It’s no secret that sports broadcasting is a huge draw for advertisers and audiences worldwide. This year, advertisers invested a total of $385 million on content for the Super Bowl, which attracted 111.3 million total viewers. As AI technology continues to grow and evolve, major sports tournaments such as the U.S. Open, Masters, and Wimbledon have all leveraged cognitive technology to level up their broadcasts. This session will explore the ways AI is empowering sports broadcasters to get more value from their video content, specifically through streamlining production team workflows through advanced content search and discovery, maximising advertising spend with contextually relevant ads, and delivering enhanced viewer experience with highlight recaps and instant closed captioning.

This presentation provides a brief overview of the HTML5 video workflow and the latest news in standards, adoption, trends, and more. We discuss the major components necessary to build a video delivery workflow, concentrating mainly on format, encoding, player, DRM and advertising. At the end of this talk, participants should have a better understanding of what to take into account when building a video delivery workflow, the state-of-the-art of the relevant technologies and standards, as well as the options available to them.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has seen increased interest from customers to go deeper in AI and machine learning with new use cases, most of which are designed to enhance the viewer's media consumption experience, automate production processes, and optimise delivery of media content. Amazon has been investing in artificial intelligence for over 20 years, and many of the capabilities customers experience are driven by machine learning. AWS is focused on bringing that knowledge and capability to customers through three layers of the AI stack: frameworks and infrastructure, API-driven services, and machine learning platforms. In this session, we’ll take a look at how Amazon AI and Deep Learning services can be applied to media workflows such as metadata enrichment, image classification, live and VOD media processing, sentiment analysis, facial recognition, and content moderation.

How does the trend toward serverless platforms and micro-service architecture benefit streaming media use cases? Why are live events - and, in particular, live sports - ideally suited to a public cloud service? M2A Media has been working with Perform Group's DAZN over the last year to build a market-leading live streaming service that delivers 40+ channels of live sports events to subscribers in Asia, Europe, and North America. Learn how DAZN delivers broadcast-quality live and catchup video to fans around the world using AWS-hosted live transcode and just-in-time packaging. See how agility, data analytics, deployment automation, resilience, and virtualisation help DAZN achieve broadcast quality, while rapidly growing its subscriber base and adapting its services to compete in the highly challenging world of OTT live streaming.

This session will look at the competitive dynamic for streaming and pay TV services and the key drivers for commercial success. How are European players responding to the global SVOD giants with investments in both ‘full-fat’ and ‘light’ pay TV services? What are the technical and business decisions that separate the winners from the losers in an increasingly fragmented and competitive market?

2018 will see the emergence of new formats that maximise the value of rights and provide new digital experiences for audiences, particularly with live platforms. We have seen this already with the likes of Buzzfeed's daily Twitter Live show AM2DM, and the impending release of Facebook Watch. Our panellists will look at these trends, as well as the recent movement by Amazon and Netflix into sports broadcast, and the way they are affecting rights management, purchase, and distribution.

In recent years, user churn, and how to prevent it, has been at the forefront of business intelligence and for good reason: companies take an average loss of $243 per year for every customer that gets away. Adding up the costs of customer acquisition with that of customer losses, companies of all sizes see significant cuts to their profits. On the upside, combatting churn is a high-return investment: a 5% boost in customer retention rates correlates with an average 25% increase in profits. In this session, we aim to identify behavioural KPIs that alert video services to users who seem at risk of churning. Media companies will join and share their experiences and business strategies to proactively build strong user engagement from all perspectives—from engaging customers with an aggressive content strategy, to optimising their advertising decisions, pricing plans, or their customer service approach, among others.

As the operator of three professional football leagues and the governing body for 72 clubs, the EFL organises hundreds of football matches per season, featuring some of the UK's most renowned clubs, which never air on TV. With the launch of iFollow, a global OTT streaming product, the EFL has entered the live streaming business. This session will explore how the EFL successfully captures live games from a stadium in Birmingham and streams them to fans in Australia, enhances digital broadcasts with local commentary in ways not possible with traditional TV, manages a global digital product across dozens of clubs, builds digital fan communities, and more.