I never cease to be amazed at how quickly the world of ad-tech evolves and this is especially apparent if I look back over Yospace’s experience at the last few NAB Shows.What was striking this year was just how few meetings I was in required a demo. This is a big change to just a couple of years ago and I put this down to the fact that server-side ad insertion has become a well understood technology. In its basic form anyway.It’s also nice from a Yospace perspective that nobody questions whether it works anymore. A fast-growing customer list helps with that, for sure, but also features such as ad copy normalisation and frame-accuracy come as standard nowadays and people just trust that they work.Much more common than a demo is the use of a pen and pad to draw out customer-specific workflow diagrams, and it’s in these types of conversations that things get really interesting.Like many modern tech providers, Yospace’s product map is largely defined by what a customer needs it to be. The tech and the teams that develop it are agile enough to work in this way and we always have an innovative project on the go that pushes the boundaries of what SSAI can be as a result.Our IBC Innovation Award-winning project with Medialaan to reduce ad load in a live stream came out of exactly this type of scenario.We’ve also been able to lead the way in delivering programmatic at scale for live, a process that can become incredibly complex as you scale to millions of simultaneous viewers who all go to ad breaks at the same time.We developed our prefetch technology to address this use-case in response to the requirements of a leading sports broadcaster. I’m very pleased that today Yospace’s robustness in this area is recognised by so many (you can read more on prefetch in our Go Live white paper).Achieving scale was the biggest topic we were asked about this year. Others that cropped up a lot included:

• Support for MPEG-DASH and CMAF (we were the first to market with an MPEG-DASH solution and have a number of live customers now)
• Total Video, or the idea of using consistent advertising methods and measurement tools across all content
• Prebidding, which is an add-on to prefetch and provides a “look ahead” function for programmatic to ensure the highest value is earned for your inventory

These are areas that I anticipate will continue to be high on people’s agendas at IBC in five months' time. We’ll have a stand in Hall 14 and it will be great to catch up. And of course, if you’d like to discuss any of the above in the meantime then you can drop us a note here.See you in September.–Subscribe to Yospace's mailing list for monthly news and insights