SVTA SEGMENTS:2023 is a new, one-day public conference exploring how to make streaming video better.
May 16th in New Orleans, Louisiana
At SVTA SEGMENTS, you'll learn how to solve key technical challenges, gather best practices for delivering the best viewer experience at scale, and network with some of the brightest folks in streaming video on the planet.
Anyone Can Join SVTA SEGMENTS, Join the Discussion, and Join the Fun!
You Don't Have To Be An SVTA Member to Attend.
About SVTA SEGMENTS:2023
what can you expect?
SVTA SEGMENTS is an exciting, one-day public conference, organized by the Streaming Video Technology Alliance as a walk through the streaming video workflow. Beginning with acquisition/ingest and ending with playback/analytics, you’ll learn from streaming video experts about best practices, technologies, and techniques to deliver the best possible viewer experience at scale. Streaming Video Technology Alliance working groups will present about their current projects in 5-minute “lightning talks” throughout the day. With built-in networking time, you’ll also get to collaborate with colleagues. And the best part? You don’t have to be an SVTA member to attend! This event is open to the entire industry.
SVTA SEGMENTS:2023 Conference Tracks
Workflow
Over-arching challenges and foundational issues
Ingest
Challenges with acquiring content into the streaming workflow.
Content
Challenges with encoding, optimizing profiles, packaging, and other content preparation tasks.
Manipulation
Challenges with manipulating content including applying DRM, transcoding, and watermarking.
Delivery
Challenges with delivering content to players and devices.
Playback
Challenges with content playback such as buffer optimization, offline viewing, and device synchronization.
Analysis/Monitoring
Challenges with analyzing streaming data to improve workflow reliability, performance, scalability, and QoE.
Operations
Challenges with operating a streaming platform.
Come Visit the Magic of New Orleans!
Bourbon Street. Jazz music. A nightlife that never ends. SVTA SEGMENTS:2023 will take place in the magical city of New Orleans. After a day of digging into the technical challenges of streaming video, you can march through the French Quarter with your industry colleagues and enjoy the New Orleans nightlife!
SVTA segments:2023
Schedule
This one-day conference begins at 8am and ends a little before 6pm. The schedule is divided into areas of the workflow, beginning with challenges/considerations associated with the entire workflow and ending with operational concerns.
SEGMENTS:2023
Speaker Schedule
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2023-05-16Day 1
Welcome
In the opening remarks, SVTA Executive Director, Jason Thibeault, will welcome the conference, cover housekeeping and other items, and acknowledge our Fellow awardees.
Working Group Update: Advertising
In this session, chairs or members of the SVTA Advertising Working Group will provide a brief update on their current activities, publications, and projects.
Reengineering for Energy Efficiency (Workflow)
Greening of Streaming is working to encourage streaming engineers to consider energy efficiency at a systemic level, and treat it as a first class priority along side quality.
In this brief talk we introduce the areas where we think there is work to be done together, and invite input from the SVTA community to get involved in our Low Energy Sustainable Streaming (LESS) Accord, where you can join many other stake holders from across the industry already taking part to form a series of tests based on collective intuition about where the most efficiency gains may be made most effectively.
Will also touch on our working group which is making initial efforts to help add energy insights into the capacity insights element of open caching.
Developing SRT Ingest Diagnostics and Best Practices (Ingest)
CBC/Radio-Canada is seeing year over year growth in live sports streaming which reflects a strategy to cover more local, collegiate and other amateur sports. As we adjusted our ingest workflow to introduce SRT delivery from distributors at indoor and outdoor venues across Canada and around the world, we started seeing audience-facing impact on our CBC video players and OTT services, such as macroblocking, video stuttering and freezing, and audio breakup. We implemented a diagnostic procedure to analyze live ingest and playback, identify key technical challenges and develop best practices for our delivery partners and internal infrastructure. In this presentation we will discuss the framework we developed to troubleshoot and diagnose the technical challenge and the results and insights we gathered.
Working Group Update: Live Streaming
In this session, chairs or members of the SVTA Live Streaming Working Group will provide a brief update on their current activities, publications, and projects.
End-to-End Low Latency HLS Workflows: Technology Status and Challenges for the Industry (Content)
Low Latency HLS (LL-HLS) is one the latest evolutions of the HLS specification, aiming at dividing the streams latency by a factor of three. While the promise is kept overall, some of the LL-HLS design choices generate unique challenges at multiple workflow levels, and the industry still needs to catch up with the technology on multiple aspects. This presentation will walk the audience through the specifics of the LL-HLS technology, explain the associated challenges and identify the remaining areas of work. It will also use the example of the AWS Elemental services implementation to illustrate how to setup end-to-end LL-HLS workflows and compete with the broadcast & social networks latency.
Working Group Update: Privacy and Protection
In this session, chairs or members of the SVTA Privacy and Protection Working Group will provide a brief update on their current activities, publications, and projects.
BREAK
Reduce Content Delivery Cost Through Encoding (Content)
Review of content processing methods available to reduce total cost of operations for a VOD and/or live video streaming service at scale including cloud-native software-based encode, multi-cloud, multi-codec, and content aware encoding all without sacrificing quality.
Deciphering the Latest in Video Codecs. What Is Just Noise, And When Can You Truly Capitalize? (Manipulation)
There are several new compression types that promise better quality and lower latency, but are they ready for primetime? Get into the weeds, find out the tipping point for video streamers to adopt new tech. It's all there: usage, pricing, latency calculations, PLUS the real issue, how to find out when viewers' devices and platforms are ready to receive it.
Leveraging Segments for Dynamic Video at Scale (Manipulation)
This talk will take a look at what it takes to create dynamic and personalized experiences at scale, without breaking the bank or the environment. We're taking a look at all the segments: ingest, encoding, manipulation, delivery, playback and analytics.
Many people agree that the video experience of the future will be dynamic and personalized. Not just content discovery, thumbnails, or maybe a dynamic UI, but the video itself. There are many reasons for creating dynamic video content, such as increasing inclusiveness, relevancy, engagement, and advertising. So calling this the holy grail of video is not an exaggeration.
Currently there are some standards out there we could use to define dynamic video content, like IMF. This already defines dynamic video for localization and compliance purposes, but only at the distribution stage, and the dynamic aspects of it disappear after the ingest process which turns it into a static asset.
In this talk, I'll discuss how we can leverage this standard and expand on it, to describe video on a granular per-scene level, and build a streaming workflow that supports this. I'll also discuss the problems that we still have to solve before there can be mass-adoption of this technology. Some are obvious and simple to solve, others not so much.
Finally we'll take a look at how dynamic video workflows are a prerequisite for using technologies like 3D engines and Generative AI for content personalization in the future. And how production and distribution will need to be more connected to each other than ever before.
Working Group Update: Metadata
In this session, chairs or members of the SVTA Metadata Working Group will provide a brief update on their current activities, publications, and projects.
Technical Challenges of Achieving Reliability And Predictable Low Latency in Live Sports Streaming (Delivery)
This presentation will focus on solving streaming reliability and latency challenges for high-value live sports. The popularity of live sports streaming has never been so high and the delivery of high-quality and low-latency video is crucial to ensure a seamless and engaging viewer experience that can bring real value to the content owners and rights holders. One of the major challenges faced in live sports streaming is network congestion, which can lead to buffering and delays in video playback. We will discuss how this can be addressed by improving network infrastructure and using distributed nodes and edge technology. Another significant challenge is reducing latency, or the delay between the live event and the viewer seeing it. High latency can be a problem, particularly for live sports events that require real-time interaction between the audience and content. We will explore different ways to reduce latency, such as using low-latency streaming protocols, optimizing server placement, and edge processing. Overall, this presentation will provide insights into the technology challenges of streaming high-value live sports and potential solutions to address them. We will discuss the latest advancements in streaming technology and how they can be used to create a more reliable and low-latency viewing experience for live sports fans.
Multicast ABR and Open Caching (Delivery)
The presentation discusses the ways to expose and exploit a multicast ABR service through the SVTA Open Caching API. In particular the presentation will highlight the challenges and solutions related to the request routing to a Local (i.e. LAN) domain.
Working Group Update: Networking and Transport
In this session, chairs or members of the SVA Networking and Transport Working Group will provide a brief update on their current activities, publications, and projects.
LUNCH
Catching the Moment in Low-Latency Live Streaming (Delivery)
Bandwidth prediction, which is already a difficult task, must be more accurate when lower latency is desired due to the shorter time available to react to bandwidth changes. Any inaccuracy in bandwidth prediction results in flawed rate-adaptation decisions, which will, in turn, translate into a diminished viewer experience. In this talk, we present several bandwidth prediction models (based on statistical and computational intelligence techniques) optimized for low latency, a rate-adaptation scheme (both heuristic and learning-based) and a playback speed control scheme to overhaul low-latency live streaming clients completely. The public (open) source code is available, too.
Delivering Content At 250Km Per Hour (Delivery)
An overview of the challenges of delivering content into locations where there is limited connectivity, and collectively a lot of time is spent by consumers, even if an individual passenger train or plane is small by itself. Using UK rail operator LNER as a case study and looking ahead to future implementations, this talk will discuss the challenges of passenger environments such as planes and trains for the delivery of live content, and look at why this is a challenge. We will discuss the challenges of cache management in these environments for on-demand content, the excitement of delivering live events to the, using data from the Netskrt deployment of its Edge CDN into the UK Rail Operator LNER to demonstrate our experience in this space. The presentation will look at how technologies like open caching can enable content providers to access these kinds of locations with Edge CDNs like Netskrt.
HLS/DASH Content Steering at Scale
In modern-era streaming, CDN switching and multi-CDN delivery technologies are increasingly important. They help with scale, reliability, and QOS/QOE aspects of streaming delivery. However, the implementation of CDN switching is not a trivial task. Over the years, several technologies have been proposed, with different cons and pros. SVTA’s players and playback study group is currently studying this topic, intending to produce a report and guidelines for effective uses of such technologies in practice.
One of the technologies currently under consideration by SVTA is server-side switching, implemented using Content Steering features of HLS and DASH standards. In this talk, I will briefly overview this technology, its advantages, and its potential in practice. I will also describe some limitations and challenges when deploying it at scale. I will then explain how these challenges can be addressed by turning the HLS/DASH content steering servers into stateless functions deployable at the edge (using advanced functions of many existing CDNs). With such an implementation, the steering system becomes mass-scalable, economical to deploy, and enables a full spectrum of traffic and QOE/QOS-based optimizations. In the end, I will show a quick demo of such a system, under development as an open-source project in SVTA.
Study Group Update: Players and Playback
In this session, chairs or members of the SVTA Players and Playback Study Group will provide a brief update on their current activities, publications, and projects.
Seamless Delivery of DRM-Protected Content to the Ever-Growing Device Ecosystem (Playback)
The presentation will focus on the challenges of delivering DRM-protected content to the increasing number of playback devices in today's digital world. It will explore the importance of protecting intellectual property and the need for content owners and distributors to deliver their content to a wide variety of devices while maintaining security and control over their content. The presentation will discuss various DRM technologies and their implementation, including the challenges of interoperability and compatibility across different platforms and devices. The presentation will also explore the different approaches to delivering DRM-protected content, such as using streaming services or offline playback, and supporting older devices. By the end of the presentation, attendees will have a better understanding of the challenges and solutions for delivering DRM-protected content to the ever-growing number of playback devices.
Monitoring Live OTT Services Across the Entire Workflow Is Fundamental to Quality Assurance (Measurement/Analysis)
Worldwide, OTT video consumption is rising steadily, with live streaming leading the way. To meet the high expectations of an increasingly large viewership, whilst also decreasing customer churn and maximizing monetization, service providers need to see what’s happening across their entire workflow. They can achieve this by adopting a holistic methodology to quality assurance, centered around an end-to-end monitoring solution. This presentation will explore the challenges associated with live streaming, and how monitoring can help overcome them by providing a centralized view of multiple creation and delivery points, verification of an issue’s location, and increased flexibility via a cloud-deployable approach.
Working Group Update: Open Caching and Edge Storage
In this session, chairs or members of the SVTA Open Caching Working Group and Edge Storage Sub Group will provide a brief update on their current activities, publications, and projects.
QoE insights from NTT DATA OTT Streaming Observatory (Measurement/Analysis)
Competition in video streaming is high. Business models are changing and once simple propositions (e.g. SVOD, FAST, etc.) they are now morphing into multiple offerings, creating additional levels of 'complexity' in the technical domains. So low perceptual quality, artifacts, buffering, stuttering, UX impairments can happen even more and they can contribute to loss of users and harm service reputation. Assuring high QoE is of crucial importance to compete in the streaming arena but sometimes there is a lot of 'hype' around key metrics, often wrapped in marketing messages. Based on our experience from OTT Streaming Observatory, a technical benchmarking report from NTT DATA, we will provide insights on how the main streaming players are performing from technical point of view and we will shed some lights on overlooked aspects of the Video Quality of Experience, considering technical quality KPIs compared against each others in the market.
Working Group Update: Measurement/QoE
In this session, chairs or members of the SVTA Measurement/QoE Working Group will provide a brief update on their current activities, publications, and projects.
BREAK
Study Group Update: Immersive Video
In this session, chairs or members of the SVTA Immersive Video Study Group will provide a brief update on their current activities, publications, and projects. Part of this presentation will focus on the recent in-depth investigation (including discussion of empirical data gathered through experimentation) of streaming real-time virtual/mixed reality experiences and a proposed approach for augmenting client player analytics with real-time network analytics.
The Pitfalls to Avoid with Streaming Measurement (Measurement/Analysis)
It is not an easy path to transform raw event data into analytics that reflect the real-world experience of every viewer, in real time, every time. Gathering data across all OSes, players, regions, devices, and models is just the first piece of the puzzle. But every endpoint sends events in their own format. To make sense of that raw data, teams need to map events into common semantics, then define and validate common metrics modeling user experiences. Lastly, they need a flexible way to explore these metrics along infinite dimensions in real time to solve any challenges viewers may face. Incorrect instrumentation, mapping or validation can lead teams to make critical business decisions on inaccurate data. Uncover the mistakes to avoid and ensure your data models the real-world experience of every viewer, in real time.
The Halo Effect: Content Attribution Explained (Monitoring/Analysis)
In a perfect world, there would be universal parameters set for determining the success or “performance” of a company, however, we face the challenge of defining what this concept means. In the world of streaming, we can define performance through several types of data, including revenue, minutes watched, ROI, completion rate, total playbacks - the list can go on. However, with no industry standard set, different brands and companies measure these metrics differently as well, creating discrepancies in measurement and reporting. With all these parameters in mind, how can we effectively analyze streaming data to measure and improve performance? In this session, we’ll discuss the roadblocks companies face while analyzing performance data, and will also provide insight into how companies can successfully define performance to improve their platforms.
What Is In Your Data? How to Identify CDN & ISP Issues And Plug the Gap In Content Delivery Monitoring (Operations)
The ISP domain has always been a blind-spot between CDNs and OTT viewers, where the majority of critical streaming issues occur. In this presentation Brenton Ough discusses Touchstream’s approach to identification of issues like high cache miss ratio and low throughput indicating video buffering via their innovative on how to enrich CDN log data, summarize and extract nuggets of valuable information to pinpoint issues between CDN edge nodes and ASNs.
The Next Frontier of Streaming Performance (Operations)
The next generation of immersive and interactive experiences will present an entirely new set of challenges to streaming services and underlying infrastructure providers. These challenges include the need for continually better uninterrupted streaming performance with unfaltering network reliability. Essentially, we need the reliability of terrestrial broadcast, paired with the innovations of future devices, at the highest of quality levels delivered worldwide. It will also require the ability to have insights and monitoring throughout the delivery chain and across networks. This includes a depth of insights beyond the observation data available from traditional QoE measurements. Rather, the insights needed to develop the innovation needed to achieve this goal require extensive, in-depth research, the nature of which Dolby has been driving in audio and imaging for the past fifty years. This presentation will dive into the depth the research we have done at Dolby into the current state of streaming media and CDN delivery, describing the challenges faced by even the best CDNs that we as an industry must overcome to meet this reliability standard. The future of streaming at the highest performance levels demands a highly adaptive and anticipatory solution. We will also share some insights into our research and standards work with advanced methods of streaming that would allow the industry to take better advantage of the underlying network and cloud infrastructure to make the demands of the future a reality.
Closing
Jason Thibeault, Executive Director of the SVTA, will wrap-up the conference.
Happy Hour
Onsite Happy Hour
learn about the solutions that will improve video streaming for everyone
SVTA Working Group Lightning Talks
These SVTA SEGMENTS:2023 talks will provide overviews and updates on the different projects being addressed in each of the SVTA’s working groups.
You Won't want to miss this!
Venue
SVTA SEGMENTS:2023 will take place at the Hilton New Orleans, St. Charles Ave. The conference will happen right before the SVTA Q2 member meeting. If you are interested in attending the member meeting after SEGMENTS (but you aren’t a member yet), please contact the Alliance.
The deadline to book a hotel room in the SEGMENTS room block is Monday, April 23rd.
SPONSORS
Interested in Sponsoring SVTA SEGMENTS:2023
We have a variety of sponsorships available for SVTA SEGMENTS:2023, from the general conference to individual items like the networking event, coffee breaks, WiFi, and more. Just fill out the form below and one of our staff will get back to you to discuss sponsorship opportunities.
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submit your topic and become one of
Our speakers
The submission window closes March 15, 2023.
Are you interested in getting on stage in front of an audience eager to improve the streaming video experience? Do you have technical expertise in one of the stages of the streaming video workflow? Have you collected best practices in technical implementation that could benefit your peers? Then we need you! Fill out the form below with your presentation suggestion and our content committee will review it promptly.
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THE SVTA SEGMENTS CONFERENCE IS AN extension of our mission
About the Streaming Video Technology Alliance
Comprised of members from across the video ecosystem, the Streaming Video Technology Alliance is a global technical association that works to solve critical streaming video challenges in an effort to improve end-user experience and adoption. The organization focuses on three main activities: first is to educate the industry on challenges, technologies, and trends through informative, publicly-available resources such as whitepapers, articles, and e-books; second is to foster collaboration among different video ecosystem players through working groups, quarterly meetings, and conferences; third is to define solutions for streaming video challenges by producing specifications, best practices, and other technical documentation.
No! The SEGMENTS conference is open to the general public. We’re sure that a lot of SVTA member company employees will be in attendance so it’s a great opportunity to speak with people who are active in the organization to find out if you should join!
No! Anyone can submit a proposal to be on our stage. Our committee will review submissions anonymously to determine the best fit.
Absolutely. Simply fill out the form to tell us about your topic and preferred track. Note: SEGMENTS is not a pay-to-speak event. We have a designated committee who will review speaking submissions to pull together the best possible program for attendees.
The short answer is, “no.” Registration and attendance of SEGMENTS does not entitle you to attend the SVTA Q2 meeting held at the same Hilton hotel, May 17th and 18th. But, the SVTA does afford a certain number of “guests” at each meeting. If you are serious about becoming a member and would like to attend the meeting, please let us know as soon as you register so that we can discuss a guest pass.
The Alliance is a non-profit, non-equity, 501 (c)(6) organization incorporated in the state of Delaware. The SVTA is governed by the Board of Directors and managed by an experienced team. The SEGMENTS conference is organized and run by the SVTA.
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