With live sport streaming, control the platform, control the game

Streaming platforms, tech giants, and traditional broadcasters are all fighting to become the destination for live sport viewers. And in the middle of it all are the fans, facing rising costs, fractured access, and a growing sense of fatigue. The rights war has become a platform war. And no one's sitting on the sidelines.

Introducing the 2025 Streaming Media European Innovation Awards Winners

The polls have closed, and the results are in! After an energetic voting period, we're excited to reveal the winners of the 2025 Streaming Media European Innovation Awards. Now in its 17th year, this year's programme attracted more than 1,200 participants who cast 8,000-plus votes votes across 13 distinct categories.

The Future of Live Sport: Get Some Skin in the Game

All fans don't want the same experience. They don't consume sport content in the same places, with the same purpose, or with the same expectations. And yet, the industry still builds around the default—the single, editorially led, one-size-fits-all feed. It's time we treated live sport like what it really is: a base layer with infinite skinning potential. That's the model that drives engagement in every other digital format. And if broadcasting wants to stay culturally relevant, that same logic needs to be applied—fast.

The 2025 Streaming Media Europe 51

Welcome to the 2025 edition of the Streaming Media Europe 51, making its much-awaited return after a pause in 2024. This marks the 11th iteration of this list and the second time we've streamlined the selection to just 51 standout companies—moving away from the more expansive Europe 101 format of the past to focus on the most innovative, impactful, and forward-thinking technology providers in the streaming ecosystem.

The Multiview Imperative: How Technical Architecture Determines Streaming Success

The largely unsung hero in YouTube's growth may be a feature that cost the company 99% less to implement than Sunday Ticket: multiview streaming capability. As this article shows, if you're broadcasting sports, multiview--particularly Build Your Own Multiview (BYOMV)--is quickly becoming an expected feature among sophisticated viewers. It's also one of the most affordable and effective ways to amplify the value of your programming, particularly when your content isn't exclusive and faces direct competition in the same market.

Review: YoloLiv YoloBox Extreme

YoloBox, an Android-based tablet with live production software and hardware-based connectivity, marries the capabilities of software, the I/O of hardware, and the portability of a tablet. The all-in-one tablet-based streaming solution market also has entries from Magewell (Director and Director One) and Cinetreak. YoloLiv is not only the pioneer in this segment; it also offers the most diverse solutions, from the single-input Mini to the new device I'll be looking at here, the eight-input Extreme.

MoQ Trial: SVT and Vindral revolutionise real-time streaming at the World Rally Championship

At the forefront of innovation in live broadcasting, Swedish public service broadcaster SVT is taking bold strides toward modernizing its live streaming workflows. As part of this transformation, SVT has partnered with Vindral, a company specializing in next-generation, ultra-low latency live streaming solutions. Their joint mission is to streamline hardware usage, enable remote production, and push the boundaries of real-time media delivery by leveraging the emerging and evolving transport protocol Media Over QUIC (MoQ).

Software decoding and the future of mobile video

If you'll be encoding with SVT-AV1 or VVC, in this article you'll learn a bit about how to optimise your encodes, particularly the trade-offs that pre­sets deliver, and how many logical processors to use. With SVT-AV1, I also explore the qual­ity and playback efficiency of the fast decode option, although I didn't find much to show for it. You can also peruse the FFmpeg command strings used for all encodes.

Streamticker: The biggest streaming mergers and acquisitions of 2024

The 2024 edition of Streamticker, recapping the streaming industry's most momentous mergers and acquisitions of 2023, kicked off with Disney's gobbling up the last extant portions of Hulu, as Comcast ceded its re­maining 33% stake. But if the late-2023 deal marked only the quiet conclusion of an already-silent part­nership, the much noisier news of Jan. 6, 2025, found Disney absorbing sports-centric streamer Fubo and merging it with Hulu Live + TV. Here we'll review this and other done (or more nearly done) M&A deals that reshuffled the stream­ing industry in 2024.

The State of Corporate Video 2025

Due to limited growth in the size of the market, the solution to increasing profitability in the corporate video space has been consolidation and cost-cutting. After some signs of movement in acquisitions in 2023, 2024 final­ly saw the larger companies in the space getting ac­quired or beginning to look for formal partnerships or acquisitions.

The State of the Video Codec Market 2025

HEVC rode the 4K/HDR wave to success, but AV1, VVC, and LCEVC lack an equivalent killer app. With CDNs racing to the bottom on pricing and new royalty pools threatening to increase costs, codec adoption is no longer just about technical merit—it's about survival. These are the issues I'll explore in this article.

Buyers' Guide: Hardware Transcoders

Although software transcoding is accept­able for transcoding most VOD streams and even low-volume live programming, most high-volume live applications need hardware for efficient transcoding, both to save you money and to save the planet. This buyers' guide will cover: What hardware transcoders are, what you need to bring to the table to identify the best hardware transcoder, factors to consider when choosing one, choosing a hardware transcoder for cloud workflows, and choosing a hardware transcoder for on-prem workflows.

The State of Live Sport Streaming 2025

The sport media sector continues to undergo rapid change, with streaming aggregators attempting to reconsolidate for greater ef­ficiency but still falling short of traditional broadcast models in reach and revenue.

Streaming Year in Review 2025: Online Video Is Now an Advertising-Led Business

Old Hollywood got Wall Street's memo: "Do whatever it takes to do what Netflix is do­ing." And finally, the studios have begun making money from streaming. With the exception of NBCUniversal, the biggest leg­acy media companies all reported a profit from their direct-to-consumer (DTC) businesses in Q3 2024. They got there by variously writing down or shedding ca­ble assets, slashing jobs, hiking prices, policing pass­word-sharing, improving bundled offerings, and put­ting the full focus of their business strategy into online.

MainStreaming CEO Tassilo Raesig Talks Resilient Edge Delivery and Optimising QoS and QoE at Scale

In this interview, MainStreaming CEO Tassilo Raesig discusses the ongoing challenges facing global CDN services in their efforts to deliver broadcast-grade streams that meet client expectations for performance, scale, and monetisation. Raesig explains how MainStreaming's edge solutions work within ISP networks to create resilient infrastructure, optimise video delivery, and reduce network strain.

AI and Entertainment: a Q&A with Hub Research's Jon Giegengack

AI is rapidly changing the way people interact with entertainment, and companies are embracing AI to streamline operations and improve efficiencies in producing, marketing, and distributing content. Hub Entertainment Research released its first study on AI in Entertainment, revealing that while most consumers have heard of generative AI, very few understand how it works or what it's for. Jon Giegengack of Hub Research discusses the report's findings and implications in this Q&A with Streaming Media's Tyler Nesler.

Altman Solon Global Sports Survey - A Q&A With David Dellea

Altman Solon's David Dellea discusses the findings from their 2024 Global Sports Survey, with topics including the impact of younger generations' changing consumption habits on live sports, the role of AI in enhancing viewing experiences, the challenges of content fragmentation, and more.

Free Streaming and Sports

The second half of 2023 saw the launch of numerous premium brands and the rise of exclusive deals. What has happened in the FAST sports landscape since then? Let's find out.

Review: Magewell Director Mini 3.0

All-in-One (AIO) live production devices leverage the latest mobile CPU and GPU power and integrated capability, with real hardware connections for multiple HDMI ports, ethernet, headphones, audio input, and more—all from one manufacturer so there's just one update cycle to track. Magewell recently came out with the 3.0 update to their Director Mini AIO production tablet (Figure 1), and they are pushing the envelope with what these little powerhouses can do.

Q&A: Microsoft Worldwide M&E Strategy Director Simon Crownshaw Talks Gen AI

In this expansive interview with Simon Crownshaw, Microsoft's worldwide media and entertainment strategy director, we discuss how Microsoft customers are leveraging generative AI in all stages of the streaming workflow and how they're using it in content delivery and to enhance user experiences in a range of use cases. Crownshaw also digs deep into how Microsoft is building asset management architecture and the critical role metadata plays in effective large-language models (LLMs), maximizing the value of available data.