The number of internet-connected TVs in homes is growing by 50% annually, and consumers are embracing video apps as part of their television experience. Samsung is leading the way with its Smart TVs, which offer dozens of video apps as well as apps for music, games, social media, and more. But bringing those apps to the TV carries with it an array of challenges – technical, business, licensing, and user-interface – as well as opportunities. Samsung’s Sidharth Jayant will discuss the future of the connected TV ecosystem, as well as sharing the lessons Samsung has learned in its efforts.

MPEG DASH provides an open, interoperable standard for adaptive streaming. A panel of experts discusses its key features, its rate of adoption by various consortia, the challenges for a wide adoption and its impact on adaptive streaming. Possible migration paths from the current proprietary formats to MPEG DASH for content and service providers will also be discussed.

Whilst TV is still the most powerful medium on the planet to deliver reach, audiences are increasingly migrating on to new platforms. Advertisers and publishers need to shift their budgets if they want to maintain the relevance and reach they have previously enjoyed. This session will look at the size of the IP-delivered video advertising opportunity, and will address how video publishers can take advantage of this opportunity, whilst also tackling the challenges of retaining audiences and effectively monetising them across devices. The presentation will explore how video publishers can develop an effective, multi-device advertising plan that delivers on the promise of IP-delivered video.

Windows Azure Media Services give content providers and media partners the nearly unlimited capacity of the cloud to cost- effectively handle a huge volume of digital media and make it available in the format that customers want, when they want it. This session will demonstrate the platform architecture and the services components available for building live and on-demand media workflows.

This session will examine the challenges of establishing and rolling out a common platform for electronic sell-through, enabling consumers to purchase and access video content via any device or network. It will examine various models proposed by industry players, including pay-TV operator ‘TV Everywhere’ initiatives, connected device manufacturer portals (e.g. Apple’s iTunes), and proposed industry standards such as the studio-led Ultraviolet platform. Among the issues to be addressed are: the role of the pay-TV operators; the pros and cons of a centralised approach; the use of digital rights lockers; the need to protect premium video content on retail devices; and the impact of Europe’s fragmented regulatory environment and video release windows.

Learn the technological fundamentals behind encoding both H.264 and WebM formats for playback with the HTML5 tag. Find out more about the basics of H.264 and WebM encoding, and how to produce it for HTML5 distribution. In addition, see how the various H.264 and WebM encoding tools compare in regards to performance, quality and features.

Having high-quality engaging content has become a key differentiator for publishers, but their success with online video is often hindered by limited resources and an inability to produce video content in- house. This session will explore how media publishers can develop a winning online video strategy by tackling these challenges head-on, examining how publishers can cost-effectively grow their libraries and boost the impact of content with a social video strategy.

As advertising revenue gets harder to come by, big-name brands are becoming the content producers of the future. They’re working with artists and production companies to fund content creation directly, removing the middle men and giving more brand awareness for the spend. This panel discussion will address the benefits for brands, content creators, and video sharing sites.

More and more broadcasters are looking to foster a deeper relationship with their viewers to ensure a richer experience for their online and broadcast audiences. The challenges are not just in ensuring that the various platforms complement each other, but also how they punctuate the experience and support editorial content both during and between transmissions. This session will look at ways in which Channel 4 is at the forefront in leveraging streaming media as an essential complement to major TV events, across a wide variety of platforms, to further engage audiences.

This session will compare three well-known media servers: Adobe Media Server; Real Helix Server; and Wowza Media Server. We will look at iOS delivery, Android delivery, and Flash Player delivery. In addition, we will discuss the black box known as digital rights management (DRM) and how it affects mobile users on the go, at home, and in the workplace.

Covering breaking news or delivering live entertainment from remote locations was once a cumbersome, complex, and costly process. Today, with the advent of cellular link aggregation, small encoders, and always-on live streaming services, that’s all changed. But these new technologies have brought with them their own set of technological, business, and even ethical problems. Join this lively discussion and debate among vendors and news organisations to explore these issues and learn more about the cutting edge of mobile, live video capture and delivery.

Join us for an informal drinks reception in Streaming Media’s Expo on Tuesday 16 October. Network with your industry peers from around the world and find out who won Streaming Media’s European Readers’ Choice Awards.

The BBC’s aspiration is that the London 2012 Olympics would do for digital what the Coronation did for television. By developing digital services across all four online platforms – desktop, mobile, tablet and connected TV, the BBC is using the unique characteristics of each device to create outstanding experiences for our audiences.

With the increasing trend for audiences to watch video on the web, fuelled primarily by the mass adoption of smartphones, the BBC has invested in innovative online video services to ensure they never miss a moment of their favourite TV programme, online.

Jane will discuss the role the BBC and its partners played in bringing high-quality coverage to audiences, ensuring they caught every second of the largest sporting event in the world, the Olympics, together with further developments to make BBC iPlayer even better and what this means for both content providers and network operators in the future.

This seminar starts by detailing the playback specs for all iDevices, old and new. Then, learn the strategies used by prominent iTunes publishers to serve the complete range of installed iDevices. Next, the seminar switches to cellular wireless delivery, with a technical description of Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), including recommendations for the number of streams and Apple’s encoding parameters. The seminar concludes with a review of encoding options for HLS and techniques for serving multiple target platforms such as Flash and iDevices with a single set of encoded H.264 files.

Consumers are becoming accustomed to getting the video they want anywhere, on any screen – even moving from screen to screen over the course of viewing the same piece of long-form content. In order for the consumer to have that seamless experience, everyone from the content owner to the distributor needs to work together to integrate their solutions. This panel will host representatives of each of the major steps in the delivery chain – content owner, ingest, distribution, and player – who’ll discuss the challenges involved in making it all look easy.

Designed to offer seamless delivery of both live video streams and video ads via apps and browsers to multiple devices, Adobe’s Project Primetime was recently chosen by the BBC to power its online delivery of the 2012 London Olympics. This session looks behind the scenes at how Project Primetime works to enable monetisation of live video content.

Typically there are two separate systems for streaming video content—those designed for streaming only within a company network, and those designed for streaming to a Web audience—and never the two shall meet. Until now, that is. Video conferencing, distance learning, and telepresence systems have long been deployed on private networks, but now, thanks to new transcoding technology, these video sources can reach audiences outside the enterprise network as well. The same systems that have been used only for connecting corporate or university conference rooms or lecture halls can now easily be repurposed for streaming to a worldwide audience on the web. This session will discuss technical and strategic concerns surrounding bridging the two types of systems to maximize the value of your content.

Thomson Reuters have been producing tens of thousands of live events a year for their investor relations clients. They wanted to scale up, and also wanted to reduce their fixed costs. With the development of a fully virtualised solution, the company has been able to achieve 40%-50% cost reduction, remove scaling limits, and improve service level agreements. This session will provide invaluable lessons from the frontlines for anyone considering a migration to a cloud-based workflow.

Historically, corporates have had an archive of video content sitting unused on the shelf while it could be relevant to a wide variety of their stakeholders. In the age of video, social media, and austerity, savvy enterprises are looking to use online video platforms to better leverage this content and make it available to a diverse audience on a wide variety of platforms. This session will look at the benefits this has given through two case studies contrasting a business that is just starting on the path of using content as a way to enhance its revenue and a large corporate that is looking to get better value from its existing resources.

This session will discuss factors to consider when choosing an enterprise video encoding system from the likes of Ateme, MainConcept, Thomson Video Networks, and others. Factors incorporated into the analysis will include performance, output quality, quality control options, format support, expansion options, programmability, and other variables. If you're considering buying an enterprise encoder or upgrading your current systems, you'll find this session particularly useful.

Industry leading panellists and experienced webcasting end users discuss the state of live webcasting for corporate events in the European market. This roundtable focus session will provide first-hand knowledge and insight about the power of timely delivery and how it can enhance the impact of your event.

When launching multi-screen OTT video services, operators, broadcasters and content owners are facing new paradigms in quality management. They do not control the access networks and do not own the devices, so they cannot guarantee the quality of the services actually delivered to their subscribers. But Quality of Experience and Quality of Service are crucial to the success of any online video initiative. This session will look at the challenges and solutions available to service providers, CDNs, and operators.

Companion devices, such as the iPad and other tablets, are already having a significant impact on consumer TV consumption behaviour, due to their nature as both a media consumption platform and an attractive interaction interface, capable of connecting to TV devices. This session will explore how broadcasters, operators, and content providers can effectively use branded companion apps to enhance the user experience, interact directly with the customer in a new and appealing way, and ultimately generate customer loyalty.