Live Sport Is Powering the Next Wave of Streaming Innovation

Live sport viewers expect a flawless streaming experience with ultra-low latency and immersive features that bring them closer to the action. At the same time, the rising cost of sport rights is forcing service providers to rethink how they maximise return on investment. The result is a perfect storm of innovation, where advances in AI, cloud infrastructure, and ecosystem partnerships are reshaping the future of streaming.

The State of Streaming Codecs 2026

Streaming codec adoption used to be an engineering abstraction governed by RD curves, BD-rate tables, and roadmap slides that no one outside of R&D ever considered. Over the last 15 months, codec adoption decisions have morphed into a much broader discussion, involving C-level execs from finance and legal. While the precursors to this transition occurred pre-2025, the situation coalesced in 2025. During the same period, we saw one codec step to the front (AV1) and another shrink before our eyes (VVC).

The State of Streaming Sustainability 2026

Is it still fashionable to be sustainable, even with AI?

Streamticker: The Biggest Streaming Mergers and Acquisitions of 2025

Here is a month-by-month roundup of the streaming industry's most momentous mergers and acquisitions of 2025 (excluding the competing Paramount Skydance and Netflix bids for Warner Bros. Discovery—a drama that just turned definitively in Paramount's favour at press time).

How to Fight Sports Streaming Fragmentation Fatigue

The fragmentation of sports streaming rights and the proliferation of channels with some matches but not others makes it increasingly difficult for fans to track their teams' upcoming games. Free Live Sports President Cathy Rasenberger, Play Anywhere CSO Pete Scott, Hub Entertainment Research Principal Jon Giegengack, and MTech Sport's Matt Stagg discuss ongoing discoverability challenges and how Free Live Sports, Roku with its Sports Zones, Fox One, the ESPN app, and others are trying to create new sports destinations to counteract sports streaming's disaggregation crisis.

Sports Leagues and Broadcasters Must Tailor Engagement Strategies for Gen Z

Free Live Sports president Cathy Rasenberger argues that sports leagues and broadcasters need to adapt to the ways Gen Z viewers consume content—short-form, social, athlete-centric storylines—if they want to engage and retain younger audiences in this discussion with MTech Sport, Media & Entertainment consultant Matt Stagg, Play Anywhere CSO Pete Scott, and Hub Entertainment Research principal Jon Giegengack from Streaming Media Connect 2025.

Agentic AI: A New Path to Efficiency and ROI

By this time next year, agentic AI will sit inside everyday operations no longer as an experiment, but as part of the connected backbone that powers how content is created, managed, and delivered. The question has shifted from if to how, and specifically, how to make it usable across the whole business.

How to Leverage AI in Streaming Ad Tech in 2026

Whether it's traditional machine learning (ML) or its trendier generative cousin, artificial intelligence (AI) is appearing in a range of streaming ad tech use cases for increasing under-the-hood efficiency in streaming monetisation applications. Sargeway's Sarge Sargent, Fox's Amit Shetty, Google's Inderpreet Sandhu, IAB Tech Lab's Shailley Singh, and Reality Software's Nadine Krefetz discuss AI's fast-changing role in this clip from Streaming Media 2025.

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.

Leveraging AI in OTT and CTV Content Discovery

In this article, several experts from key EU streaming vendors weigh in on both the benefits and drawbacks of leveraging AI in OTT and CTV content discovery. They also speculate on how it will impact the future of personalisation.

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.

Divvying Up the Growing Digital Ad Spend

This article will look at the state of CTV and streaming advertising and monetisation in the UK and EU, how the ad spend pie is divvied up, where CTV stands in relation to traditional broadcast, how the markets are trending, and what accounts for current growth patterns.

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.

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.

Boosting Streaming Profitability with IMAX StreamSmart

Streaming organisations must be able to accurately measure and swiftly assess the impact of workflow changes to validate their effectiveness. Therefore, they must have access to the right metrics that can reliably predict viewer perceptions of quality for achieving bitrate savings without compromising the viewing experience.

Instant Replay: Streaming Media Connect November 2023

Streaming Media presented its 12th Connect virtual conference November 13 - 16, with media industry cartographer Evan Shapiro as host and MC. Shapiro kicked off the event with a dynamic keynote, digging deep into the Q3 earnings call data to hold the spin doctors accountable and giving an unvarnished view of the industry. Other highlights included The Future of Streaming with Shobana Radhakrishnan, Senior Director of Engineering at Google TV, and several panels covering topics such as Cloud Workflows for Streaming and CTV, Optimizing Live Streams at Scale, How Codec Patent Pools Will Impact Streaming in 2024, Making Live Streaming and VOD More Accessible, Live Streaming Technology Trends, and more.

The State of VVC Adoption and Implementation

If you're a video publisher who doesn't rank high in the VVC patent list, it's likely that you won't consider VVC until 2026 or later. If you're looking to augment your H.264 encodes with a more efficient codec before then, your most likely choices are HEVC and AV1, with LCEVC also an option. However, if you're a product or service provider in the streaming media ecosystem, it's long past the time to start considering where and when VVC is going to fit in for you and your target customers.

Netflix and the Challenges of Live Streaming

Brad Altfest of Agora discusses Netflix's move into live sports streaming and the challenges they and other established platforms face in managing large-scale live-streaming events.

The 2023 Streaming Media Europe 51

Our annual list of the most cutting-edge, influential, and dynamic technology companies in the European online video market.