Post-Peak Performance in the M&E Universe

The recent Subscription Wars report commissioned by U.K.-based digital payments tech company Bango points to consumer dissatisfaction with the fractured state of subscription services in general and the increasing appeal of indirect subscription options and super-bundles of aggregated services sold through telcos like Optus in Australia. Perhaps it's another sign of less-than-inspiring times that the best thing consumers say streaming services can do for them is to stop standing out from the crowd and start disappearing into it.

Is 2024 the Year of WebRTC?

With large sports-streaming operators, WebRTC provides a real opportunity for ultra-low-latency streaming. But those same operators, which spend billions on licensing rights, can't afford to just swap the ability to stream content in real time for basic OTT functionality like SSAI and DRM.

Everything in Streaming Has Its Price

This column isn't meant to be a downer, especially because the overall economy seems to be plugging along. But it is meant to ask those of you in the industry to share anecdotes and stories about the pain points you're facing. We know that everything in streaming has its price, but you are in a better position to help us fully understand what that price entails.

Evidence That Survives Time

From war crimes to war crime tribunals and war commemorations, how do we guarantee that content is available to play?

An Impending Accessibility Backlash

Software developers are trained in accessibility issues for front-end development and basic concepts like labeling control elements and reporting state changes to assistive technology—screen-readers—are part of a professional developer's code testing procedures. Despite this progress, two very different forces are swirling with the potential to push back on the trend towards better technological inclusion of the disabled.

Synthetic Scabs Are Awful: Netflix, AI, and the M&E Industry's Ongoing Labor Struggle

Somehow, greenlighting "Joan Is Awful" has made Netflix look oddly actor strike-sympatico, via its winking endorsement of a show that warns against a writer-less, actor-less "profits without people" media and entertainment future from whose realisation they stand to benefit.

Follow-the-Presenter Tools for DIY Instructional Videos

Until fairly recently, if a teacher wanted to produce a DIY instructional video untethered to a fixed point in front of a camera, they'd need to remotely control either a pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) head or a multicamera switcher. With the arrival of competent and inexpensive facial recognition software, several consumer videoconferencing cameras now offer automatic framing to allow teachers or other presenters to move around a scene to better engage with viewers and interact with props and visual aids.

Why Aren’t You Streaming Your Live Event?

These days, the cost and technological barriers to live streaming are few are far between. Robert Reinhardt outlines some reasons why organisations may still hesitate to live stream their events, and he shows why these reasons are misguided. He breaks down the ways that even events with small budgets can still produce high-quality live streams.

I’ve Seen The Future of The Streaming Video Tech Stack

The evolution of the evolution of TV is coming soon, hinted at by services like Norsk. I for one can't wait.

Streaming Sustainability and Imaginary Bridges in the Cloud

Only time will tell how successful new sustainability reporting standards ESRS E1 (European) and the SEC (US) mandate will be in the near-term in curbing greenwashing and improving sustainability requirements and adherence in the streaming industry, or how much of the long-term their failure might costs us.

Cloud-Based Streaming Production and the Sound of Inevitability

The production and communication tools we use are ever-more tied to the cloud, and to take advantage of it is to open a door of possibility and additional capability. Where do you want to go today?

5 Ways to Future-Proof Your Streaming Role with AI on the Rise

How do you keep your skills relevant and useful regardless of developments in AI, Machine Learning (ML), or more advanced automation in any process related to your role in streaming media? Whether you are a seasoned veteran or just starting out with your career, I recommend setting five goals for the coming year.

What The Growth of FAST Really Tells Us About Viewers

The popularity and growth of FAST shows us that viewing behaviour, despite the rise of streaming, hasn't really changed much at all. People want choice, but they want it in a way that meets their needs.

Preserving Our Inter-generational Legacy (or Streaming Media’s Feet of Clay)

So considering streaming, file transfer, or even leaving the long tail simply unused and archived as the storage media changes around it over years, there's much to think about for anyone wanting to leave a video as an intergenerational legacy.

What's the Point of Streaming?

You might think it's crazy of me, as the executive director of the world's largest streaming technical association, to ask the question in this column's title. But I think it's actually important that we do a gut check every once in a while.

Does Streaming's Future Success Depend On Discoverability?

The future of streaming is about unification built on top of a single open standard of content metadata. Right now, it's a matter of seeing the forest for the trees.

View From the Edge: IBC 2022

There is stress in big public streaming companies that is stifling their innovation completely at the moment. Billion-dollar contracts are cool, but disruption is cooler, and the Unicorns have done their disruption now, and it's time for other actors to take the stage. So what was disruptive at IBC 2022?

An Industry Welcomes Itself Back, Amsterdam Style

Anticipation is mounting for this year's IBC. After a reasonable-size crowd at the April 2022 NAB event in Las Vegas (by most estimates, about half of normal attendee count), we've had smaller events take place—including our own Streaming Media East 2022, held in Boston—from May onward that seem to have returned to normal.

Don’t Believe the (Financial) Hype

Dom Robinson writes about why it's important for the streaming industry to focus more on customers first over investors and share prices

The Closed Circle

Long gone are the days of three-channels-only broadcast entertainment options in most countries, yet we remain nations of cord-cutters. Whether we swore off OTA because of monthly costs, fixed schedules, or intrusive advertising, OTT has largely won out because viewers clearly wanted something else.