All-in-One Streaming Tools Let You Do It All—But Should You?
26 Jan 2024
Today, we are seeing a similar conglomeration of features and abilities in today's production hardware, enabling one person to "do it all!" This begs the question: Should you do it all?
Live Sports Streaming and the Edison Tone Test
26 Jan 2024
There can be little doubt that live sports streaming has a lucrative and dazzling future. But first, it needs to get past the Tone Test stage.
Effective K–12 Video Strategies
26 Jan 2024
The revolutionary change over the past 10 years has made production technologies accessible to teachers and even students. And 4 years ago, of course, almost everyone was forced to rely on educational video to keep schools asfunctional as possible. Today, we can identify several use cases of teacher-produced educational video that are particularly effective.
Should We Trust Nielsen Math?
23 Jan 2024
After reviewing Nielsen/Gracenote's 2023 State of Play report, Data-Driven Personalization: The Future of Streaming Content Discovery, I found the numbers they cited to be very much on the creative side. I don't get a warm, fuzzy feeling when I think about their research.
Is 2024 the Year of WebRTC?
19 Jan 2024
With large sports-streaming operators, WebRTC provides a real opportunity for ultra-low-latency streaming. But those same operators, which spend billions on licensing rights, can't afford to just swap the ability to stream content in real time for basic OTT functionality like SSAI and DRM.
For Live Streaming Producers, Tables of Gear Are Still a Good Idea
16 Jan 2024
While the All-In-One live production and streaming tools grow and mature, let's make sure we keep backup solutions in mind to ensure a successful production—even if it still means a table full of gear.
Dances with Wolves
01 Dec 2023
Most of those following the Hollywood strikes of 2023 found reason to cheer on Nov. 8 when SAG-AFTRA and AMPTP reached a tentative agreement that reportedly resolved the AI-related disputes that largely motivated the strike (alongside the impasse over streaming residuals). But that resolution came with a significant compromise.
WCAG 2.2, Web Content Accessibility Standards, and You
17 Nov 2023
Instead of a patchwork of accessibility standards for California, Illinois, Europe, and everywhere else, the current standard is set by a broad cross-section of experts from the industry and published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
The State of CTV Advertising
10 Nov 2023
Ad buying is changing. For example, now you can buy from an agency that has deep knowledge of data around local viewing, or you can go to a TV manufacturer that has deep knowledge of all of the viewing on its hardware.
With Social Video Sizing, Serve Your Viewers What They’re Hungry For
24 Oct 2023
The customer wanting to watch your stream on Insta does not want a horizontal video shoehorned into a vertical frame. The customer watching the horizontal version doesn't want the vertical slice with the same thing blurred out behind it to fill the frame. Each of those customers is hungry for that particular experience. It's your job to give your customers what they are hungry for.
8 Lessons Surfing Can Teach Live Streaming Producers
06 Oct 2023
I had the opportunity to try and learn to surf earlier this year. I'm very glad that I took the lessons because I soon found out how hard surfing really is. While trying, failing, getting hurt, watching, and learning, I saw some parallels between my lessons on the water and the streaming business—which isn't quite as easy as it looks either.
Everything in Streaming Has Its Price
04 Oct 2023
This column isn't meant to be a downer, especially because the overall economy seems to be plugging along. But it is meant to ask those of you in the industry to share anecdotes and stories about the pain points you're facing. We know that everything in streaming has its price, but you are in a better position to help us fully understand what that price entails.
Personalization Is More Than What You Think It Can Be
04 Oct 2023
With advances with generative AI, just-intime transcoding, SSAI stitching, and other streaming video tech stack components, companies like Infuse Video are demonstrating that the true vision of video personalization—changing the video content itself—is finally at hand.
The Argument for Addressable Advertising
04 Oct 2023
For this column, I spoke with Larry Allen, VP and general manager of data and addressable enablement at Comcast Advertising, about a question that lands firmly on the deterministic side: "What is addressable advertising?" The term "addressable" refers to targeting digital and broadcast inventory and being able to buy audience segments on a household level.
Backward Design for Educational Video Production
04 Oct 2023
Software developers are trained in accessibility issues for front-end development and basic concepts like labeling control elements and reporting state changes to assistive technology—screen-readers—are part of a professional developer's code testing procedures. Despite this progress, two very different forces are swirling with the potential to push back on the trend towards better technological inclusion of the disabled.
Amazon Prime Adds Ad-Supported: Not Too Late for Tiers
04 Oct 2023
September 22 brought the unsurprising news that Amazon will soon join Netflix, Disney+, and Max by adding an ad-supported subscription tier for viewing its premium content in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and Canada. Prime being Prime, it's slightly inverting the approach its fellow top-tier titans have taken. Instead of offering a reduced subscription price for those budget-conscious viewers who are willing to suffer through a few ads in their premium shows, Amazon is making the ad tier the default and tacking on $2.99 to its ad-free tier.
Evidence That Survives Time
09 Aug 2023
From war crimes to war crime tribunals and war commemorations, how do we guarantee that content is available to play?
‘Bulletproof’ Needs to Be a Standard Feature for Production Gear
01 Aug 2023
There's a lot more imperfect gear on the market than ever before—gear we can't count on from gig to gig. Gear that can't deliver reliable video. Features that work and then don't. Devices that connect and then don't. We've lost core reliability. Bulletproof needs to be a feature.
Stars, Strikes, Streaming, and a Reckoning on Rock-Bottom Residuals
21 Jul 2023
Largely at issue in the first simultaneous WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 60+ years are legacy residual rates in expired contracts that no longer reflect either the prevalence of streaming or the profit it brings to studios.
Max, Netflix, Off-Licensing, and The Real World
17 Jul 2023
Perhaps the most surprising HBO outplacement news came just at this writing in late June, when WBD revealed that it was "in talks" to license the five-season HBO comedy series Insecure and other DFA'd HBO titles to Netflix, the first time HBO has ever let a tier-one original content competitor get its hands on HBO content. Like selling ads and staggered season releases for Netflix, for HBO, cutting such a deal with a premium rival was internally frowned-upon if not strictly verboten until recently.