How to Perfect Ad Insertion in the OTT Media Streaming Environment

Introduction

Streaming media over OTT platforms has given users the ability to access any content, at any time on a device. With this flexibility the era of conventional cable and DTH television is threatened. These service providers are slowly losing their market share to OTT platforms. According to industry research, video views on OTT platforms have grown by more than 50 percent in the last year, and the number is still growing. It’s safe to say that streaming media is the next generation of watching TV. Since TV viewers are moving to OTT platforms, there is a need for sponsors to also move to the same platform for marketing. This has opened up a new era of marketing — OTT advertising.

The actual viewing of OTT advertising is not different from conventional TV ads, but the former has more impact since there is a larger reach to targeted segments. That’s all thanks to the powerful analytics gathered from end devices. This technology will make a big difference in the TV market in upcoming years.

Benefits of Advertising Over OTT

In today’s world there are tens of global and hundreds of regional OTT providers. Most offer free subscriptions, and only a few have paid subscribers. This makes advertising even more important and necessary for service providers to survive and generate revenue.

The case for OTT advertising is backed by recent reports from Hulu earning more than $1 billion from ads for the first time, and Roku’s business nearly doubling over the last year. Key benefits of advertising on OTT platforms are:

·        It has a large reach

·        Advertisements can be targeted to the relevant audience

·        Ads can be inserted dynamically based on viewers’ preferences

·        OTT platforms provide feedback so the impact and effectiveness of the ads can be gauged

Methods to Insert OTT Ads

Most OTT platforms prefer dynamic ad insertion that allows providers to serve advertisements based on viewers’ preferences. All of this is possible with the feedback loop in OTT. The component that enables ad insertion decisions based on the analytics is the ad server.

There are two ways to insert ads in OTT media stream:

·        Client-Side Ad Insertion

Client-side insertion is a method where the main content is paused, and an ad is served from a different streaming server for the paused duration. After the ad, the mainstream content resumes.

·        Server-Side Ad Insertion

Also referred to as Stitching, this technology stitches together the video/audio chunks within advertisements with mainstream content at the streaming server only. It provides a seamless transition between the content and ad. (See Figure 1 and Figure 2.)

In the case of SSAI, ads are inserted/stitched at the media streaming server only, thus the manifest is appended with the ad chunks.

Regulatory Compliance

There is no regulating government body with set specs; however, some of the large OTT operators have come out with their own specs/regulations for ad insertion based on following parameters:

·        Minimum duration of content that must be played at the viewer side, before an ad can be inserted

·        Maximum duration of ad in each ad slot

·        Maximum number of ads per ad slot

·        Resolution and aspect ratio of ad must be in sync with the media content

Current Situation, Challenges and Monitoring of OTT Ad Insertion

Advertising is the main source of revenue for non-subscription-based OTT platforms. Hence, it is the utmost priority for any provider to make sure the correct ad is played on time and that ad playout is free from any audio/video glitches. That requires placing ad markers at defined time slots, otherwise the ad might not get the expected viewership. Any such issues while streaming might result in poor ROI and hence defeat the purpose of an ad.

The biggest challenge is to automatically ensure that all of the above-mentioned issues don’t happen. It’s impossible to manually perform all of these checks in real time while the content is being streamed.

Ideally, an OTT provider would want to monitor ad streams at manifest as well as at the chunk level to ensure the correct ads are streamed at the desired times. To achieve that, one must monitor:

·        The correct placement of ad markers (i.e., SCTE-35, etc).

·        That ads are not being played too frequently, as this can lead to a poor customer experience.

·        The duration of targeted ads. It should be the same as the duration of available slots, otherwise there will be a spill over of ads in the mainstream content.

·        The resolution and bitrate of the ad. These should match the properties of the mainstream content to ensure smooth switching between the mainstream content and the ad. It requires that ad servers encode ads in different profiles.

·        To make sure that the streaming server is not serving older/stale manifests in the ad slot. This can result in an ad not being played on the end device, thus killing the ad revenue.

·        To check for unintentional video freezes, blacks, audio silence and other issues with the ad content.

Interra Systems’ Solution

Interra Systems’ ORION-OTT is a software-based OTT monitoring solution that enables you to monitor Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) content integrity and related network performance in an OTT environment. 

Leveraging industry-proven audio and video quality analysis technologies, ORION-OTT enables OTT service and equipment providers, as well as content delivery network (CDN) providers, to seamlessly monitor online video delivery for quality and compliance of mainstream content, along with ads.

ORION-OTT monitors ABR content, both VOD and live, leveraging user-defined automated or manual schedules. It checks for inconsistencies pertaining to ABR package compliance, manifest and playlist syntax, download errors, content quality, and more.

Specific to ad monitoring, it offers the following monitoring checks:

·        The presence of respective ad markers in MPD or HLS playlists and out time, in time, ad duration, etc.

·        Inconsistent ad start segments across variants

·        Duration of ads

·        Minimum and maximum duration of content between ads

·        Download failure or delay for ad segments

·        Stale manifests in ad slots

·        ABR compliance issues in ad chunks

·        Audio and video quality issues within an ad stream

CONCLUSION

Content is the king. If you’re in the TV industry, you’ve no doubt heard this phrase and know it’s very important for OTT providers to offer good quality content both in terms of what people like and perceptual quality, also referred to as quality of experience (QoE). Delivering a superior QoE is essential to customer retention and expansion. Seamless ad insertion and assuring quality on the inserted ads help with better QoE and monetization. Ad monitoring should be part of OTT video service providers' core strategy.