Ad Creative Signaling in DASH and HLS 2nd Edition

With the release of the first edition of the Ad Creative Signaling in DASH and HLS, there were questions submitted from industry members asking what further information could be signaled alongside the basic identifiers and if enough information could be carried to fully enable ad presentation and tracking through this signaling alone. After informally surveying interest from SVTA members and industry subject matter experts, the Advertising working group determined there was enough desire and benefit to explore further expansion of the signaling scheme. Looking at the advertising landscape, the industry has commonly converged around VAST as the ad response communication format. This is a great standard for server-to-server communication and has many mechanisms for describing a wide variety of use-cases, but as it has continued to expand the usage and complexity has grown. Similarly, a common practice was to resolve VAST responses directly on the client with Client-Side Ad Insertion implementations and as implementations transitioned to Server-Side Ad Insertion solutions, no standard in communication was established leading to a large variability in implementation. Looking forward to the industry adoption of Server-Guided Ad Insertion, there is yet another chance for the industry to further fracture and bring greater complexity to the carriage and usage of ad response metadata across streaming formats. To avoid further fragmentation of industry implementation and promote simplification and interoperability of components within the advertising ecosystem, the establishment of a formal manifest driven ad metadata signaling specification was deemed appropriate and a logical expansion of the original Ad Creative Signaling in DASH and HLS specification. This expansion will look to provide a simplified mapping of VAST to manifest based signaling to enable the removal of VAST awareness from clients and a comprehensive description of carriage for both SSAI and SGAI enablements across HLS and DASH enabling streaming component interoperability.