I will be moderating a panel at the TV of Tomorrow Show in San Francisco on June 7th. Overall it looks like a very interesting show. It has a rather interesting name. Here are the details on the panel I am moderating:
12:00-12:55PM
Cypress Room
THE BRIDGE: Avoiding the Jerk(iness)
As consumers are migrating an increasing amount of their viewing time online, their expectations of a quality experience are similarly increasing. Tolerance for slow starts, buffering, and poor-quality video is falling, and the penalty for poor performance is swift. After 4 minutes of poor streaming performance 75% of online video viewers will have abandoned the video they were seeking to watch. But there are things a content service provider can do to minimize the problems, and this panel will explore what those are. Some of the topics covered will include: Common video playback problems and how to avoid them; how to deliver smooth playback end-to-end; and the benefits of server-side ad insertion. Panelists include:
- Eric Grab, Founder, Disruption Wave (Moderator)
- Michael Dale, VP of Engineering, Ellation
- Jason Friedlander, Director of Solutions Engineering, Media and Entertainment, Verizon Digital Media Services
- Ed Haslam, CMO, Conviva
- Spencer Sellay, Director of Global Solutions, IneoQuest Technologies
- Kurt Michel, Head of Marketing, IneoQuest Technologies
- Peter Vasay, SVP of Technology Operations, THX
The panel went well. I see a pattern emerging. Live streaming is reaching an optimization phase. In some ways it is lacking elegance and simplicity that most people can understand. Take internal combustion engines. They started simple. A block with cylinders that contained combustion. To get better and competitive engines started getting attachments and refinements. For example turbos, catalytic converters, fuel injection, and various computing boxes to help control everything. A modern engine would be still be recognized as an engine, but mostly be a mystery how it could generate so much power with so little emissions. Internet video is going down the same path. How to delivery continuous playback with low latency? Delivery is now getting its own attachments and refinements to push this to the next level. Deploying a competitive service is no longer just “make it adaptive bit rate”, it is about a lot factors with production encoding, metadata, CDNs, and using real-time analytics to make decisions about the configuration of the service.