas" and important (sports) content has gone OTT-only, the next frontier is reaching rural areas and regions like Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Asia Pacific. This opportunity also creates a whole lot of new challenges for content delivery. In this panel, you hear about those challenges and the solutions available and used today.

With video consumption on mobile phones on the rise, resulting in high expectations from mobile users, content providers need to take a closer look at performance, especially as startup times are so extremely important to keep users watching, and let those advertisement dollars come rolling in. What impacts on the bottom line do we see just from having better performance? In this session, you find out why performance on mobile matters ... big time!

We have talked about low latency (LL) and ultra-low latency (ULL) for years, but this year we might see breakthroughs in implementations for gambling and interactivity as well as in relation to social media. The growth of the edge also has advantages for low latency. So why and how is it useful to marry the two? You hear about different use cases demonstrating why low latency will become even more important and how the edge will play a role in making it happen.

From transcoding and storage all the way to caching and delivery, there are many points for optimization in a complex low-latency streaming stack. We delve into features like request coalescing, intuitive cache pre-warming, per-title encoding, and more to see which are worth looking into and which present diminishing results. Let's uncover why optimized HTTP-based formats are highly relevant in the world of low-latency streaming and what challenges it poses.

Sustainability is a hot topic in media, broadcast, and OTT, and the content delivery industry is taking its first steps toward a more sustainable future. A number of initiatives have emerged, and most major CDN service providers and CDN vendors have dedicated people within the company focusing on sustainability. But what are the results so far, and where are the most important initiatives now? Learn from the frontrunners in content delivery sustainability about their plans and results.

We get and create more and more data from several levels within the content delivery chain. Too much data is not only costly to process, but also introduces delays. It is a constant balance between the amount and granularity of the data and how to turn this into insights that are actually relevant. In this session, you hear best practices on how to do this the right way.

One of the oldest debates in content delivery is about multicast. It was a blessing in the early ages of streaming and IPTV, but eventually was pushed aside by OTT. Now, however, it again is seen as an alternative for large-scale live events to ensure smooth delivery on fixed and mobile networks. The main question is whether it will finally find mass adoption or remain a niche—and if so, for what use cases? We discuss all the pros and cons with this session to find out if multicast is here to stay.

Open caching has been around for years and slowly is moving into a position where its potential can be proven. We've seen announcements made over the last year about adoption by vendors and implementations by telcos and content providers, along with other initiatives such as common tokens and client-based multi-CDN, which also has been open sourced by the SVTA. So what has happened, where are we now, and where is open caching going in the future?

Multi-CDN is now used by roughly 60% of all content providers for video delivery at scale. However, the growth of edge and the capabilities it offers have put in question what the future of multi-CDN will look like. What technical changes are on the horizon with the edge that will impact on how we use multi-CDN in the future? In this session, you hear bright minds share their vision on what will happen and what the technical implications are you need to be thinking about.

Having a good cache hit ratio and avoiding too many cache misses not only improves performance, but also impacts traffic and associated costs back to the origin. There are actually formulas you can apply to optimize cache misses based on scientific research. In this session, you hear what value to expect from these improvements, the research behind them, and how to apply them in your day-to-day business.

Although the word "standard" immediately sounds like a very theoretical exercise, having standards does make sense in order to save time, money, and errors. Although the basics of CDNs in order to work are based on open standards, interacting with CDNs is not standardized. In this open discussion, in addition to a number of panelists, we also give the floor to the audience to discuss this topic.

Join us for drinks and tasty bites as you mix and mingle after a full day of sessions! Open to all full-conference attendees, speakers, and sponsors. Note: This is a combined networking event with Streaming Media East 2023.