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GlobalLogic, the design and engineering firm that has developed and worked on some of the most widely used OTT apps and platforms in the market, currently has two sales positions open, in LA and NYC. Details on the jobs are below, contact me if you’d like an intro.

The ideal candidate is someone with strong experience in establishing new customer relationships and has established connections with technology executives in the Media and Entertainment industry.

Responsibilities:

• Identify and develop key relationships with potential clients to grow sales revenue
• Work directly with senior decision makers; Chief Technology Officer, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Product Officer, VP of Engineering and their teams
• Deep engagement with customers to understand their needs and build/ nurture long term relationships
• Conduct client presentations, proposals and negotiations
• Own the sales funnel across the entire cycle – from lead to close
• Own all sales conversion metrics and monthly goals

Experience required:

• A minimum of 10+ years of proven experience selling technology products and services to Media industry customers
• Strong network of key decision makers in the target (media) segment
• Proven track record in new business acquisition
• Expert understanding of the technology needs of target segments
• Exceptional verbal and written communication skills
• Exceptional prospecting skills and excellent closing skills

Target segments and customers:

• Entertainment: TV Networks, Studios, Distributors, vMVPDs, technology providers
• Publishing: Magazine and Newspaper publishing customers
• Education: Publishers of education content

GlobalLogic Service offerings:

• Strategic Design, User Experience and Technology Development for Digital Transformation, New Products Creation, Tools for internal needs and Platform Customization
• Technology development for Video delivery through OTT, Liner TV, TV Everywhere
• Development of “native” client apps for Big-screen, Mobile and Web platforms
• Cloud native software application development, Analytics platform development, Automation using AI / ML technologies

On Sunday February 25th, Ericsson is hosting a special one-day “UDN Global Partnership Forum” around the topic of content delivery at the Hotel ARTS in Barcelona. This executive event brings together business and technical leaders from over 50 leading service providers and content providers worldwide to explore creative ways to transform content distribution and grow new revenue streams.

I’ll be kicking off the event with my thoughts on some of the latest trends in the market and moderating a round-table session later in the day. Executives from Telstra, Bharti, Vodafone, Rogers, KDDI, NTT DoCome, FOX, Sky, ESPN, Al Jazeera, Warner brothers and many others are confirmed. There will also be a welcome reception taking place the night before at 7pm on Saturday, February 24th.

If you are a carrier, telco, major content owner or broadcaster and would like to attend the event, please reach out to me. It’s going to be a great event, with a lot of networking and tickets are free for those that are qualified.

And if you’d like to hear more about the topic, listen to the L8ist Sh9y Podcast where Yves Boudreau from Ericsson provides insight into what webscale customers are looking for in the Edge as they think about balancing their applications from public cloud services to future edge clouds.

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Based on CDN pricing data I collected in December, a lot of customers are currently using multiple CDNs to deliver their content, even for customers not spending millions of dollars per year. To get a better insight into how customers make content routing decisions and where in their technology stack these multi-CDN routing decisions are being made, I’m doing a quick 10 question survey. Please click the survey button below to take the survey and see the data I am collecting.

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I am excited to announce that in partnership with the NAB, we are launching a new series of focused conferences at the NAB shows, dedicated to the streaming media industry. Called the “Streaming Summit by Dan Rayburn“, the event will kick off at NAB Vegas on April 11th as a one-day, three-track show, and will grow into a much larger conference, covering two-days at the NAB show in NYC on October 17-18. (nabstreamingsummit.com) [I’ll be giving away some free passes to the show, so tweet out your request using @danrayburn and the hashtag #streamingsummit for your chance to win.]

The NAB shows have more streaming media related vendors, content owners, broadcasters, and industry attendees all in one place, than any other event. Now, with a dedicated focus on the technology and business around streaming media, my goal is to foster a much tighter community that together, can bring more exposure and awareness to the streaming media market. The new Streaming Summit isn’t just a one-off event but rather is the first piece of a brand new media company I am building, that will give vendors and end-users a better way to collaborate, share information, gain exposure, and learn from each other.

For the past 15 years I have been an extension for many in the industry, using the platforms I have to try to help inform, educate and empower others, to help our industry grow. With the reach the NAB has and their marketing power to get the message out, I now have a much larger platform and more resources to help us all. This is your chance to help shape your industry and I WANT to hear from you! I’m looking to get as much feedback as possible from individuals and on behalf of companies who have been going to the NAB shows, so I can hear what you want to see at the events and other resources you want to see in the market.

I’m also now accepting all speaking suggestions and proposals for the Vegas show and anyone interested in presenting, moderating, etc. can email me directly.

Today, an entire industry of professionals relies on streaming and online video services for their livelihood. And I believe that it’s time that together, as an industry, we do everything we can to “make video matter”. I’m excited for this new opportunity and look forward to hearing your ideas and as always, you can reach out to me at anytime at 917-523-4562 or email (mail@danrayburn.com).

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The live stream of Super Bowl 52 is looking great so far, across all the devices and platforms I’ve tried. I’ve tested the stream on Amazon Fire TV (NBC Sports App, SlingTV), MacBook (Firefox, Chrome, Safari), iPad Mini (NBC Sports App), Xbox One (NBC Sports App, Sling TV), Apple TV 3/4, (NBC Sports App) and on mobile using the Yahoo Sports App and NFL Mobile App on iPhone, both celluar and WiFi. (Updated 8:14pm ET: Sony’s live streaming service PlayStation Vue is having major problems, in multiple cities, keeping many from being able to watch the Super Bowl. Seems to be fixed in some cities but not others.) (Updated 10:40pm ET: Hulu’s live stream of the Super Bowl has gone down for users in some markets.)

There is a massive difference per device on how behind the stream is when compared to the TV feed as well as startup times. The Fire TV is 20+ seconds behind, and the NBC App on the iPad is taking 15+ seconds to startup. But once started, none of my streams, across any device or platform has buffered once. I don’t have the encoding specs as of yet, but max bitrate looks to be about 800Kbps on mobile and 3.5Mbps on desktop, with max being 30 frames per second.

Ironically, the only problem I have seen so far is that my local NBC affiliate had an error cutting over to a commercial break at 7:38pm ET. So anyone who saw that on their stream, it’s not a streaming issue. Yes, broadcast TV can still have problems but NBC re-ran the ad properly at 7:46pm ET.

NBC Playmaker Media isn’t saying how many viewers they are expecting for the live stream, but I predict they will have 1M or less simultaneous streams. The third-party CDNs delivering the streams include Akamai, Amazon, Limelight, and Level 3. Will update this post if I get more tech details.

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Verizon Digital Media Services is looking to hire a Sr. Director/VP Level CDN product specialist. (Video, DNS, WAF, DDoS, Acceleration, etc.) Contact me if you are interested in more details and I can put you in touch with the right people at Verizon.

There has been a lot of discussion about low-latency streaming and how Adobe’s upcoming end of support for Flash will impact low-latency workflows. RTMP media delivery had become the standard for many low-latency streaming workflows. However, when web browsers began deprecating support for Flash, CDNs started dropping RTMP streaming capabilities, and Adobe announced it will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020, it became clear the industry needed a new solution.

As I have previously noted, HLS/DASH/Smooth and other HTTP streaming variants are the future. They all offer scalable delivery of on-demand content using standard codecs that are widely supported in most end-point devices. These adaptive segmented streaming formats use standard HTTP to deliver content in a variety of bitrates or spatial resolutions. By implementing smaller chunk sizes that require less buffering, stream delays can be significantly reduced. However, when chunk sizes are too small, it creates additional overhead from all of the additional HTTP requests and the potential for higher rebuffering rates.

CDN Limelight is betting big on WebRTC and has implemented acceleration techniques to allow streaming providers to reduce chunk sizes to the point where HLS and DASH traffic can be delivered with latency as low as four seconds. While this is a big improvement for on-demand workflows, it still isn’t fast enough to replace Flash in live streaming workflows for live sports, gaming, and online gambling use cases, all of which have some need for low-latency streaming.

To successfully replace Flash and still provide low-latency streaming, the industry needs a solution that provides the lowest possible latency from capture to client. It must also use a standard transmission protocol that does not require any special network configurations or optimizations, scales to support millions of simultaneous viewers using standard web clients and browsers, and doesn’t need any special plug-ins. Finally, the solution must have built-in capabilities for secure streaming. It’s a tall order.

Various streaming and CDN vendors are taking different approaches to solving this challenge. Some vendors have begun testing novel implementations of traditional chunk streaming formats such as HLS with very small segment sizes, but these techniques require specialized client software to support this non-standard implementation. Other vendors are pursuing solutions that use UDP for low-latency streaming, but they require specialized plug-ins to be installed on the clients.

WebRTC was originally developed by Google and they released as an open-source solution for browser-based realtime communication. It uses UDP to stream media without the need to create discrete media segments, which delivers a consistently low latency to all clients. With the addition of WebRTC support by Apple into the Safari 11 release, it is now natively supported by all major browsers including Google Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. The WebRTC protocol was designed to be flexible in its implementation, allowing companies to experiment with solutions geared toward one to one, one to few, and even one to millions. Plus, it supports delivery over TLS to ensure the security of content in transit.

In addition to low-latency streaming, WebRTC offers a realtime two-way data channel that can be used to send and receive data streams. This two-way data technology offers some interesting possibilities for how online streaming can now become a more interactive experience. Viewers can vote in realtime on what song they would like a performer to sing during a live concert. Sports fans can receive customized live sports statistics during a game or match. Live online shopping channels can display customized offers or pricing for different customers. The possibilities seem like they could profoundly change the live video experience.

While the benefits of WebRTC are promising, there is no guarantee it will win out. Other protocol-based solutions are available on the market and that focus on being mobile-optimized with advanced packet-loss concealment/recovery capabilities, so there are alternatives. But as more live content is streamed this year, and broadcasters and content owners continue to demand low latency solutions, the industry is going to need to settle on a technology. Let me know in the comments what technology you think will win out.