Thursday at 2pm ET, I’ll be moderating a StreamingMedia.com webinar on the topic of “Live Video No Fail Best Practices“. You get one shot at a live event, so there’s no room for failure. Everything—from the video and audio quality to the delivery to the player functionality to social media integration—must work seamlessly, or viewers won’t stick around. This panel of seasoned speakers will share their wisdom of how to produce and manage live webcasts of all sizes, whether a high school football game, church production, concert, or major league sporting event. Professionals will be on hand to answer your questions and help make your live event business easy to scale and easy to manage. Topics to be covered will include:

• How to eliminate problems related to the inherently poor signal path in internet-based video acquisition
• Considerations when using cloud transcoding for HD broadcasts in lower bandwidth environments
• Solving the challenges of live video distribution to mobile devices
• Make use of pre-configuration, presets, and live monitoring to ensure an error free event

Register Now to attend this FREE live webinar.

Omer Luzzatti, Senior Director and Head of Yahoo’s Video Platform will be the keynote speaker on day two of the Streaming Media West show, taking place November 17-18 in Huntington Beach, CA. Yahoo was selected by the NFL to stream the Buffalo Bills vs. Jacksonville Jaguars game from London, live and for free. This marked the first time an NFL game was delivered only via OTT outside of the teams’ local markets. Omer’s presentation will describe Yahoo’s platform, its ability to select CDNs according to stream quality and differentiate quality per device, along with collaboration with the ISPs, performance metrics, ABR, and other details of how Yahoo pulled off the live event.

Access to the keynotes, reception, networking events and exhibit hall is free if you register online using promo code 15DR200.

Yahoo’s stream of the NFL game between the Bills and Jaguars kicked off at 9:30am ET this morning and from a quality and technical standpoint, appears to have been very successful. I tested the stream being played back via TiVo, Roku, Xbox, Fire TV, Apple TV, MacBook, iPhone and iPad and experienced very few problems. The stream was split between multiple content delivery networks including Akamai, Limelight, Level 3 and Verizon amongst others. Streams started up fast, within 1-2 seconds at most and I never experienced any buffering or stuttering, aside from the stream to the TiVo. That stream, being delivered by Akamai, had multiple issues with the stream being in fast-forward mode, freezing or having to re-buffer multiple times, for more than half the game. When the stream did work correctly, it looked like cable TV quality on an 80″ TV.

Taking a look on Twitter there were some users complaining of problems with the Internet stream, but not many and while we don’t know how many simultaneous streams Yahoo had, there will always be some users who experience problems when streaming via the Internet. While many want to compare a webcast like today to broadcast TV, you can’t compare the two when the delivery mechanism is so different. Video broadcast via the Internet can’t compare to cable TV distribution, when it comes to reliability and QoS. [See: Streaming Video Can’t Scale At Cable TV Quality, Will Never Replace Traditional TV Distribution] Yahoo hasn’t broken out any of the usage numbers yet, but I would bet that 5% or less of all the streams consumed were via OTT streaming boxes. We also need Yahoo to confirm this, but it looks like the higher bitrate streams on OTT devices were at 60fps.

I don’t know how many details Yahoo will give out in the coming week, but next month at the Streaming Media West show on November 18th, Yahoo will keynote the event and discuss how they selected CDNs according to stream quality and differentiate quality per device. They will also discuss how they collaborated with the ISPs, performance metrics, ABR, and other details of how Yahoo pulled off the live event.

Corey Smith, Senior Service Engineering Manager for Xbox Live will kick off the Streaming Media West show, taking place November 17-18 in Huntington Beach, CA, with a keynote on day one of the event. Corey’s presentation will walk the audience through the world of live broadcasting for Xbox events and will discuss their approach to linear and live broadcast streaming. Audiences will get to see firsthand the power of the Xbox broadcast services platform, how they deliver live events that engage viewers and see a demo of interactive TV on the Xbox One.

Attendees will also have the chance to win an Xbox One bundle. Access to the keynotes, reception, networking events and exhibit hall is free if you register online using promo code 15DR200.

The program for the Streaming Media West show, taking place November 17-18 in Huntington Beach CA, is 99% done, but a few speaking spots remain open. If you are interested in being considered, I have a few spots left on two round tables. Please contact me ASAP.

1. Tuesday, November 17th 2014
   Predicting The Winners and Losers Of The Streaming Device Market
   This session will focus on the popular streaming devices in the market today, including dongles, smart TVs, consoles, and mobile devices. Panelists will discuss the crowding of the streaming device market over the past two years and touch on the devices that are gaining more consumer traction than others. Hear what viewer habits are driving some streaming devices to outgrow others, especially for millenials who value the social aspect of watching premium content with friends as much as they value their ability to cut the cord. Learn what the future of digital entertainment in a multiscreen world will look like and which devices will dominate the market.
2. Wednesday, November 18th 2015
   Bye-Bye Browser: Product Strategy For OTT and TVE In The Post-PC Era
   This session will discuss how TV Everywhere and OTT providers are adapting their product roadmaps to meet changing consumer behavior. The discussion will focus on how to manage PC-centric services that are in decline, mobile services that generate high traffic, but low monetization, and fragmented connected TV devices where there is no clear winner. We will discuss apps vs. web, single vs. multiple apps, hybrid billing models, in-app upgrades and why competition is a good thing.

Over the past few months, multiple content owners have told me that Amazon has been quietly asking them about licensing content for a live streaming service. While none of the content owners want to go on record, or will discuss how far along Amazon is with their plans, other companies involved in the video ecosystem also confirm that Amazon is looking at potentially offering a live OTT video service of some kind.

Considering Amazon already offers an on-demand Prime Video streaming service, it’s would not be surprising that they would also look at the economics of offering live content, just like every other OTT provider is probably doing. But what makes this Amazon story even more interesting is that Amazon recently agreed to acquire Elemental Technologies, a company that offers a cloud-based platform for ingesting, encoding, protecting and packaging live linear streams. While Amazon has already confirmed they plan to integrate Elemental’s live linear platform into their AWS platform and offer it as a service, acquiring Elemental will also give Amazon their own in-house platform needed to make an Amazon branded live OTT service possible.

This also might explain why Amazon would pay so much for Elemental, with rumors of the sale price valuing Elemental at $500M. (Note, I haven’t been able to confirm the $500M number is accurate) Updated Oct. 23: Thanks to an SEC filing, we now know Amazon paid $296M for Elemental, not $500M like The Information was reporting. In 2012, Elemental disclosed they did $21M in revenue. In 2013, revenue grew to $32M and in 2014, revenue was projected to be over $50M. Insiders say Elemental is on a run rate to do close to $100M in 2016. So if the rumors of Amazon valuing Elemental at $500M are correct, Elemental is getting about 5x projected 2016 revenue, a rather high valuation, unless Amazon is also placing value on them for other reasons, like the ability to power their own live OTT service.

Those I have spoken with haven’t disclosed how far along Amazon is with regards to a live OTT service and it’s possible Amazon is simply looking at the economics of the business, which would involve them talking with content owners about costs. That alone is no proof that they plan to bring a live OTT service to the market anytime soon, but the purchase of Elemental adds to the intrigue and it could be that Amazon is doing more than just thinking about a live OTT service.

Conviva has released their Industry Data portal, which provides analysts and the general public access to video quality and engagement metrics by quarter, by region, by content type and by device. The Industry Data portal provides access to quality and engagement data for streaming video, which was only previously available to a small group of insiders. Unlike traditional audience measurement estimates provided by Nielsen or comScore, Conviva’s portal focuses on quality and experience metrics—such as video startup times by region, the average bitrate by device, and the rebuffering ratio by content type—across device categories of desktop, wifi, tablet, and connected TV devices.

The source of the data is comprised of Conviva’s global intelligence network and includes data from premium media companies including HBO, ESPN, Viacom, CBS, Sky, Foxtel, and Yahoo. This information can be used to assess performance of Internet delivered video for benchmarking purposes, for geographic expansion, or for evaluation of the success of an OTT offering. Conviva has made it simple for analysts and others to download the data so that business analysts might draw high-level insights into the performance of streaming videos. Conviva gave me some additional details on the data collected and the methodology:

• Methodology — processed data for the quarter using Conviva’s real-time Big Data platform
• Data — will have historical data as well as those for the most recent quarter-end
• Anonymized and segmented by device, region, and content type
• What’s being measured — Quality of Experience, Engagement and Audience metrics, including VST, exits before video start, re-buffering ratio, playtime, bit rate distribution
• Source of Data — all companies within Conviva Global Intelligence Network, including premium media companies such as HBO, ESPN, Viacom, CBS, Sky, Foxtel, Yahoo
• Periods — quarterly starting from Q4 2014 (should be available soon — Q1 2015 is there now) to the present
• Devices — Conviva separates the data by desktop, mobile – wifi, mobile cellular, tablet wifi, tablet cellular, TVs/TV devices

The data which Conviva provides to paying customers is much more in-depth, which applies to all dimensions stated above. From an aggregation perspective, Conviva wanted to provide actionable, insightful information about QoE for the OTT industry, which is info that many OTT providers don’t share on their own. There is some good data in their portal that you can check out at www.conviva.com/industry-data-portal