Sneak preview: taming TCO for live streaming at scale
On Monday 9 November, Bhavesh Upadhyaya, AI and Streaming Technology Strategist, STVA, will moderate the Streaming Media Connect panel “Taming TCO for Live Streaming at Scale.” While total cost of ownership spans an encyclopedic number of operational touchpoints, managing streaming P&L from CapEx to OpEx ultimately comes down to making targeted, high-impact architectural choices. This panel of streaming ops experts covers practical approaches to optimising infrastructure, encoding, delivery, and operational costs without compromising the quality and reliability that live audiences demand.
Confirmed panelists include:
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Bhavesh Upadhyaya is currently volunteering with SVTA as a subject matter expert for QoE, AI, and live operations in the Streaming Media Operations and Measurement/QoE working groups. A veteran of the streaming industry since the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Upadhyaya has experience and expertise in product, operations, and professional services from a variety of companies such as iStreamPlanet, Verizon Digital Media, Deltatre, and Warner Bros. Discovery (now Skydance). He is a consultant to the streaming industry, co-chairs SVTA’s AI Committee, and helps coordinate the Streaming From the Moon and Beyond project.
“Reducing the cost of live streaming takes more than negotiating a lower delivery rate,” says Upadhyaya. “We’ll explore how decisions across infrastructure, encoding, and delivery affect the full operating picture, including the work it takes to keep a service reliable. With Scott Grizzle, Loke Dupont, and Matt Miller, I want to get into the trade-offs: where architectural changes can deliver meaningful savings, where they add complexity, and how to evaluate those choices without sacrificing the audience experience.”
Scott Grizzle started at SeminarSource.com, one of five major companies in the early days of streaming, running off encoding gear he built himself, then spent time at LSI writing standards and workflows still used across the industry. At DVEO, he built a streaming product line from zero to more than $20 million a year, sold almost entirely through partners. At IBM’s Watson Media unit, he grew the partner business fivefold, then moved into IBM’s CIO office. He advises on partnerships, go-to-market strategy, and AI adoption in streaming and enterprise communications at thegrizzle.net.
“The streaming cost that gets missed is the gap between what a company bought and what its people actually use,” Grizzle notes. “I spent most of my career selling into enterprises, which meant watching that gap from the outside, and it is why IBM later put me in charge of unified communications for 300,000 people. The first job there was not cutting. It was finding out what was used and what worked, keeping a backup and a documented workaround for every piece that mattered, and retiring only what had gone out of date. That is the TCO conversation I want to have on this panel.”
Loke Dupont is a staff engineer at TV 2 Denmark, working in the live production domain. He is responsible for studios, continuity, MCR, streaming, DRM, encoding and distribution of signals. Dupont has more than 10 years’ experience working within the streaming industry with anything related to encoding, streaming, and DRM, having worked on both the vendor and customer side. Prior to joining TV 2, Loke worked with Blockbuster to launch its Nordic streaming platform.
Matt Miller is senior vice president of operations at FloSports, where he oversees end-to-end operations across 55,000-plus live events, including business operations, production operations, programming operations, broadcast engineering, and streaming operations. Since joining FloSports in 2015, he has held leadership roles spanning business transformation, commercial strategy, and operations, including serving as chief of staff to the CEO. His work focuses on scaling live sports delivery, improving streaming quality and reliability, and advancing production techniques at scale while maintaining financial and operational discipline.
“Managing streaming costs at scale starts with aligning infrastructure and operational investment with each event’s business value and viewers’ expectations,” says Miller. “Across a portfolio as varied as FloSports’, decisions about redundancy, monitoring, and support should reflect those differences while maintaining clear standards for quality and reliability. Small changes repeated across thousands of events can produce substantial savings. But complexity itself is a hidden cost: every additional workflow, exception, and manual intervention creates an operational burden that compounds when you’re delivering 60,000 live events a year.”
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