#ad insertion

New Post has been published on http://www.overdigital.com/2014/12/05/consider-building-2015-ready-ad-architecture/

What to Consider When Building a 2015-Ready Ad Architecture

Online video has come a long way, and is increasingly becoming the digital TV of tomorrow, driven by a demographic shift and continuously increasing migration to digital TV consumption.

The Nielsen Q3 ’14 Total Audience report is highlighting the trend with some new data.

Nielsen has released its Q3 ’14 Total Audience report (which is the new name for the previous quarterly Cross-Platform report), the highlight of which is the marked reduction in linear TV viewing across every age group except 65+, with an accompanying surge in online video. I charted the new Q3 ’14 data vs. Q3 ’13 data below.

The big quarter-vs-quarter change that pops out is the 19.2% reduction in linear viewing per week by adults 18-24. This age group is now watching 17 hours, 34 minutes per week, which is 4h, 11m less than the 21h, 45m a year ago. While this group increased its online video usage by 20.7%, that only accounted for 25 incremental minutes per week. [more on Videonuze]

Meanwhile South Park’s latest episode #rehash is talking about changes in gaming demographics, with an increasing popularity of game streaming, rather than directly interacting with the game in the living room.

  What does this mean for your online ad strategy?

Scale will be more important than ever. The TV audience is migrating to digital platforms, which includes the large screen, but with gaming consoles, media hubs or smart TVs as source, rather than the traditional cable box. The business models are aligning, demonstrated by the increased popularity of TV Everywhere and OTT direct-to-consumer offerings.

Advertisement reach is not optional anymore. While certain platforms were considered too insignificant and technically too hard to monetize, this is not an acceptable long term approach anymore.

Data and Targeting is increasingly important to optimize the ad experience. This includes more integrated solutions with Analytics tools, and taking advantage of programmatic advertisement technologies.

To be able to successfully execute a strategy to incorporate this, the following architectural considerations are important.

Reduce redundant workflows that could increase the operating costs and prevent scale. This includes preventing redundant streaming protocols, DRM or advertisement architectures.

Define a base design that allows future growth. As example, even though advertisement might not be a requirement for the initial roll-out, select the right base architecture that will allow it in the future, taking your existing advertisement environment into consideration.

Reduce client complexity for ad monetization, as example for ad insertion, without impacting scale or IAB compliance.

Architect for long-terms scale by using cloud services intelligently.

New Post has been published on http://www.overdigital.com/2013/08/30/extending-existing-red-button-workflow-mobile-adobe-primetime/

Extending an Existing Red Button Workflow to Mobile with Adobe Primetime

This is a project I have been working on the last weeks, which I wanted to share since it is applicable to a lot of existing red-button advertisement workflows. 5 years ago I wrote an Adobe Developer Center article that outlined how to inject live metadata into a live stream. This concept since then has been used to inject not just metadata, but also trigger live stream ad breaks. As a matter of fact, most Flash-based live ad workflows use this technique.

  Options to inject ad markers

Before I go deeper into how Adobe Primetime helps to expand this workflow to mobile, it’s important to understand what the overall options are to inject ad breaks – Adobe Primetime supports all of them, meaning the workflow described in this article is not the only option, but it is the most compatible one if you already have a workflow like this in place.

1. Ad cuepoint injection with encoder

Many encoders have the option to inject ad cue points for RTMP over an API. Overall that reduces the complexity of the setup, with the only downside that building out a custom ad injection interface might be slightly more complex, since it’s hard to pull the live stream accurately into an operator interface to sync the ad breaks visually to the stream. The workaround is to work with absolute time code.

For HLS and HDS ad break triggering, injecting it on the ad-enabled encoder is the best approach, because it’s setting keyframes at the ad break points. This allows frame accurate ad insertion with stitching technologies, which is specifically important for linear workflows where broadcast ads are replaced with dynamic ads. This is also important for RTMP workflows – instead of triggering the ad breaks with Adobe Media Server as described in this article, and using an encoder with RTMP ad injection API instead, Adobe Primetime would benefit from correct keyframes at the ad cue points, which increases the ad placement accuracy.

2. Ad cuepoint injection with Adobe Media Server

I am reviving this old diagram from my 2008 Developer Center article to explain the technique. The product names changed, but the concept is the same.

Adobe Media Server is located between the encoder and the CDN / Flash Player, and has two purposes:

Receive an RTMP stream from the encoder, and republish it to the CDN / Flash Player with the multi-point publish feature.

Send a low latency live preview to the ad cue point application, and receive commands from the same to inject ad cue points.

The advantage of this workflow is full independence from the encoder, since ad insertion is handled by the Adobe Media Server layer. The disadvantage is once the stream is getting repackaged to HLS, the ad insertion won’t be frame accurate, since Adobe Media Server can’t inject keyframes – this is only possible at encoding time on the encoder.

  How to use Adobe Primetime to extend this workflow to mobile

The prerequisite is Adobe Media Server is used as the cue point injection mechanism, since it doesn’t introduce any encoder dependence, and which I assume, at least for this article, is already in place.

This is the starting architecture.

Figure 1 – Starting architecture

With the Adobe Primetime Packager, Adobe Primetime Origin and the Adobe Primetime Player, the architecture evolves to the following.

Figure 2 – Mobile support with Adobe Primetime

  Adobe Media Server

The Adobe Media Server runs an extended script based on the original Dev Center prototype.

Besides republishing the stream and injection of the cue points, it also includes additional logic to properly handle streams events to correctly send absolute time code information to the Adobe Primetime Packager.

function sendDPIAdCue(stream, id, duration) { trace("sending ad cue, duration: " + duration); var params = {}; params["type"] = "spliceOut"; params["id"] = id; params["time"] = 0; params["duration"] = 30; stream.send("onAdCue",params); }   function sendAdSignal (data) { trace("##Sending Ad cues to all streams."); for(var sname in application.smap) { var ns = application.smap[sname]; sendDPIAdCue(ns, "Cue" + application.adCueId,data); } ++application.adCueId; }   application.onAppStart = function() { application.lastCue = 0; application.smap = {}; application.adCueId = 1; }   application.onPublish = function(client, myStream) { trace(myStream.name + " is publishing into application " + application.name); if(client.ptConnArray == undefined) client.ptConnArray = []; var nc = new NetConnection(); nc.connect( "rtmp://myprimetimeserver.com/livepkgr" ); trace("Connected to livepkgr"); var ns = new NetStream(nc); // called when the server NetStream object has a status ns.onStatus = function(info) { trace("Stream Status: " + info.code) if (info.code == "NetStream.Publish.Start") { trace("The stream is now publishing"); } }   nc.onStatus = function(info) { if (info.code == "NetConnection.Connect.Success") { ns.setBufferTime(2); ns.attach(myStream); ns.publish( myStream.name); trace("Publishing " + myStream.name); application.smap[myStream.name] = ns; myStream.ptNetConn = nc; client.ptConnArray.push(nc); } } }   application.onUnpublish = function(client, myStream) { var nc = myStream.ptNetConn; if(nc != undefined) { trace("Client unpublished: " + myStream.name); nc.close(); } }   application.onDisconnect = function (client){ trace("Client disconnected, will close all upstream connections:" + client.ptConnArray.length); for(var i = 0; i < client.ptConnArray.length; ++i) { var nc = client.ptConnArray[i]; trace("###Closing outbound connection:" + i); nc.close(); }   }   Client.prototype.Splice = sendAdSignal;

The ad insertion console for this test is very simple, it only displays the video and provides an input form to inject the ad marker length. The timing is defined by when the operator hits the send button.

This interface is intended for the ad operator user role, meaning there is a lot that can be added to provide an easy to use experience. This application doesn’t have to be operated on the Adobe Media Server, but can be a normal website accessible to the ad operations team.

package {   import flash.display.MovieClip; import flash.net.NetConnection; import flash.net.NetStream; import flash.media.Video; import flash.events.*; import flash.media.Video; import flash.net.NetConnection; import flash.net.NetStream;   public class main extends MovieClip {   private var video_ns:NetStream; private var video_nc:NetConnection;   public function main() {   video_nc = new NetConnection(); video_nc.addEventListener(NetStatusEvent.NET_STATUS, netStatusHandler); video_nc.addEventListener(SecurityErrorEvent.SECURITY_ERROR, securityErrorHandler); video_nc.connect("rtmp://myamsserver.com/adrelay"); this["sync_btn"].addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, injectCue);   }   private function injectCue(e:MouseEvent):void { video_nc.call("Splice",null,inputfield_txt.text); }   private function netStatusHandler(event:NetStatusEvent):void { trace(event.info.code); switch (event.info.code) { case "NetConnection.Connect.Success" : connectStream(); break; case "NetStream.Play.StreamNotFound" : trace("Unable to locate video"); break; } }   private function connectStream():void { video_ns = new NetStream(video_nc); video_ns.bufferTime = 1; video_ns.play("jens"); video_ns.client = new CustomClient(); this["videoarea"].attachNetStream(video_ns); }   private function securityErrorHandler(event:SecurityErrorEvent):void { trace("securityErrorHandler: " + event); } } }

Download the complete source.

To get access to the Adobe Primetime related components, please contact the team directly,

  Player

The player for both desktop and mobile in this setup is the Adobe Primetime Player. Besides solving the Android video problem, it also enables a true seamless ad experience, which is very different from what is possible with dual player approaches with OSMF or on mobile today. On mobile, seamless ad insertion is a must have component.

window.onload = document.write("<iframe width='640' height='360' marginwidth='0' marginheight='0' scrolling='auto' frameborder='0' src='//www.youtube.com/embed/0OSBG5I_YVw?start=310' > ");

In addition, if content protection or DRM is required, the Adobe Primetime Packager can easily enable it for both HDS and HLS, and the Adobe Primetime Player has the necessary DRM components embedded.

  Conclusion

This is a great example how existing workflows can be easily extended to support mobile with the right technologies. I am personally excited about this setup, since it builds on top of solution I worked on a couple of years ago.

New Post has been published on http://www.overdigital.com/2013/04/11/adobe-primetime-explained-part-14-ad-insertion/

Adobe Primetime Explained (Part 1/4) - Ad Insertion

Adobe Primetime officially launched this week, providing an end-to-end solution to distribute, monetize, analyze and optimize online video.

I encourage you to read the official Adobe announcement for a more in-depth overview. This is a multi-part blog miniseries to highlight key relevant features. In the first part, I’m going to describe a key feature for both users and advertisers: Ad Insertion.

There are fundamental challenges with online video ad insertion today:

Seamless ad insertion on both desktop and mobile devices is difficult, and approaches are fragmented

The ad transition user experience is often poor, with buffering between content and ads

The percentage of streaming on the web is increasing, and high-quality live ad insertion is fundamentally harder than video on demand (VOD)

Without implementing the proper technology, it is challenging to provide a seamless user experience. One of the challenges resides with the very popular, but inefficient, dual player approach.

Having a dual player means swapping the video players between the ad breaks and the main content (e.g. via the ProxyElement with OSMF). Unfortunately, with a dual player approach come many disadvantages including the required buffering between ads and content, the overhead of having multiple player instances, the higher CPU and memory consumption.

On mobile platforms, the disadvantage of using a dual-player is even more pronounced. For example, the video stack on iOS provides a lot less flexibility. Adobe used its profound expertise of video protocols, packaging and playback to create a low-level, seamless ad insertion solution that provides the best possible user experience. It solves this complicated task much more efficiently than other approaches. The time has come to move beyond a dual player, and provide a quality experience for the next generation of TV viewing across screens.

Interested in seeing this in action? Check out NBC Sports Live Extra on desktop, iOS and Android, or XFINITY TV by Comcast.

TargetSpot, the largest Digital Audio advertising network, appointed Mitch Kline as its new Vice President of Radio Sales on 10/15. Mitch brings to TargetSpot over 25 years of ad sales experience, most recently serving as EVP/DOS for Univision Radio. RBR-TVBR spoke to Kline recently about the business of audio ad insertion and how it’s sold: