Use our visitor code to get a complimentary access to the IBC exhibitor hall.

The International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) is one of the world’s most influential media, entertainment, and technology show. We are thrilled to be back in Amsterdam to connect with industry leaders, showcase our latest innovations, and discuss how StreamShark can help you with your video streaming needs.

You can find our booth at 5.H81.

What to Expect from StreamShark at IBC2025

Visit the StreamShark booth to learn about how we are helping the world’s smartest enterprises, broadcasters, and video agencies stream flawless video content. We will be showcasing our latest features, including:

• Get a first look at our latest platform innovations, being revealed for the first time at IBC!
• Intelligent Workflow for VR & Immersive Video
• Customizable & Scalable Video CMS
• Privacy, Security, SSO & Compliance
• Software & Hardware Encoder Integrations
• Live Captioning & Live Translations
• Multi-CDN Delivery & CMCD Analytics

Book a Meeting with the StreamShark Team

Come chat with the StreamShark team, including our CEO James Broberg, Yudong Li our Head of Engineering, and Cameron Lowe our Product Lead. To schedule a meeting with one of our team members, please use the form below. If you would like to connect outside of Exhibit Hall Hours, please email us at info@streamshark.io to secure a meeting slot.

We look forward to seeing you in Amsterdam!

RAI Exhibit Hall Hours:

• Friday, September 12 | 10:30 – 18:00
• Saturday, September 13 | 09:30 – 18:00
• Sunday, September 14 | 09:30 – 18:00
• Monday, September 15 | 09:30 – 16:00

You can find our booth at 5.H81.

The post Meet StreamShark at IBC2025 appeared first on StreamShark.

Visitors are welcome to use our free Exhibitor Guest Pass Code: NS8459, which you can use here.

NAB Show Demos

Come and learn about how StreamShark is helping the smartest enterprises, broadcasters and video agencies stream video content flawlessly. Visit the StreamShark team at our booth to learn about:

• Intelligent Workflow for VR & Immersive Video
• Customizable & Scalable Video CMS
• Privacy, Security, SSO & Compliance
• Software & Hardware Encoder Integrations
• Live Captioning & Live Translations
• Multi-CDN Delivery & CMCD Analytics

Book a meeting with the StreamShark Team

Senior StreamShark leaders will be available at the StreamShark booth, including Founder and CEO James Broberg and Head of Engineering Yudong Li. You can schedule a meeting with one of our team members by using the form below.

If you would like to connect outside of Exhibit Hall Hours, please email us at info@streamshark.io to secure a meeting slot.

Booth Location

We’re located in the West Hall. Entering via the W2 entrance will get you to our booth the fastest.

Exhibit Hall Hours

• Sunday, April 6 | 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
• Monday, April 7 | 9 a.m. – 6 p.m.
• Tuesday, April 8 | 9 a.m. – 6 p.m.
• Wednesday, April 9 | 9 a.m. – 2 p.m.

The post Meet StreamShark at NAB Show 2025 appeared first on StreamShark.

Real-Time Captions for Inclusive Live Streaming

Live captions are a powerful tool for improving accessibility and ensuring that your content reaches the widest possible audience. Whether your viewers are in noisy environments, have hearing impairments, or prefer reading along, captions can dramatically enhance their viewing experience. With StreamShark, adding live captions is straightforward and fully integrated into our platform, allowing you to seamlessly incorporate them into your live streams. We partnered with AI-Media to make this all possible.

Live Translations for Global Reach

In an increasingly connected world, reaching a global audience is more important than ever. That’s why we’ve expanded our capabilities to include live translations. This feature allows you to stream in one language while offering translations in real time, ensuring that language barriers don’t limit your content’s reach. Whether your event is multilingual or your viewers span different regions, StreamShark makes it easier to communicate with everyone, regardless of the language they speak.

Captions for Both Primary and Backup Streams

Technical issues during a live stream can be disruptive, but StreamShark’s robust infrastructure ensures minimal interruptions. Our new feature allows you to provide captions for both your primary and backup streams, adding an extra layer of reliability. In the event of a switch from the primary to the backup stream, your captions will remain intact, ensuring that your audience continues to receive a seamless experience.

Why These Features Matter

The growing demand for accessible content and global engagement makes these new features essential for content creators, businesses, and event organizers alike. By providing real-time captions and live translations, you’re not only making your streams more accessible, but you’re also expanding your reach to a more diverse audience.

StreamShark’s ongoing commitment to innovation means that we’re constantly developing new ways to enhance your live streaming experience. From high-quality streaming to improved accessibility, we’re empowering users to deliver professional, inclusive broadcasts that resonate with viewers around the world.

These updates mark just the latest step in our mission to deliver powerful, user-friendly tools for streamers. Stay tuned for more enhancements as we continue to expand our platform’s capabilities!

The post Live Captions and Translations for Global Audiences appeared first on StreamShark.

What is ISO 27001:2022?

ISO 27001:2022 is the latest version of the internationally recognized standard for Information Security Management Systems (ISMS). It provides a systematic approach to managing sensitive company information, ensuring it remains secure. The certification is a testament to our comprehensive framework of policies and procedures designed to protect information from a wide range of threats.

Our Journey to Recertification

StreamShark initially achieved ISO 27001 certification in 2021, a significant milestone that demonstrated our commitment to implementing robust information security measures. This year, we have successfully undergone the recertification process for the updated ISO 27001:2022 standard.

The journey involved rigorous audits, meticulous documentation, and continuous improvement of our security practices to meet the evolving requirements of the new standard.

Key Highlights of Our Information Security Practices

1. Risk Management: We proactively identify, assess, and mitigate risks to our information assets. This ongoing process ensures we are prepared for potential threats and vulnerabilities.
2. Security Policies: Our comprehensive set of security policies covers all aspects of information security, from data encryption and access controls to incident response and disaster recovery.
3. Employee Training: We prioritize educating our team on the importance of information security. Regular training sessions ensure that every employee understands their role in maintaining the security of our systems and data.
4. Continuous Improvement: Information security is a dynamic field. We continuously monitor, review, and improve our security measures to stay ahead of emerging threats and comply with the latest standards.

What This Means for Our Customers

Recertification for ISO 27001:2022 is more than just a badge of honor; it is a reassurance to our customers that their data is in safe hands. Our clients can have confidence in the security of our platform, knowing that we adhere to stringent international standards. This certification also demonstrates our commitment to transparency and accountability in all our operations.

Looking Ahead

As we celebrate this achievement, we remain committed to upholding the highest standards of information security. Our recertification is a step forward in our ongoing journey to provide secure, reliable, and innovative streaming solutions. We will continue to invest in our security infrastructure and practices to ensure that StreamShark remains a trusted partner for all our customers’ streaming needs.

Thank you for your continued trust and support. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to enhance our platform and services.

For more information about our initial certification, please refer to our previous blog post here.

The post StreamShark Recertified for ISO 27001:2022: Ensuring Top-Notch Information Security appeared first on StreamShark.

AI-Media Integration

We’re thrilled to announce our partnership with AI-Media, a pioneer in AI-driven captioning technology and solutions, aimed at enhancing your live streaming experience. This collaboration is focused on simplifying the process of incorporating captions into your live streams, making it more accessible and enjoyable for everyone. You can read all about the integration here.

LinkedIn Live Multistream Integration

We’re excited to announce that our LinkedIn Live multistream integration has officially been approved by LinkedIn. This means you will be able to natively stream to LinkedIn, along with our other native integrations, Facebook Live, YouTube, Workplace and Twitch. We’ll release a more detailed blog post about this integration at a later date, so stay tuned!

Video Observability

We’re excited to introduce CMCD support for our live stream analytics (for StreamShark Events and Live Schedules), enhancing your ability to monitor viewer quality of experience (QoE) across your broadcasts. Visit us at our NAB Show booth for an exclusive sneak peek of what’s ahead!

Large Scale Event Optimisation

Reliability and scalability have been two of our core methodologies since StreamShark’s inception. We’ve recently improved both of these things with the concept of ‘high concurrency streams’ which is an optimized Event configuration for mega scale events. With a single click to enable this feature, your live events can support even more viewers! Paired with our CMCD support, you don’t need to sacrifice observability for scale!

Book a meeting with StreamShark at NAB

Senior StreamShark leaders will be available at the StreamShark booth, including Founder and CEO James Broberg, and our Head of Software Engineering, Yudong Li.

If you’d like to schedule a meeting and/or demo with us during Expo Hall Hours, please click here to book.

The post NAB Show 2024 – Special Announcements appeared first on StreamShark.

A Click Away from Live Captions

With this update, adding captions to your live stream is as simple as pressing a button. We wanted to cut down on the hassle and make it straightforward for everyone. No more jumping through hoops to get captions running. This is all about saving time and making your streams more professional and accessible with minimal effort.

Advanced AI Training Options to Increase Accuracy

If you wish to further increase the accuracy of your live captions, stream operators can set up custom Vocabularies to ensure challenging names, brands and product terms are correctly transcribed. 

Why are Captions Important?

Captions are important for many reasons. They make your streams more accessible to a wider audience, including those who are deaf or hard of hearing, those who are watching in their non-native language, and people who prefer watching videos without audio. Captions enrich your video content, creating valuable metadata and transcripts which enhances the discoverability of your content. Captions can even improve your SEO, increasing the reach of your video content. 

Why AI-Media?

With decades of invaluable experience in the industry, AI-Media excels in providing comprehensive expertise and end-to-end solutions in the captioning, translation, and transcription space. AI-Media stands out in the captioning industry for its commitment to accuracy, speed, and innovation. Leveraging cutting-edge AI technology, AI-Media ensures that captions are not only generated in real-time but also with a level of precision that rivals human captioners. 

Easy Compliance

As time goes on, there’s more and more international standards and regulations requiring mandatory captions for video content. Our integration simplifies compliance down to a single click for any live event.

Conclusion

The new integration with AI-Media is a big step forward for StreamShark users, making live captioning simple and enhancing the overall streaming experience. This update is all about making your streams more accessible, engaging, and easier to manage. We’re excited to see how our users will take advantage of this new feature!

For more information about AI-Media’s captioning technology and solutions click here.

The post StreamShark Teams Up with AI-Media: Simplifying Live Captions appeared first on StreamShark.

Visitors are welcome to use our free Exhibitor Guest Pass Code: NS8459, which you can use here.

NAB Show Demos

Come and learn about how StreamShark is helping the smartest enterprises, broadcasters and video agencies stream video content flawlessly. Visit the StreamShark team at our booth to:

• Explore StreamShark’s end-to-end live and on-demand streaming service including cloud encoder management, global video transcoding and playout, engagement analytics and brandable video portals.
• Learn about how we leverage partner technology integrations in our service to solve the hardest problems and automate the most complex workflows.
• See demos of our latest and greatest features, including our next-gen VOD2Live platform, Hollywood level DRM, eCDN integrations, AI-powered captioning and more!

Book a meeting with the StreamShark Team

Senior StreamShark leaders will be available at the StreamShark booth, including Founder and CEO James Broberg and Head of Engineering Yudong Li. You can schedule a meeting with one of our team members by using the form below.

If you would like to connect outside of Exhibit Hall Hours, please email us at info@streamshark.io to secure a meeting slot.

Booth Location

We’re located in the West Hall, not far from the Amazon Web Services booth.

Exhibit Hall Hours

• Sunday, April 14 | 10 a.m. – 6p.m.
• Monday, April 15 | 9 a.m. – 6 p.m.
• Tuesday, April 16 | 9 a.m. – 6 p.m.
• Wednesday, April 17 | 9 a.m. – 2 p.m.

The post Meet StreamShark at NAB Show 2024 appeared first on StreamShark.

On the back of this great partnership, we’ve got some exciting new updates to share with you!

New Hive VX Pricing Models

StreamShark now integrates and resells Hive’s latest “Hive VX Platform”, which offers a new simplified license scheme that encompasses eCDN and new enhanced VX features. It is based on Full Time Employees (FTE) using the service from unlimited devices. The FTE subscription model is available on annual plans.

Additionally, StreamShark can offer Event based pricing for one off Hive-enabled events. This means you no longer need to subscribe to an annual plan off the bat to get access to the benefits of the Hive platform, and can instead leverage it for initial individual events. This is a great option if you don’t stream regularly which will enable you to discover the full Video Experience platform.

Access To The Latest Features

The biggest and most important update comes through a technical collaboration between Hive and StreamShark to integrate and certify (“Certified by Hive”) the latest releases of the Hive Plugin, and the StreamShark Event player. This grants our users access to these great features:

1. Engagement Indicators

Engagement indicators are a set of metrics that help Hive identify the video employee engagement. More specifically Hive collect anonymous information from everyone that participated in the live event regarding the player window position i.e., if it is in the background or the foreground, the volume levels i.e., low, high, or muted, and player window size i.e., full screen or custom size. All these metrics are combined to understand the overall engagement for an event for different data points, including viewers in office vs working from home.

2. WebRTC Remote Configuration

This feature allows Hive to enable different configurations for our WebRTC Customers, such as setting peering policies, limit bitrates, enabled/disable site-to-site peering, etc. This is a much sought after functionality by WebRTC Customers as they can customize the solution per their needs.

3. JWT Based Authorization

A new and improved way of authorization, moving to a ticketless approach compared to the existing ticket based one. JWT adds the possibility to provide multiple manifests during initialization which provides enhanced flexibility.

4. Booster Support

Introduced as part of Agent release 2022.1.0, the Booster is a new service module in Hive Agent. The purpose of Booster is to enable WebRTC as the only tech from Hive for optimization, while implementing the features that can’t normally be supported in the browser plugin and making them available to Hive WebRTC via Booster using secure local REST APIs. For example, access to all network interfaces.

5.  Regex Support

In certain conditions, the Partner platform has different configurations per viewer or different sources. To support this, we provide a regex attribute that enables the Partner to specify a pattern in the segment/manifest URL that identifies the same stream/segment even when the URL has multiple sources or is different per viewer.

6.  Encrypted Stream Support

As part of the ongoing integration change, StreamShark required Hive to support an encrypted HLS stream with the manifest containing the key details, i.e., EXT-X-KEY tag in the playlist. The latest Hive plugin supported this configuration.

What are the benefits of using StreamShark and Hive Streaming?

By using our platform and Hive Streaming, you can enjoy the following benefits:

• Fully Automated Integration: Enable Hive Streaming for an event with a single click via a completely automated integration that performs seamlessly without any manual configuration.
• SSO identified viewers: Automatically identify each individual viewer and link their corresponding QoE metrics in Hive via StreamShark’s deep integration with customer Single Sign On (SSO) providers.
• Metrics per ingest: Access QoE metrics for viewers even on failover of primary ingest to backup ingest.
• Real-time Slack integration: Stay informed with QoE reports directly within your Slack notifications, thanks to our seamless API integration with Hive
• Tailored Reports: Review your company’s utilization of Hive as well as key QoE metrics for events via tailored reports generated by StreamShark.
• Lower load on server and network: eCDN delivery reduces the dependency on the server and the network, and distributes the video segments among the viewers, using their idle resources as distribution nodes.
• Higher quality and scalability: eCDN delivery ensures that all viewers can consume high quality streams, regardless of weak network links or remote offices. The eCDN leverages P2P delivery, which scales to tens of thousands of viewers, without compromising the quality or the performance.

How to get started with StreamShark and Hive Streaming?

If you are interested in using our platform and Hive Streaming for your enterprise video streaming needs, you can contact us today and request a demo. We will show you how our platform and Hive Streaming can deliver the best enterprise video experience for your organization.

The post StreamShark and Hive Streaming: Delivering the Best Enterprise Video Experience appeared first on StreamShark.

AV1 has a long and storied history designing and producing events, offering services across audio visual production, content creation and event technology across Australia. They are curators of premium event experiences, helping clients leave a lasting impression on their attendees, audience and stakeholders – whether that’s in a live, hybrid or virtual environment.

Like StreamShark, they are customer obsessed, and since they approached us in March 2020 just as Australia and the world was shutting down, we have worked together to ensure engaging and interactive events could be run virtually, and as restrictions eased, transitioned to hybrid and in person focused productions.

AV1’s Nigel Mintern and Tom Durand were kind enough to chat with James on their last working day of the year, as they collectively reflected on a busy and rewarding time, and considered what the future of digital events looks like in 2024 and beyond.

James Broberg: Today I’m sitting down with some of the folks at AV1 to chat about how they utilise StreamShark in their workflow and to learn more about their company as a whole.

To get things started why don’t you introduce yourselves, your role, and where your journey at AV1 started.

Tom Durand: Hi, my name is Tom Durand, I work with AV1 as a Technical Director. Day to day, I work with a production manager. We work as a duo producing events. 

Once the event has been confirmed, I then own the technical production. I make sure the equipment is spec’d correctly for the job, then dot the i’s and cross the t’s to ensure everything runs smoothly on the day.

Nigel Mintern: I’m Nigel Mintern, a Producer here at AV1. I started with the company almost 14 years ago now as a technical operator and worked my way up the ranks to Technical Director, and now Producer.

I work with the clients first to bring new ideas, help them define their creative vision and turn that into a production. Then working with our Technical Directors and production team, we deliver the event, encompassing countless hours of pre-production to make sure nothing is missed.

James Broberg: How long has AV1 been operating for? Were you part of the foundation team?

Nigel Mintern: AV1 will celebrate 20 years in business next year. I think I was employee number 12, back in 2010. So not quite the foundation, but not far off.

James Broberg: Yeah, wonderful. Can you talk at a high level in terms of the AV1 offering? Can you talk it through, what would be your dominant engagements with your clients? 

Nigel Mintern: We produce business events of all kinds, ranging from intimate boardroom meetings all the way to 5,000-person conferences, providing production services and equipment. Our typical type of work is in the corporate sector, you know, law, financial, medical those kinds of industries.

We really only got into live streaming when the pandemic started. Before COVID we ran maybe a handful of events each year, which we would actually live stream, and we onboarded an external provider to run those. That external provider used StreamShark, which we had great success with and that was how we learnt about the service.

James Broberg: Great to hear! Do you have your own studio spaces as well, doing events on-prem?

Nigel Mintern: We don’t have our own studio space anymore. During COVID, we had two dedicated studios. One was a converted warehouse which we cleared out and turned into a black box studio. And then we had a second one at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia set up in what’s known as the Harborside Room with the Sydney Opera House in the background.

James Broberg: So it wasn’t all virtual? You could bring in the talent there as well?

Nigel Mintern: Yes, we of course respected and adhered to the restrictions in place at any given time. So you could bring people in, at times, it may have been a single person, depending on restrictions. It was a combination of virtual and in person.

James Broberg: So we did touch on it briefly before, but what brought you to us? And perhaps you could give us an idea of the problems you were trying to solve?

Nigel Mintern: Yeah we worked with our production partner, Dennis Fernandez, for our first live streams, but obviously it wasn’t the most cost-effective way for us to do it. Ultimately we looked at how to do it ourselves, and whether we go down a hardware or software encoder route, and the different components that come with that.

Having worked effectively with the back end of StreamShark and having it do everything that we needed, we decided to jump in and go on the StreamShark journey. 

James Broberg: Did clients know what to ask for at the time? Did they just want their in-person events replicated? Or were they just looking for you to think about how you would creatively solve the problem we were all facing?

Nigel Mintern: Definitely, you know, I reckon the phone rang, multiple times from people just asking, OK, we want to hold a virtual event. What do we do? What’s needed? Nobody had an idea of what was required for a virtual event or what was needed. 

Nigel Mintern: And so they were calling on us as their technology production company for our advice on how best to deliver events. Nobody really knew what to spin up at that point in time. We were quite lucky, we’d built our first studio, in its first format pretty quickly. I think we did our first event there at the end of March 2020. We were ahead of the curve in that sense, and we executed the events from there.

James Broberg: And what was your memory of the time, Tom, any curly technical challenges that you had to solve or you’re comfortable with the tools you had at hand and to bend them to your will?

Tom Durand: A lot of the time, we’re just building from the ground up. So trying to get all the networking together, the latency, the sync. It was all pretty similar, but different at the same time. So I just feel, since we had only a couple of spaces, the amount of events going through it, you are always kind of fixing a problem and trying to do something else in time. So it’s pretty fast and furious. But yeah, in the end, I think we got there and everything is much easier now. 

James Broberg: Yeah, it was a chaotic, but a busy and rewarding time. A lot of challenges to be solved and a lot of fires to be put out concurrently is my memory of the time. 

Nigel Mintern: A lot of learnings from our crew in terms of new skills as well. We hadn’t previously used things like vMix or other software, but then we had to learn how to use them.

And that side of it is very different to an in-person event. With the in-person events we ran, as the show finishes you play the music nice and loud and there’s usually a buzz in the room. But for virtual events, it kind of just finished and they went ‘thanks’ and off they went. It can really miss the hype at the end of an event.

James Broberg: Yeah, yeah. 

Nigel Mintern: Let’s just turn the power switch off and walk out ourselves. 

James Broberg: Haha, yeah, job done. It was a bit like that, wasn’t it?

That leads me into my next question, what sort of insights and reporting were clients asking for you at the time. In terms of moving from that physical space to virtual, whether they wanted immediate feedback to know how it’s gone.

Nigel Mintern: I think the biggest thing that people wanted was just the analytics of who dialled in and how long they watched for. I think that was one of the most important data points that people were just trying to understand.

In the early days, you’d have 100 people registered to watch something, and then you’d probably end up with 95 to 100 actually attending. Whereas now you put on an event with 600 people registered and you might only get 200 people watching. So the data on who watched the streams is crucial.

James Broberg: Yeah, absolutely. I guess stepping back a little bit, obviously things have changed a bit in the last three years in terms of the tools we have available now versus early 2020 and we all overcame a lot of challenges and did things on hard mode. I think the experience has driven a lot of innovation, certainly in the virtual production space and industry wide.

So what for you has been the most material change or improvement in terms of running these events?

Nigel Mintern: I think it’s just the ease of it now. It’s very easy to add a virtual component now in some shape or form to any event as an add on.

On the flip side of that, we see a lot of virtual presenters dialling into events. That’s probably more common now than the hybrid version. Whether it’s Reese Witherspoon dialling in from Paris for an event on the Gold Coast, to a GM who’s sick at home, but still wants to present. Obviously, it’s generally cost-saving, because you don’t have to pay for travel and things like that. I’d say that’s probably the main thing.

James Broberg: And Tom, anything on the tool side? Has there been one thing in particular that you’ve been impressed by in the last sort of 12 to 18 months with the rapid improvement of the tooling that we’re all using? 

Tom Durand: I guess just the use of computers that are powerful enough to throw in application edits. Now it’s no longer one dedicated machine that does a dedicated task. Most computers are powerful enough to jump between a few different programs. You can have all virtual lines that tie it all together. So if you’ve got enough screens or are good at alt-tabbing, there you go, it’s all in one station.

James Broberg: Yeah, I definitely agree with that one. I think pre-COVID, our most risk-averse corporate clients would always want to use hardware encoders. And that at the time was using very expensive Elemental boxes, or Epiphan Pearls, which could be setting you back five to tens of thousands of dollars.

There just wasn’t the comfort level to use a consumer PC and a software encoder like Wirecast or whatever was current at the time. So I’d agree with that, Tom, it’s definitely evolved. The comfort level is much higher now to run a high-end production with vMix or even OBS. If you’ve got a good enough PC and you’re comfortable with the stability of it. And as you say, you can bring in virtual presenters. You can stream it out from the same box and be pretty comfortable that it’s mostly going to work. And if you’ve got a backup, you’re feeling pretty good about it.

We’ve seen a maturation of tools and gone are the days of pinning machines for each virtual presenter on a Zoom or a Meet, like a literal $3,000 PC just to capture some terrible quality video conference.

If the talent is remote, whether it’s a CEO that’s sick or Reese Witherspoon in another country, as long as she’s got a good mic and camera and knows how to use Teams or Zoom, you can get something pretty good out of it too. That used to be a challenge, not impossible, but challenging and inefficient. Now it’s a very integrated part of most of the virtual production tools we see out there.

That’s all super positive in our books in terms of a good trend that lowered the bar, but uplifted the quality as well.

Looking beyond that, is there anything that is the missing piece? A lot of the hard problems have been solved, but is there something out there that you still think, I wish worked better or I wish this was more compatible or coherent, or is there something out there that can save you guys time? 

Obviously, AI is a very buzzy thing right now, but is there anything in your mind in the AV space where that could enhance anything in terms of extracting metadata or summarising or shot selection or anything like that? 

Tom Durand: I think the biggest problem we often run into is just internet bandwidth. So, if you want to do something a bit ritzy, high resolution, high bit rate, you can run into problems pretty fast. Because live streaming still definitely seems to run by the rule of test when you start and test often, and if you don’t, it’s going to get stung pretty hard. 

James Broberg: And test where you’re running the event from. 

Tom Durand: Which I always thought was a nice feature of StreamShark when you can test before you go live for an unlimited amount of time. It does make everyone pretty sure of how everything’s going to work. Because a few of the other providers just cut you off 10 minutes after you start.

But yeah, I think the internet is always the biggest crutch. Everything else you can kind of spec out because you have some form of ultimate control over it. But sometimes you go to someone’s building, and you just can’t connect to their network. So you’ve got to bring in all these wireless temporary solutions and they’re just not as robust. 

James Broberg: Yeah, absolutely. I’m out at the coast at the moment and 4G’s worked quite well down here until recently. It’s starting to really get over subscribed. So, I’ve been hooking up a Starlink today. It can provide some interesting possibilities for a remote event where you could literally be anywhere with a view of the sky and be able to get an uplink at least within reason. So, I guess there’s options on that front. There’s bonding and other enhancements that haven’t solved all the problems, but have made things a little bit better.

We are also seeing more efficient codecs coming into play, like HEVC 265, AV1 (the codec) and SRT. HEVC 265 is not exactly new, but there’s in the order of 30% savings there if you’re using that as a contribution mechanism.

AV1 (the codec) is becoming mature and the hope is you could, in a constrained environment, push out a high quality signal with less bandwidth. 

We’ve recently supported SRT as well, which is secure, reliable transport, and that gives you a little bit more rope, to try and get a reliable signal out of a challenging environment. It doesn’t solve all your problems, like if your internet goes down for two minutes, it’s not going to help you. But it can at least remove some of those hiccups and gives you a bit of buffer so your event is not impacted.

Tom Durand: It would be much easier with SRT than RTMP. 

James Broberg: Yes, especially with the rise of 2K and 4K content, 50 to 80 megabit streams. We’ve seen great success with SRT and adjusting the buffer depending on how far from the ingest you are.

The other thing we’ve seen is the rise in the importance of accessibility. Depending on the country there’s all sorts of obligations coming down the pipe from a regulatory perspective. Is that something you’re being asked for in terms of, closed captioning, supporting multiple languages, ASL, that sort of stuff? 

Tom Durand: I think close captions come around frequently. Sometimes it can be kind of hard to do roundabout. Do you send your signal to someone that gets a human to do it so you can make sure that it’s going to be good, it’s going to be pretty latency heavy there, or do you trust the computer AI system that quite possibly, on a key line, will display a typo and it’ll just look a little bit rough? 

James Broberg: Yeah, we’ve had streams that make the papers because of the quality or lack thereof of the captioner for high profile streams. It can happen. I think people are pretty forgiving, but it can definitely happen.

Tom Durand: I remember the first time I ever used close captions inside an encoder, I think it was Wirecast, it would literally spit back garbled nonsense, like they weren’t words.

Obviously, it’s easier to close captions on an uploaded video, but doing so on a live stream would be a great asset. 

Also having multiple channels of audio in different languages. Not that we do that very often, but if someone ever has the question, it always does seem a little bit tough.

James Broberg: Yeah, I think that’s definitely meeting the Holy Grail in the corporate space. I’d have to check how far progressed it is, but I know we have a POC for the multi language option, because I think that’s kind of the dream for a lot of corporate events. Having a single player with switchable text captions, and audio languages.

We certainly support multiple captions for text-based captions for 608/708 within the same player. Yeah, it is, as you say, quite hard to do live. In particular with human captioners or depending on the accuracy of AI or ML based ones, which to be fair has gotten a lot better in the last three or four years we’ve noticed, but still quite hard to do live. 

All right, I’ll start wrapping up this conversation. Are there any final thoughts you want to share?

Nigel Mintern: One thing I will say, James, is that we really appreciated how early on in the piece was StreamShark’s willingness to put into place new features and changes to our benefit. Your team very quickly developed elements to help us service our clients. We very much appreciate that responsiveness and how open to new ideas your team is.

James Broberg: I’ll say, I appreciate that positive feedback. They were all good suggestions that we could see value in. Our mindset’s always been to build things for the operators and make workflows that save you time and give you insights to help measure your ROI.

Nigel Mintern:  Yes, your adaptiveness has been great!

James Broberg: Well I’ll wrap up the interview now, it was great having a chat and learning more about yourselves and AV1.

Tom Durand: Thanks James.

Nigel Mintern: Great to chat James.

The post Customer Spotlight: AV1 – a Virtual, Hybrid and Live Events Company appeared first on StreamShark.

What are the benefits of this integration?

• Real-time notifications: Ditch email chains and missed updates. Get instant alerts in your designated Slack channel for key events like stream start/end and viewer numbers.
• Quality of Experience reports: Stay informed with QoE reports directly within your Slack notifications, thanks to our seamless Peer-to-Peer assisted streaming integration with our technical partner Hive Streaming.
• Two-way chat sync: No more switching between platforms. Chat with viewers directly in Slack and have their messages pop up in StreamShark’s live chat panel, fostering real-time engagement.
• Centralized communication: Keep everyone aligned and informed, discuss Q&As, and provide support all within the familiar environment of Slack.
• Boosted team coordination: Collaborate more seamlessly. Tag teammates for immediate assistance, involve internal teams in live events, and maintain a single source of truth for all stream-related communication.
• Enhanced audience engagement: React to viewer comments in real-time, answer questions on the fly, and build a stronger community without leaving Slack.

Getting started is easy:

1. In StreamShark, navigate to “Customization” > “Slack Integration” and connect your workspace.
2. Choose your notification channels (optional): Select the Slack channels you want to receive alerts in for specific events.
3. Enable chat sync (optional): Add the StreamShark app to your desired Slack channel and enjoy seamless two-way chat flow.

The benefits go beyond:

• Improved transparency: Foster open communication and collaboration, ensuring everyone is on the same page about your streams.
• Enhanced audience interaction: Keep your viewers engaged and build stronger relationships by making communication effortless.
• Data-driven decision making: Leverage Slack’s analytics and StreamShark’s insights to track engagement, measure campaign success, and refine your streaming strategy.

StreamShark and Slack are the perfect duo for any organization looking to optimize their live streaming workflow and increase engagement with their audience. Upgrade your communication today and see the difference!

Currently this feature is enabled on a per-account basis, so just reach out to support@streamshark.io and we can enable it for your account.

Detailed support articles are available for Slack notification setup and Slack two-way sync setup.

The post StreamShark’s Slack Integration: Streamline Communication and Stay Informed appeared first on StreamShark.