Video: How to Up Your Sports Streaming Game

As countries seek to wrest themselves from lockdowns, however long that takes, we see the name of the game will be come out big and make the most of the renewed freedoms. Streaming has certainly seen a boost over the last year despite the challenges, but in order to make the most of that, as we switch up a gear in public life, now’s the time up your game. Sports streaming is likely to see gradual improvement in the number of live fixtures to cover and employees should be able to find protuctivity gains in working more closely with their colleagues when the time is right the share space again.

In this panel from Streaming Media Connect, Jeff Jacobs from VENN talks to Magnus Svensson, from Eyevinn Technology, Ali Hodjat from Intertrust Technologies, Live Sports’ Jef Kethley and Darcy Lorincz from Engine Media. Magnus kicks off the discussion highlighting the state of the sports streaming industry and the trends he’s seeing. Magnus says that streaming providers are moving away from mimicing broadcast services and inovating in their own right. The younger audience are still more interested in highlights clips then older viewers and esports wiith its on-screen chat and interactivity represents a big departure from what we are used to from broadcasters. Low-latency streaming remains important but keeping feeds synchronised within the home is often seen as more important than the absolute latency.
 

 
Jef speaks about the complete cloud infrastructure he built for the Drone Racing League (DRL) which gave a computer to each player and ran the program and drone simulation in the cloud. Looking to the future, he sees streaming as now allowing monetisation of newer sports. Now that it’s easier and/or cheaper to produce lower-interest sports, they can be economoical to monetise and deliver even to a small audience.

Darcy represents workflows where AI is doing the work. AI’s understanding the goals, the numbers on shirts and much of the action within a game. Darcy’s trying to find as many things AI can do to reduce our reliance on humans. Visualisation of data is grown in demand making these stats easily digestable for viewers by overlaying information in new ways on to the screen.

Ali’s view is from the security angle. He’s been focussed on protecting live sports. Weith the push to lower and lower latencies, the value of the streams has increased as they’re more useful to use for betting. At the same time, lower latency makes it harder to add encryption. On top of encryption watermarking individual feeds and quickly identifying them online is a major focus. Protection, though, needs to extend from the media back to the web site itself, the payment gateway, the applications and much else.

The panel session finishes after discussing low-latency, the pros and cons of remote working, co-streaming, low-latency for backhaul/contribution and finishes with a round of advice to use with your service.

Watch now!
Speakers

Magnus Svensson Magnus Svensson
VP Sales and Business Development,
Eyevinn Technology
Ali Hodjat Ali Hodjat
Director Product Marketing,
Intertrust
Jef Kethley Jef Kethley
Executive Director / President
LiveSports, LLC
Darcy Lorincz Darcy Lorincz
Global head of Esports & Business Development,
Engine Media Inc.
Jeff Jacobs Moderator: Jeff Jacobs
General Manager,
VENN

Video: OTT Workflow Integration Best Practices

Streaming can seem deceptively simple and a simple HLS workflow can be, but to deliver a monetised service to a wide range of devices, with a mix of live and on-demand assets, with advertising and DRM where needed is far from trivial. In this video, we hear from several companies on how they manage the complexity which allows their service to thrive.

Nadine Krefetz from streaming media asks the questions as we hear from Sinclair, Eyevinn Technology, fuboTV, FandangoNOW and Verizon Media. Firstly they introduce us to their services and the types of workflows that they are maintaining day in, day out.

Companies like Sinclair are frequently adding new channels through market acquisitions. Those companies that don’t grow through acquisition will, similarly, find themselves looking at their own legacy workflows as they look to modernise and improve their offering. Our panel gives their thoughts on tackling this situation. Magnus Svensson and Michael E. Bouchard both talk about having a blueprint, in essence, a generic workflow which contains all the functional blocks needed for a streaming service. You can then map the old and new workflows to the blueprint and plan migration and integration points around that.

The panel covers questions about how smaller services can address Roku and Amazon Fire devices, what to ask when launching a new service and which parts of their services would they never want to buy in or outsource.

Ad insertion is a topic which is essential and complex. Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) is seen as an essential technology for many services as it provides protection against adblockers and can offer more tight management of how and when viewers see ads. But the panel has seen that ad revenues are lower for SSAI since there are fewer analytics data points returned although VAST 4.0 is addressing this problem. This has led to one of the panel members going back to client-side ads for some of their workflows simply due to revenue. Magnus Svensson points out that preparation is key for advertising: Ensuring all adverts are in the correct formats and have the right markers, having slides ready and pre-loading to reduce peaks during live transmissions.

The panel closes looking at their biggest challenges, often in adapting to the pandemic, and the ever-evolving landscape of transport formats.
Watch now!
Speakers

Michael E. Bouchard Michael E. Bouchard
Vice President of Technology Strategy,
ONE Media, Sinclair Broadcast Group
Magnus Svensson Magnus Svensson
Media Solution Specialist,
Eyevinn Technology
Geir Magnusson Geir Magnusson
Jr. CTO
fuboTV
Rema Morgan-Aluko Rema Morgan-Aluko
Director, Software Engineering,
FandangoNOW
Darren Lepke Darren Lepke
Head of Video Product Management,
Verizon Media
Nadine Krefetz Nadine Krefetz
Consultant, Reality Software
Contributing Editor, Streaming Media

Video: The State of Server-Side Ad Insertion


Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) it’s the best defence against ad-blockers, but switching in an ad at source can be tricky particularly in low latency streams. This talk at the OTT Leadership Summit at Streaming Media East brings together leaders in the field to explain where they’re up to in delivering this technology and the benefits they see.

Magnus Svensson tells us about the instrumental role Eyevinn Technology, the consultancy who run the technical conference Streaming Tech Sweden , is played in Sweden creating an open standard for all the broadcasters to work to in order to agree how to track SSAI allowing the correct payments to be made. Magnus also talks about aligning SCTE insertion with MPEG structure and the importance of correct preparation of the source video.

Tony Brown from Newsy talks about the centralised nature of SSAI making management easier and gives ana overview of decisioning bringing together buys and sellers of ads. Tony also discusses other analytics such as adjacency and targeting.

Jason Justman of Sinclair Broadcasting Group, explains SCTE insertion and talks about the technical difficulties in reacting to live changes in programming.

Geir Magnusson, Jr. from fuboTV covers the difficulties of preparing the ads quickly enough for thousands or millions of streams to get customised, SSAI ads at the same time and discusses his strategy to start pre-fetching ads from the ad server to prepare them ahead of time. Geir also highlights the misunderstanding that can exist where streaming provides the same video and programme experience as traditional broadcast but ad buyers don’t all understand how much more targeting is possible – even with SSAI.

Watch now!

Speakers

Nadine Krefetz Nadine Krefetz
Consultant & Founder,
Reality Software
Tony Brown Tony Brown
Chief of Staff,
Newsy
Jason Justman Jason Justman
Senior Principal Architect,
Sinclair
Geir Magnusson Geir Magnusson, Jr.
CTO,
fuboTV
Magnus Svensson Magnus Svensson
Media Solutions Consultant,
Eyevinn Technology