Streaming Blog: Industry News, Trends & Tips

How AI Will Change Live Sports Broadcasting

Written by Laney Lewis in AI Video Technology on 28 September 2017

New innovations constantly change how fans watch their favorite live sports. Integral elements of today’s broadcasts like slow motion and instant replay didn’t exist before the 1950s. On-screen graphics are even more recent: Imagine watching a soccer game without the score in the top left corner of the screen, or a football game without the yellow first down line.

Now, emerging technologies like 3D and virtual reality are giving fans an entirely new perspective—and they may forever change how fans expect to experience the action.

But the real game-changer for live sports broadcasting is artificial intelligence. AI will not only affect viewers, but also advertisers, broadcasters—and even the athletes themselves. It will enrich video content with better insights and better recommendations, as outlined in this Uncovering Dark Video Data with AI white paper. Soon, we may not recognize a sporting event without it.

Be Inspiring: Top 6 Tips for Streaming Religious Services and Other Events

Written by Stacy Nawrocki in Customer Stories on 27 September 2017

Top 7 Tips for Streaming Religious Services and Other Events Point your camera at a religious service, touch the “Go Live” button, and your stream could reach dozens or even thousands of people in places you’ve never heard of. You can’t be sure what effect it might have on your audience.

Maybe you’re a rabbi sitting in front of a webcam in your office, about to play guitar and chat online with visitors to your weekly online-only synagogue. Or maybe you’re behind a camera that will sweep across 4,000 parishioners in a megachurch and send the service out to 50,000 viewers around the world.

Both these examples are among the roughly one thousand religious organizations that share their services on Ustream.tv each week. Whether the audience is vast or small, each producer wants to offer a high-quality, reliable video stream that is a gift for viewers to receive.

We asked experienced producers who stream religious services to share with us the top tips that make their work successful and rewarding. Read on to get their advice. And get started free with IBM Watson Media to stream your own religious service.

SolarCity Use Case Video: Building Employee Engagement with Streaming Video

Written by Stacy Nawrocki in Customer Stories on 26 September 2017

Nothing conveys emotion like live video. You watch it and feel it in the same moment. This SolarCity use case video explores why live video plays such an important role at SolarCity: it’s the vehicle for executive-led town halls, interactive trainings and webinars that bring together 15,000 employees across many locations and departments.

World Jousting Championship: Think Game of Thrones Without Stunt Planning

Written by Stacy Nawrocki in Customer Stories on 22 September 2017

“If you haven’t seen jousting before, picture your worst nightmare come true,” says Luke Campbell, chief operating officer at Epicentre.tv, which is streaming the first World Jousting Championship this weekend on IBM’s live streaming platform. “It’s two guys running on horseback, down a tilt line, 60 kilometers an hour (about 40 miles an hour) using wooden lances with metal tips to knock each other off. It’s insane, actually. You have to witness it to believe it.”

Direct HLS Video Streaming to M3U8

Written by Anthony Romero in Product Updates on 21 September 2017

Are you looking for a service that can provide HLS compatible live and on-demand video output? This article provides details around using IBM Video Streaming for direct HLS video streaming and the associated M3U8 manifest file format. Using this approach bypasses other methods from IBM Video Streaming such as our web based player, API based player offerings and our player SDKs.

To help guide content owners, this article discusses what is HLS and M3U8. It then outlines the benefits and uses cases for this approach, such as using third party players. It then covers what features are and are not available in this approach, letting content owners make an informed decision on their delivery strategy.

How to Use Social Media to Promote a Live Stream Event

Written by Stacy Nawrocki in Tips & Tutorials on 15 September 2017

Just about every minute of every day, there’s a live stream event taking place somewhere in the world — on social media platforms, corporate networks, and entertainment company apps. From the recent solar eclipse to the Mayweather-McGregor fight to the MTV Video Music Awards, online users are showing a healthy appetite for seeking out live video events to watch.

Of course, every event needs an audience — and given the effort that goes into a live streaming event, video planners want to ensure that, at start time, there’s a large and highly engaged audience. Social media can be used to whip up enthusiasm before the event, encourage discussion during the live stream, and continue the conversation after it ends.

If you are looking for some additional advice for marketing your video content, or creating marketing videos, also be sure to check out our on-demand 9 Mistakes to Avoid in Your Video Marketing Strategy seminar.

How to Setup a Live Stream in 8 Steps

Written by Anthony Romero in Tips & Tutorials on 6 September 2017

Want to know how to setup a live stream?

This article walks you through 8 steps from start to finish in terms of managing the sources and settings for your live stream. This includes everything from choosing a video source and lighting, to a live encoder and managing your connection. If you consider yourself already setup on the video and audio side, skip to step 4. Also, if you are more interested in perfecting your current setup or curious how to best handle the delivery aspect at scale, watch this Five Video Delivery Mistakes to Avoid webinar.

Tour de Office: Live Streaming The Way to a Healthier Workplace Culture

Written by Stacy Nawrocki in Customer Stories on 1 September 2017

Tour de Office, an Australian nonprofit, is encouraging office-bound workers to get more active while raising money for charity — and streaming video plays a key role.

“The growing knowledge economy is putting more people behind desks for longer periods of time,” says Tudor Marsden-Huggins, an avid cyclist and founder of Employment Office, a recruitment agency based in Australia. “Research shows that sitting for more than four hours per day greatly increases your risk of chronic disease.”

In 2011, Marsden-Huggins launched Tour de Office, a week-long relay event to raise awareness of those health risks. The events are part friendly athletic competition, part fundraising challenge. Participating companies compete for a charity of their choice, and Tour de Office live streams the action online to maximize donations. (See how a live stream solution like this quickly scales.)

Why Practice Makes Perfect for Live Video Productions

Written by Stacy Nawrocki in Tips & Tutorials on 29 August 2017

Why Practice Makes Perfect for Live Video Productions

An expert in North Korea agreed to an on-camera interview with the BBC in March but a few seconds in, everything went pear-shaped.

First the man’s young daughter walked in and he gently tried to coax her out during the interview. Then his eight-month-old son strolled in on a squeaky walker. Finally, the man’s wife frantically tried to herd both children out of the room.

The clip went viral, to the point where Robert E. Kelly, the so-called “BBC Dad,” felt compelled to give a press conference explaining himself.

Most glitches during a live stream don’t rise to that level of comedic gold, with a lot of them related to delivery issues that could be corrected for through scaling as mentioned in this Scaling Video Delivery to Reach Massive Audiences white paper. Very often, though, unexpected problems during live streams leave the impression that the presentation is unprofessional. But presenters can salvage such moments by taking some cues from the world of improv comedy.

Multi-Tiered Distribution for ECDN

Written by Anthony Romero in Product Updates on 24 August 2017

Multi-Tiered Distribution for ECDN

Interested in delivering internal video to large, potentially massive audiences? Are you running into delivery issues not at the service level, but due to congestion caused at the ISP level?

IBM’s ECDN was created to address this need. However, large network setups have still seen congestion issues from their video applications due to multiple video distribution servers pulling videos into the enterprise network through a central ISP connection. To address the challenge resulted from hub-and-spoke network architectures IBM Watson Media has introduced a multi-tiered distribution approach for ECDN. This creates a distribution hierarchy to further resolve congestion issues for some setups. In situations like a hub-and-spoke network, where there are central hubs that are gone through for Internet access, users might go through a regional server instead to remove strain that might originally have been placed on the hub.

Read on to learn more about this approach and the hub-and-spoke network setups that will benefit from it.

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