Dan Rayburn has his hands full leading up to NAB Show 2018 and its first ever Streaming Summit running Wednesday, April 11 at the Westgate.
The streaming media industry veteran and analyst said that he really wanted to plant a stake in the ground with the first Streaming Summit at NAB Show in Las Vegas rather than waiting until NAB Show New York in October. But that meant he had less than six weeks to program, design and promote the Summit.
“It’s a lot of work in short period of time,” Rayburn said.
But he has experience with this sort of thing, already doing 47 shows over 15 years with Streamingmedia.com, and he sounded confident that the first Summit has lined up good speakers and content that will accurately reflect where the streaming industry is at today.
For this inaugural Summit, Rayburn has lined up a keynote conversation with Dwayne Benefield, vice president at Sony Interactive Entertainment and head of PlayStation Vue. In addition, the Summit will have multiple tracks featuring different panelists. Mitch Weinraub, director of product for Dish’s AirTV, will be discussing how OTT will disrupt the pay TV model. Two Twitch engineers will be on hand to talk about innovations their company has made to its streaming architecture. Ty Bekiares, chief architect at GogoTV, will be looking at how launch an OTT channel without having a big studio budget. Michael Fay, vice president of products and operations for Akamai, will go through the ins and outs of live sports streaming.
The Summit will also feature speakers from Ericsson, IBM, Limelight Networks, Sky Italia and more.
“As video streaming services continue to gain immense popularity, media and technology companies must evolve to meet the demand for quality content when and where consumers want it,” said NAB Executive Vice President of Conventions and Business Operations Chris Brown in a statement. “We are pleased to be working with Dan to present the Streaming Summit at NAB Show as a forum for education and industry collaboration around streaming.”
After this first run-through at the NAB Show, the Streaming Summit will come back bigger for the NAB Show New York, with a full two days of programming and dedicated spot on the show floor. Rayburn said his partnership with NAB will continue to grow to address other streaming media subjects like infrastructure.
Rayburn said that good things will continue to happen by combining NAB’s logistics and marketing prowess with his insights and knowledge of the streaming media industry.
“We realized that if we put both of our resources together, there really isn’t another show like that currently being offered in the market at that size and scale,” Rayburn said. “I saw the huge inherent value in having NAB as a platform to get my message out and my message has always been, from day one, to inform, educate and empower others.”