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Facebook Live is currently one of the hottest platforms for broadcasting live on the Internet. At the Streaming Media East show in NYC, taking place May 16-17, hear real-world results from Chad Sisneros, Managing Director at The Humane Society of the United States, who has been live-streaming (via Facebook and YouTube) for years. Hear how they have gone live from various corners of the globe, with varying levels of success — and learn from their failures, and borrow from their successes. Along with the analytics, learn what they have found are the best practices for broadcasting on Facebook including content choice, engagement rates, securing donations and other best practices.

You can register online using code 200DR17 and get $200 off your registration ticket. #smeast

At the Streaming Media East show in NYC, taking place May 16-17, we have a panel with Plex, NBC Universal, Roku, Vimeo and Vice that will discuss the future of TV. As 2017 continues to see big disruption in the TV space, the problem that exists with Internet TV and OTT is that the “consumer experience is terrible.” Many believe that hardware platforms and content providers must come together to address the problem of “how do I easily find what I’m looking for?” While some device manufacturers are developing better universal search, there are still huge unresolved problems for viewers, including inconsistent access to content across platforms, a wide variety of user experiences, and getting unbiased recommendations. This panel of hardware companies, software companies, and publishers will talk about how consumers want to watch video and what the future of TV will look like. Confirmed speakers include:

• Moderator: Keith Valory, CEO, Plex
• Moritz Gimbel, VP, Product, NBC Universal
• Bernarda Duarte, Director, Content Acquisition, Roku
• Will True, Senior Product Manager, TV Apps, Vimeo
• Drake Martinet, VP, Product, Vice

You can register online using code 200DR17 and get $200 off your registration ticket. #smeast

The industry has made big strides forward in bridging the divides between HLS and DASH, Fragmented MP4s and Transport Streams, CBC and CRT, and the myriad little details that continue to cause fragmentation and chaos in delivery and rendering of DRM-secured content to devices. At the Streaming Media East show in NYC, taking place May 16-17,  Avni Rambhia, Industry Principal, at Frost & Sullivan, will present how achieving cost-effective, cross-platform secure playback remains a critical yet mostly unsolved challenge. While the unified vision of HTML5 and seamless playback across browsers is still several years from potential fruition, there are methods to conquer the madness and implement delightful, yet secure, OTT services. Her presentation will provide an update on the state of DRM including insight into the apps vs browsers debate, customer needs, and best practices recommendations.

You can register online using code 200DR17 and get $200 off your registration ticket. #smeast

It’s been five years since Oculus VR launched their Kickstarter campaign for funding, but the 360 and VR landscape is still evolving, and increasingly fragmented. At the Streaming Media East show in NYC, taking place May 16-17,  Sara Poorsatter, Director of Product at Vimeo, will detail how the company is taking the scattered landscape and helping standardize it for creators and audiences; from cameras, to editing tools, to metadata, to player visual language, to distribution platforms. Learn about Vimeo’s goal to help define and promote standards, best practices, introduce/set a new benchmark for quality and offer tools that help creators showcase their content in the intended way – the highest quality possible.

You can register online using code 200DR17 and get $200 off your registration ticket. #smeast

At the Streaming Media East show in NYC, taking place May 16-17, you can learn how Twitch accommodates a user base size larger than the population of New York City each day while maintaining service quality for all users. This presentation by Twitch Engineers Yueshi Shen and Ivan Marcin, will go over Twitch’s ABR transcoding solution and how it was built as a high-density solution to bring positive feasibility analysis results in terms of cost-density, video quality, reliability, and software architecture. With close to 10 million daily active users and an average of 106 minutes watched per person per day, you’ll learn how Twitch keeps things running smoothly.

You can register online using code 200DR17 and get $200 off your registration ticket. #smeast

On Tuesday May 16th, at the Streaming Media East show in NYC, we will have a very unique session where former soldiers from our military’s Special Operations Forces (SOF) will discuss how some of the skills they have learned can be practically applied by everyone, in life, and in business. This session, with former Special Operations veterans and entrepreneurs, will explore how the notions of situational awareness, transparency, empathy, adaptability and integrity inherent to the SOF community can and should be incorporated in your life and within business irrespective of industry.

We are making this session FREE for everyone to attend. Just register online for a discovery pass using code DR100 and make sure you show up early to get a seat. It will be a packed room. The session starts at 4pm and is produced by Tactivate. Speakers include Jesse Levin, Founder, Tactivate – Matthew “Griff” Griffin, Co-Founder, Combat Flip Flops (former Army Ranger) and Trey Russell, Captain, U.S. Army Special Forces.

Over the past few weeks Sling TV has been making the rounds with some analysts on Wall Street who have told me that Sling TV execs have quietly told them that in Q1, Sling had 1.3M paying subscribers to their service. That number seems to track well with other estimates in the market, although it’s going to be interesting to watch Sling’s number over the rest of this year with new competitive live linear services coming out from YouTube and Hulu. YouTube TV is only available in limited cities right now and Hulu will launch shortly, but it won’t take long for either of them to ramp up their availability.

Between Sling TV, DirecTV Now, PlayStation Vue, YouTube TV, and soon to be Hulu, I expect there will be less than 3M subs to all the services combined, by the end of this year. So for all those estimates some are putting out on the growth of live TV services, they aren’t realistic. Even YouTube and Hulu’s own internal estimates, come nowhere close to what many are predicting. And that’s from the companies that run the services and have a better insight into their customers than anyone else.

Sling TV also needs to STOP calling their service “a la carte TV”! You can’t pick and choose the channels you want and they are seting FALSE expectations in the market, which hurts everyone.