Streaming Blog: Industry News, Trends & Tips

Streaming Media Readers’ Choice Awards 2018 Winner

Written by Anthony Romero in Company News on 14 November 2018

Winners for the Streaming Media Readers’ Choice Awards 2018 have been announced. As selected by users, the awards represent the exemplary services and products in the industry, from platforms to hardware offerings. This year, IBM took home four awards at the ceremony in the following categories:

– Closed Captioning Solution
– End-to-End Workflow Solution
– Enterprise Video Platform
– Media & Entertainment Video Platform

We’d like to thank all of our users for their continued support. For more information on the awards, including our history at them, please read on.

How to Live Stream in Multiple Languages

Written by Anthony Romero in Product Updates on 7 November 2018

Interested in learning how to live stream in multiple languages? Offering multi-lingual content as part of your video strategy can be a great way to broaden attendance and improve asset comprehension. It can also allow more people to share in the excitement of live video, enjoying in-the-moment experiences while being able to appreciate the details.

IBM Cloud Video has added the ability to broadcast live content in multiple languages. This allows broadcasters to publish a video stream and then include multiple audio streams as part of the same live broadcast. Consequently, being able to effectively produce content for more people in more places. This also fits into one of the video trends of 2018, which saw a notable increase in the global viewership of content.

Captioning at the Speed of Live for Accessible TV

Written by David Mowrey in AI Video Technology on 5 November 2018

When news breaks, television news crews do what they do best: hustle to the scene to get the word out quickly, accurately and often under daunting conditions.

Their work has enormous impact: Even in a new era of instant-access to digital news on the Internet, television remains a go-to resource. The September 2017 State of the News survey by the Pew Research Center found more people get their news from television than any other source. What’s more, Pew found most of those TV news viewers get their news from their local TV stations and their companion websites.

Understanding the scope and social impact of TV news helps to explain why it’s disappointing to news directors and station managers that coverage isn’t always accurate and available for a significant share of the audience – people who rely on written text, not spoken language, to know what’s happening. To highlight this, we cover the importance of making accessible TV possible, even for live television content, through advancements happening around automation thanks to AI (artificial intelligence).

For more depth on the topic of using AI for captions, also download this white paper which goes over some of the solutions available from the Weather Company and IBM Watson Media: Captioning Goes Cognitive.

Avoid These 13 Live Streaming Video Mistakes

Written by Stacy Nawrocki in Tips & Tutorials on 31 October 2018

The live stream video begins, and the carefully prepared speaker begins addressing an audience of thousands of viewers. The presentation is going smoothly until, just a few minutes into the opening keynote, the video freezes. Some viewers sound the alert in the chat window, others try checking their own connection. But many viewers have left: On average, one in five viewers will immediately stop watching a stream with poor video quality and never return.

Most of the time, common live streaming video mistakes—poor sound quality and a broken (or unattended) chat function, among others—are easily avoided with careful advance work. Organizations new to streaming video should heed this advice from Jeff Irwin, customer success manager for IBM Cloud Video. In the process of helping customers implement and manage streaming video, Irwin has identified common mistakes that stand in the way of streaming events and their viewers. So follow these 13 tips to avoid any unlucky mishaps on your next broadcast.

Note that this list assumes that you are using a platform that is scalable, able to reach large audiences without crashing, and is mobile friendly, having adaptive bitrate delivery. If not, these would be priorities as well.

Q&A with Nick Barber, Sr. Analyst with Forrester Research on Video and AI

Written by Stacy Nawrocki in Video Trends & Studies on 30 October 2018

We asked a few questions recently to Nick Barber, senior analyst with Forrester Research on video and what’s changing with the advancements of artificial intelligence (AI). Here’s what Nick had to say based on his research around enterprise video and related communications technology.

You can hear more from him on through this on-demand webinar: Transform the Employee Experience with AI Driven Video Communications.

4 Live Video Analytics You Shouldn’t Ignore

Written by Stacy Nawrocki in Tips & Tutorials on 24 October 2018

There’s a gold mine of data in live video streams — data that can guide communications programs and help organizations refine future presentations. Important engagement clues are buried deep in the data: How long are viewers actually tuning in to company video? Are they responding to calls to action? How often are they engaging?

During any live stream, metrics are key for assessing performance, spotting trends and honing everything from a video’s message to its quality. Here are four impactful (and often overlooked) data points to collect from your live video analytics to get a complete picture of the event’s success.

Content Innovation Awards 2018 Winner: IBM Watson Captioning

Written by Anthony Romero in Company News on 18 October 2018

This week in Cannes, France, IBM Watson Captioning was honored in the Advanced TV Innovation of the Year category at the Content Innovation Awards 2018. The award highlights technology that has improved the TV experience, overcome challenges to the market or enabled viewers in new ways. In this respect, IBM had recently launched IBM Watson Captioning Live, which debuted in April of 2018 to offer live intelligent closed captions for broadcast networks.

The solution, which aids in automated caption generation, helps solve some of the most critical issues facing live content creators today in providing captions. This includes both the ability to scale caption generation and in regards to accuracy, all through infusing the technology with artificial intelligence. This article details what is IBM Watson Captioning and some background on the Content Innovation Awards. For even more information on this technology, also download our white paper Captioning Goes Cognitive: A New Approach to an Old Challenge.

ECDN Provider Features and How to Find the Best Solution for You

Written by Anthony Romero in Tips & Tutorials on 16 October 2018

71% of executives describe distributing video without harming the corporate network as a top priority purchase decisions in streaming technology.

Video, especially live video where large simultaneous audiences can occur, is a very bandwidth intensive process. Without a proper delivery strategy in place, it can easily compromise the network, halting other activities that might require network bandwidth. So what does a proper strategy look like? Well it often includes an ECDN (Enterprise Content Delivery Network) solution.

This article tackles this topic of ECDN provider features and how to find the best solution for you. It will arm you with a better understanding of features that are out there to help you start to build a checklist of what’s important based on your needs and scope out your optimal setup. This includes considerations like ease of use and monitoring capabilities alongside the different types of available solutions, including efficient delivery over unicast networks and multicast options.

For those looking for even more information on this topic, including comparing unicast, multicast and P2P options along with firewall considerations, download our Internal Video Delivery Without Bottlenecks eBook.

Streaming Video Analytics API and Developer Tools

Written by Anthony Romero in Product Updates on 8 October 2018

Looking for a streaming video analytics API and other developer tools related to video metrics?

IBM has expanded the analytics options available to IBM Streaming Manager and IBM Streaming Manager for Enterprise users. This includes a set of APIs that allows developers to take metrics related to their video content and infuse them into other applications. These available analytics can be used to track content broadly, seeing metrics on all content. However, they can also be used to track individual usage, associated with an email address gathered either after a user authenticates for restricted internal content or fills out a registration gate for video marketing content.

This article covers what type of data you can get through using the streaming video analytics API, where to find them and API use cases. Some of these are focused on the idea that they will be used for video marketing, while others on the very different use case of internal comms. For the latter, also be sure to download our Using Video for Internal Corporate Communications, Training & Compliance white paper as well.

Cloud Video Editing and Chaptering

Written by Anthony Romero in Product Updates on 3 October 2018

Looking for cloud video editing capabilities? Tools that can let you trim content online while also looking into value adds like the ability to chapter content for better accessibility?

IBM Cloud Video offers capabilities for content owners to modify videos, either uploaded or archived from previous live sessions, online. This is non-destructive, meaning changes can be reverted, and is collaborative as multiple managers and admins can utilize the same account to edit video content.

This article covers this feature set along with highlighting improvements that have been made, moving the technology to being HTML5 based. Also be sure to register for our Getting Started with IBM Cloud Video webinar as well, which will cover this and any additional improvements and features to the IBM Cloud Video services.

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