Advertising

This paper, originally published in SCTE-ISBE Journal of Digital Video, Vol 5, No 1, December 2020, outlines a collaborative integration of manifest delivery, analytics, quality metrics, visual dashboard, and reporting methods while highlighting several demonstration use-cases. This proof-of-concept study will prove helpful for ad operations teams to enable a reliable Quality of Service (QoS) across streaming devices while validating advertiser’s investments.

Advertisement insertion into OTT streams is a critical part of the overall user experience. Breakdowns in services or delivery can have a detrimental impact on viewer churn. To provide users with the best possible Quality of Experience (QoE), content publishers must take into account the advertising workflow with regards to quality, duration, delivery, and failure. The best practices presented in this paper, developed by a number of contributing companies in the Streaming Video Alliance’s Advertising Working Group, address a myriad of considerations for any OTT service provider that is considering the inclusion of advertising in their offering.

The two most common streaming formats for Adaptive Bitrate Streaming – Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) – provide mechanisms for ads to be inserted into manifest files. However, there’s often a challenge to properly identify the unique ad asset(s) that are embedded in a manifest. This hampers efforts to ensure delivery and monitoring accuracy. This document proposes a clear and interoperable signaling mechanism for the signaling of creative assets in DASH and HLS. It enables, for example, unique ad asset identifiers such as those from Ad-ID.org and/or unique in-house ad asset IDs to be captured in original or stitched manifest files.