Yospace Blog

Server-Side Ad Insertion for MPEG-DASH

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By Olivier Cortambert, Product Manager at Yospace.

There’s been a lot of talk in the industry about MPEG-DASH and we’re finding that a number of our customers are turning to this protocol, and of those a number are looking to it as a means of implementing multi-platform DRM.

Yospace was the first vendor to announce server-side ad insertion (SSAI) support for MPEG-DASH and are one of the only vendors today that can boast live services.

The ecosystem for supporting MPEG-DASH is still relatively immature in terms of players, encoders and packagers.  Behind this is the fact that the specification for MPEG-DASH doesn’t specify exactly how an MPD should be expressed to support SSAI, while the DASH-IF has only made a recommendation which is not universally followed.

Compared to HLS, which provides a simple list of segments in its manifest files, MPEG-DASH lists a much more complex set of information which includes the exact presentation time of each segment.  This complexity and precision makes replacing segments a much more involved task.

In a traditional linear television environment ad breaks are usually pretty precise, but in digital this is not always the case.  The SSAI system may receive four 30-second ads from the ad server to fill a two minute ad break but find they are not actually 30 seconds to frame, meaning there may be a slight under run over overrun at the end of the break.  HLS handles these discrepancies in a much simpler manner than MPEG-DASH through the use of a simple holding slate.

To avoid gaps between period in MPEG-DASH (which would lead to a break/buffer of the playback experience) it is necessary to adjust the timing of every period (content and ad breaks).  MPEG-DASH requires that all levels must be expressed on every manifest update, and the XML format of the MPD is quite wordy, so the CPU required to support a manifest update in MPEG-DASH is greater and more bandwidth is required.  HLS, by contrast, uses a more terse expression syntax and the player only grabs the levels it is actually playing, ultimately making server-side ad insertion more expensive for MPEG-DASH than it is for HLS.

It’s also harder to match audio and video when the programming is time-shifted in this way due to the fact that they are digitised in different ways: audio is usually divided in 44000 or 48000 samples per second whereas video is divided into 25 or 50 frames per second.

While MPEG-DASH throws up some complexities for applying SSAI, they are by no means insurmountable and Yospace has proved this over the last 12 months.  We were the first SSAI vendor to announce support for MPEG-DASH, in March 2018, and the first to implement it in a live customer environment later that year.  Today we have several customers using MPEG-DASH with SSAI.

There does remain more expertise in supporting SSAI for HLS though, and we are seeing broadcasters start to explore the alternative of using HLS with CMAF, the Common Media Access Format.  HLS with CMAF maintains the simplicity of HLS (especially for SSAI) while many of the advantages provided by MPEG-DASH. I would actively encourage broadcasters to consider harmonising to CMAF fragments as they are now supported on Apple devices, and use MPEG-DASH as and when it is required.

Where there are devices that can support both MPEG-DASH and HLS+CMAF, careful consideration should be given as to what format is most suited to their in-house expertise.

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Yospace at NAB: the latest developments in server-side ad insertion

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By Paul Davies, Marketing & Communications at Yospace

The 2019 NAB Show is fast approaching and we at Yospace are looking forward to exhibiting at the event for a seventh time.  Here’s a quick overview of what we’ll be talking about and our activity in and around the show.

The focus of our show will be on two main topics: best practice for implementing server-side ad insertion (SSAI), and realising the ad revenue opportunities once SSAI is in place.

There will be four demo pods on the booth, two of which will be dedicated to best practice in implementing SSAI for live and VoD.

The other two will showcase some of the possibilities of what you can achieve once you have the right SSAI foundation in place.  

These will consist of a shared demo with programmatic specialist SpotX that looks at the concept of prebidding to achieve maximum ad value, and another, with Capella Systems, that will focus on how to scale up and monetise multiple channels during major live events.

Here’s what else will be happening during the show:

  • Yospace Founder and CTO David Springall will be speaking live to Akamai TV: Tuesday, 10.00am
  • David will also be speaking on the Bitmovin booth, discussing our joint support for HLS+fMP4 and integration with the Bitmovin player: Wednesday, 3.30pm
  • Unified Streaming Platform will be showcasing Yospace’s SSAI for MPEG-DASH on their booth

I’ll be sharing insights on all of these topics throughout the show on our LinkedIn and Twitter feeds.  And you can check back here for a daily update post at the end of each day.

See you at NAB!

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Handling the opposing forces of programmatic and low latency

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By David Springall, Founder & CTO of Yospace.


In this post I’d like to talk about the challenges faced by broadcasters in efficiently monetising live sports at scale using server-side ad insertion.

We have broadcasters in five continents monetising live sports using our platform.  During the World Cup last year, we saw a peak audience of 1.6 million concurrent users and only a few weeks ago, in January this year, we saw that record double to 3.2 million – a significant jump in the space of just six months.

So the ability to scale SSAI, and to plan for future scale, is really important but this topic is made complex because there are two opposing forces at play.

On one hand you have the desire for the broadcaster to improve the viewer experience by reducing latency.   

On the other hand, the way in which online advertising is being bought and sold is trending towards automated, or ‘programmatic’, fulfilment.  This makes the user-level ad decisioning much more complex.

Underlying all of this is the fact that the industry as a whole is finding online audiences, especially where major sports events are concerned, are growing at an ever faster rate, and it’s important that solutions deployed can continue to keep ahead of this growth.  

So why is it that these forces are opposing?

The reason for this is that in live streaming everyone watches the ad break at more or less the same time.  In order for us to know which ads to stitch in to each individual stream, we need to make a call to the ad decisioning ecosystem on behalf of each individual streaming session.

Naturally, these calls all take place in a very short space of time.  The lower latency the stream, the shorter the time frame under which this bevy of calls will be made.  As this time window is made even smaller, you need each individual ad decision request to also take less time.  

Ok, so let’s hold that thought.

On the other hand, because the ad decisioning ecosystem is getting more complex, it actually needs more time to resolve ad decisions.  Real-time bidding is required in the process of getting decisions for ad placement, so you’re not making calls to a single ad server, you’re making calls to multiple partners in the ecosystem.  Furthermore, you’re depending on all of those partners to be able to scale to handle these bursts of requests.

Therefore, to deliver the low latency experience at scale for live sports, and to plan for future scale, with a complex ad decisioning ecosystem to maximise the revenue opportunity, it’s necessary to the make ad decisioning calls in an orderly fashion way ahead of the actual break taking place.  By doing this you are no longer hostage to stream latency and how long you can spend, or how many calls you can make to get a decision for each user.

So this is what we do with the Yospace SSAI platform.  We call it prefetch and it allows us to scale to support the world’s biggest live events.  We co-authored a white paper on the topic with Akamai and SpotX.  It’s called “Go Live” and you can download it here.

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Why Yospace’s acquisition by RTL Group is a huge endorsement of its SSAI

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On 8th January RTL Group announced it was acquiring 100% of Yospace Technologies Ltd. The announcement represents a huge endorsement of Yospace, our people and the server-side ad insertion technology we have developed.

Having launched VoD server-side ad insertion in 2011, Yospace was first to market with server-side ad insertion (SSAI) for live streaming at the start of 2012, showcasing it in partnership with ITV at the 2012 IBC Innovation Awards.  Since that time the team has focused exclusively on development and innovation in the SSAI space. This has been with a focus on solving broadcaster challenges while maintaining a TV-like viewer experience. Today we are the world’s leading provider of one-to-one addressable SSAI and stream management.

This is an achievement we are hugely proud of.  We are also immensely proud of building a profitable market-leading business organically, while maintaining the independence required to have such a laser-sharp focus on the long-term development of our product.  As such we were fortunate to be in a position where we could carefully consider an acquisition that best suited the future ambitions of the team, primary of which is to continue to innovate with our loyal existing broadcast customer base while accelerating global adoption of our capabilities.

The key principles of our technology road map since 2011 have been based on understanding the close integrations with broadcast playout systems and the end-to-end streaming workflows needed to deliver a true broadcast experience, and a willingness to adapt to the evolving and often complex needs of broadcasters.  Challenges such as achieving one-to-one addressability at true broadcast scale, while delivering real-time metrics reliably and supporting enhanced viewer experiences have all been addressed.

As the market continues to mature and advertiser expectations increase, the ability to deliver a truly optimised standards-based programmatic SSAI solution will become increasingly critical.  To this end, the opportunity to work more closely with SpotX, who we’ve been a partner with for a number of years, will be of huge benefit to Yospace and to the wider industry, as the learnings we will gain will optimise integration with the entire programmatic and SSAI ecosystem.

As SpotX remains committed to all its existing SSAI partnerships, Yospace remains ad server and ad-tech agnostic.  Our independent stance and freedom to work with providers across the broadcast and advertising ecosystems are crucial, and this is recognised by SpotX and the RTL Group.

Our aim, as it has always been, is to provide the world’s leading server-side ad insertion platform and establish our technology as the de facto standard for the industry.  We will continue to serve all of our existing customers, without whom we would not have achieved the market position we are so proud of today, and to whom we remain fully committed.  This focus will in turn allow us to accelerate further the expansion of our global customer base.

Ultimately our decision to join RTL Group was an easy one.  The Group has bought into our strategy and is fully committed to supporting both our product roadmap and our expansion plans.  Whether you are an existing customer or a customer-to-be, we’re looking forward to working with you.

Sincerely,

Tim Sewell
CEO, Yospace

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The unique value of live streaming

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By Paul Davies, Marketing & Communications

Live event streaming offers tremendous value for viewers – thus, tremendous value for advertisers. Events like the World Cup present golden opportunities for broadcasters to supercharge ad breaks and golden moments for brands to be seen at scale.

Live simulcast gaining pace

The number of viewers who live stream content is growing; even in the early group stages of the World Cup, live streaming figures exceeded those of Super Bowl by 40%, with Conviva recording a peak 7.7 million concurrent viewers. In the UK alone, a record 3.3 million requests were made to stream England’s dramatic penalties win against Colombia via ITV Hub.

This trend isn’t confined to live sports. Events like the Royal Wedding and Trump’s presidential inauguration all drew significant online audiences, illustrating a diversity in event-based live viewing.

And why not? Live simulcast is now a valued part of the fan experience, and one which can be enhanced with added extras, like watching and syncing content on multiple devices, scrub control and interactive features.

Commanding hearts, minds, and eyeballs

Live events and, in particular, sports, command the hearts and minds (and eyeballs) of viewers, and huge rights sums from major broadcasters. Viewers expect to see premium quality content with advertising that is delivered seamlessly, frame-accurately and without interrupting or disrupting the live stream, regardless of the type of device they are watching on.

And when broadcasters deliver on expectations? You get vast audience numbers who are engaged for a specific reason, at a specific time, creating a hugely valuable opportunity for advertisers to achieve mass reach at a single point in time, with the accuracy that digital measurement can bring.  This is something that brands simply can’t achieve anywhere else, whether it’s a leading social media service or AVOD platform.

BT Sport recognised this opportunity and has been using Yospace’s DAI technology since 2016 to monetise live sports. Jeremy Rosenberg, Head Of Advertising Partnerships TV at BT perfectly sums this up: “Audience and reach is paramount to any advertiser.  It is about appointment to view and I would say that reaching that at such a high level where people are engaged is paramount compared to other platforms out there that give you a very short attention span from a content perspective.”

A golden opportunity

Audience reach is great for advertisers, but how can broadcasters manage this scale? In live OTT all viewers go to an ad break at the same time, putting huge strain on an ad server which will have to manage a bombardment of ad requests: during a football match an ad server could be stone-cold for 45 minutes, until a half-time break unleashes millions of simultaneous ad requests.

BT Sport is just one name to have scored with scale-management: the broadcaster recently completed its second full season of Premier League and Champions League football with addressable DAI. Yospace’s pre-fetch system – a core component of scaling addressable DAI – ensures calls to the ad server are paced over a longer period so the ad server isn’t overloaded and the broadcaster can ensure maximum fill-rates. All of this must be achieved without affecting the viewer experience, of course.

Read more about the BT Sport project in our case study.

Other broadcasters are in a strong position to do the same. Live events continue to command huge numbers of engaged viewers who expect a high quality viewer experience. Investing in advanced ad tech translates this engagement into valuable opportunities for broadcasters, who’ll be able to open up new ad inventory, and to advertisers who are keen to capitalise on the unique appointment-to-view experience: “You can’t get that anywhere else,” concludes Rosenberg.

Jeremy Rosenberg was speaking at the Future TV Advertising event in London in December 2017.

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Delivering a world-class World Cup experience

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The World Cup kicks off this week: cue blanket media coverage and scores of football puns. We’ll of course be following the tournament’s progress, but will be keeping an even closer eye on how the world streams – and how broadcasters monetise – live content.

Our server-side DAI technology is being used by multiple broadcasters across four continents to monetise the 2018 World Cup, with every viewer worldwide delivered a one-to-one addressable live stream.

Major live events have driven huge innovation in the live OTT arena, particularly in monetisation and scale.  Yospace has developed an advanced system to pace ad requests, called pre-fetch, which lessens the load on ad servers during those moments when all viewers go to an ad break simultaneously – an innovation which earned Yospace a Sports Technology Award recently with BT Sport.

When it comes to monetisation of live events, scale is of course becoming increasingly important.  In 2016, a record 2.3 million people live-streamed England’s Euro 2016 win over Wales, via the BBC Sport website; more than doubling the channel’s previous audience number. This figure contributed to (another) record-breaking 14.6 million unique visitors who live-streamed Euro content on the site on a single day.  It is widely expected that these figures will be eclipsed during the World Cup.

In fact, we expect live streaming records to be broken this Summer by all host broadcasters in the UK: BBC, ITV and STV.  The latter two monetise their streams using Yospace’s server-side DAI.

On a global scale, a brief glance at Akamai’s figures are further proof of the increasing popularity of live sports streaming amongst fans: from the maximum peak traffic of 1.4Tbs generated by 2012’s Superbowl, which leaps to peak traffic of 6.9Tbp for 2014’s football World Cup.

Earlier this year Akamai set a global streaming record of 10.3 million concurrent viewers for a VIVO Indian Premier League match – another record that could well be broken in the next few weeks.  Yospace expect to break concurrency records for personalised SSAI, too.

While scale will no doubt be the focus of industry headlines, the sub-plot of the story is viewer experience and reliability.  Advertisements must be seamlessly integrated into a live stream to ensure a true TV-quality experience for millions of football fans, and – for broadcasters monetising content and advertisers relying on its success – form a frictionless component of the end-to-end delivery mechanism for live sports streaming.

Football – as with most sports – is unpredictable.  Whilst this delivers edge-of-your-seat viewing experiences to fans, these nervous moments must be the result of the outcome of the match, not the outcome of a poor viewing experience.

We’ll steer clear of predicting the winners and losers amongst this year’s World Cup qualifying teams, but one thing Yospace can reliably predict is the quality of end-user experience for many of the millions of viewers who’ll be going OTT in the coming weeks. And in turn, scoring wins for advertisers and broadcasters alike.

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Award wins celebrate latest innovations in SSAI

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Yospace enjoyed a great start to the industry’s awards season last month, winning at both the Sports Technology Awards and The Connies, with BT Sport and Medialaan respectively.

The STA was awarded for monetising a full season of top-flight sport with server-side dynamic ad insertion.  The significance of that achievement cannot be understated.  Viewers are moving online and a reliable and scalable monetisation system is central to any broadcasters’ long-term aspirations.

Achieving scale with major live events can be particularly challenging, especially when applying any advanced level of addressability.  Yospace‘s platform provides true personalisation – that is, ad calls and measurement for each user session.  In a live stream, unlike VoD, all viewers go to an ad break simultaneously so catering for millions of ad calls is incredibly important.

Yospace developed innovative new approaches to pacing ad requests and managing peak traffic, which allows concurrent audiences to grow into the millions – all receiving DAI-enabled streams, all personalised.

The system was also successfully integrated into BT Sport’s enhanced player provided by Deltatre which allowed viewers to scrub back to important moments in a match without affecting the ability of the broadcaster to monetise.  This was only possible due to the fact that each viewer received their own personalised stream.

This last point brings me onto the Medialaan project, for which dynamic ad insertion was one part of a full stream management system that Yospace provided (not “just” SSAI).  Each viewer watching a live stream was able to scrub back to an earlier point in the channel’s timeline, switching seamlessly from live to catch-up, or “startover”, as we call it.

A viewer in startover mode is served with shorter ad breaks so they can catch up with the live channel.  And if they’re delivered an ad break that they’ve already seen then they’re free to skip it – thus reducing ad load in order to improve viewer experience.  In doing this, Medialaan were specifically catering for the next generation of viewer.

I’m very pleased that Medialaan’s forward-thinking approach has been recognised with an award. It also offered Yospace the perfect platform to demonstrate what our one-to-one DAI technology can do.

Combined with the BT Sport award, Yospace is able to show off its ability to support the three central pillars of 21stcentury broadcasting:

Viewer experience. Monetisation.  Scale.

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Seven Report 66% YOY Growth for Live Simulcast at FTVA Australia

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Yospace sponsored Mediatel’s inaugural Future TV Advertising Forum in Sydney last month and were very pleased to be associated with such a strong event for broadcasters and advertisers alike.

Our CTO and Founder David Springall co-presented a case study with James Bayes, Digital Sales Director – OTT Video at Seven West Media at the event.  Seven launched Dynamic Ad Insertion for live simulcast with Yospace for the Australian Open in January 2017 and reported a 68% year-on-year increase in streamed minutes for this year’s event.  There were 107.5m total streamed minutes across the fortnight this year, with 10.6m of those on the Men’s Final day alone.

James also reported figures for the Superbowl (viewing minutes up 65% YOY), Olympic Winter Games (57.3m total live streamed minutes) and 2017 Melbourne Cup, which generated a 66% YOY increase in streamed minutes (11m in total), with a 22% increase in the number of users.  These figures demonstrate that significantly more people are streaming live content from one year to the next, and for longer too.

This growth, of course, has a positive impact on the amount of addressable inventory the broadcaster is able to open up.  James summed up the broadcaster’s attitude to online viewing and the requirement to be forward-thinking when it comes to monetisation.

“When does a stream become a river?  It’s irrefutable to think that the primary distribution method that we’re going to be experiencing in the future around video is going to be IP-delivered.  Preparing for that future of IP-delivered video content and the opportunity it creates around addressability is something that we all need to start working on and start investing in.”

He also described why live DAI in OTT streams is so appealing for advertisers.

“Premium, long-form, scripted, brand-safe video content delivered on the biggest and best screens that there are.  That’s an amazing opportunity for brands.”

“One live stream, one moment in time, multiple users all delivered a personalised advertising experience…everybody seeing a different ad based upon their profile data that they shared with us when they registered and signed in, and then coming back and everybody sharing that same linear experience.”

Thanks to James and Seven for co-presenting with us, and thanks to Mediatel for organising another excellent addition to it’s FTVA series.

You can watch the full presentation here (registration required):
https://www.ustream.tv/recorded/113134288

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Why addressable advertising is dependent on centralised ad copy

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Yospace recently presented a paper with Adstream called “Translating Broadcast Ad Copy Principles to the Dynamic Ad Insertion Age” at the excellent Streaming Tech Sweden event.  A video of the presentation was published this week and you can watch it here.

The paper calls for a centralised system for managing and delivering ad copy online.  In the traditional broadcast world ad copy is centrally managed to help ensure that:

1) Audio and video levels are up to standard
2) All ad creatives are rights-cleared and their contents is logged
3) There is reliable and effective measurement of ad views

These principles need to be carried across to the online world if broadcast channels are to continue to be the primary home for big advertiser spending.  There is also a huge amount of revenue potential in data-driven advertising and programmatic workflows, but the potential can only be realised if there is a centralised system for managing ad copy, metadata and measurement.

Find out more and download the paper here.

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