Prefetch – Yospace

Akamai, SpotX and Yospace team up to Go Live with addressable advertising at scale

Posted on September 20, 2018October 2, 2018

NEW YORK and LONDON— September 20, 2018 — Akamai, SpotX and Yospace have set out the key principles of monetizing major live events over OTT in a white paper entitled “Go Live: Addressable, Ad-Supported, Live Video At Scale,” which was made available at the IBC Show in Amsterdam this month.

Drawing from the technology companies’ wealth of combined experience in delivering and monetizing the largest live audiences in the world, the paper focuses on the three key pillars of major event television – monetization, scale and viewer experience – and outlines the technical complexities involved in delivering all three in an environment where viewing records are being broken on a regular basis while the demand for data-enriched advertising is increasing.

Prefetch is a central theme of the Go Live whitepaper. Yospace, the world’s foremost provider of server-side ad insertion (SSAI) technology, operates closely with the broadcast headend, allowing it to detect an upcoming ad break before it happens. Ad calls are made early to an ad server, such as SpotX, who then have more time to instruct the programmatic marketplace and generate the highest possible CPM and fill-rate for the rights-holder.

“Delivering addressable advertising at scale is the next big challenge for broadcasters and rights-holders,” said Tim Sewell, CEO at Yospace. “During a major live event millions of viewers around the globe can go to an ad break at the same time, placing huge demand on the advertising ecosystem. This white paper explains how the leaders in SSAI, video advertising and content delivery have addressed that.”

Monetization at such scale will only work if the right delivery mechanisms are in place. Akamai, a global leading Content Delivery Network (CDN), reliably handles peaks in audience demand to deliver video and ad content at scale, while providing a seamless, broadcast-quality viewing experience.

“Content providers understand the potential of OTT as more audiences move to consume content online,” states Campbell Foster, VP of Product Marketing at Akamai. “The challenge for live and linear content is delivering the seamless, high-quality experiences viewers are accustomed to from TV, while effectively monetizing content through one-to-one addressability at scale. This whitepaper focuses on how manage peak demand to optimize monetization of live content at scale.”

The white paper also looks at how SSAI technology and the wider ad ecosystem is adapting to the requirements of a maturing OTT world. Support for low latency streaming, at scale, and for data security mechanisms, both safeguarding the privacy of the viewer and protecting the value of the rights-holders audience, are addressed.

“Live inventory is a growing sector of our business and as audiences continue to consume content across multiple platforms like OTT, monetizing live video becomes even more important,” said Mike Shehan, co-founder and CEO at SpotX. “We believe that the media industry needs to understand the technology behind what can truly take addressable, ad-support live video to scale, and this white paper outlines all the relevant information.”

Download the white paper here

About Akamai

Akamai secures and delivers digital experiences for the world’s largest companies. Akamai’s intelligent edge platform surrounds everything, from the enterprise to the cloud, so customers and their businesses can be fast, smart, and secure. Top brands globally rely on Akamai to help them realize competitive advantage through agile solutions that extend the power of their multi-cloud architectures. Akamai keeps decisions, apps and experiences closer to users than anyone — and attacks and threats far away. Akamai’s portfolio of edge security, web and mobile performance, enterprise access and video delivery solutions is supported by unmatched customer service, analytics and 24/7/365 monitoring. Learn more at www.akamai.com.

About Yospace

Yospace is the world’s leading provider of server-side ad insertion (SSAI) technology for OTT. With proven scale, its platform enables one-to-one addressability while delivering a TV-like viewer experience.

In partnership with the UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster, ITV, Yospace was the first company to successfully demonstrate SSAI in a live broadcast stream, in 2012 – an achievement that was recognised by the IBC Innovation Awards. Today, the multi-award-winning platform services major broadcasters across the globe and is widely recognised as both the most innovative and most reliable in scaling to monetise major event traffic.

Customers include: AT&T Entertainment Group in North America; Sky Media, ITV, BT Sport, Channel 4, Sky Deutschland, TV4, Telia and Medialaan in Europe; SonyLIV, Seven West Media, Network Ten in APAC. In 2017, Akamai announced that their dynamic ad insertion capabilities would be exclusively powered by the Yospace platform.

www.yospace.com

About SpotX

SpotXis the leading global video advertising platform that enables media owners and publishers to monetise premium content across desktop, mobile and connected TV devices. As a modern ad server with programmatic infrastructure, data enablement, and monetisation solutions for OTT, outstream, and addressable TV, SpotX gives media owners and publishers the control, transparency, and actionable insights needed to understand buyer behaviour, manage access and pricing, and maximise revenue. SpotX also provides advertisers with a direct pipeline to premium supply and innovative solutions for optimising media efficiency, reach, and audience targeting. With best-in-class technology purpose-built for video, SpotX’s holistic, brand-safe solution is employed by some of the largest media owners and publishers in the world including fuboTV, Microsoft Casual Games, Newsy, Samba TV, Sling TV, Vudu and partners with a variety of different companies within the digital video ecosystem including comScore, DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, JW Player, MediaMath, MOAT, Nielsen, Oracle, and more.

Headquartered in Denver, SpotX has nearly 600 employees in 24 offices worldwide including Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, Los Angeles, Milan, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, and Tokyo. In October 2017, RTL Group completed its 100% acquisition of SpotX which is currently combining its business with smartclip, a sister company. Learn more atwww.spotx.tvand follow @SpotX on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Yospace to demonstrate the world’s most scalable and trusted server-side ad insertion platform at IBC

Posted on September 6, 2018

The global leader in SSAI achieved unprecedented scale for one-to-one addressable streams during the World Cup, recording a peak of over 1.5 million simultaneous viewers.

Staines-upon-Thames, UK – 30th August 2018
Yospace is to showcase its award-winning server-side ad insertion system at IBC (stand 14.G14). The technology, also known as dynamic ad insertion or SSAI, has undergone a transformation in the last couple of years as audiences embracing OTT have been met by advertisers keen to exploit the opportunities of digital.

This summer’s World Cup tested the technology in the most demanding setting: major live event television. Many streaming records were broken during the tournament, with the world’s largest CDN, Akamai, reporting that they delivered more video data in the 10 days of the group stage than during the entire 2014 tournament. In keeping with overall trends, Yospace saw huge growth among SSAImonetised streams too.

Scottish broadcaster STV launched server-side ad insertion for the 2014 World Cup, the first in Europe to do so. They saw a five-fold increase in peak concurrent, or simultaneous, viewers watching personalised SSAI-enabled streams during the 2018 tournament, with viewers this year also able to enjoy all the action in HD. Average viewing time increased, too, pointing to an audience that was more engaged with the content they were watching. This resulted in two extra ad spots being opened up per viewer session.

Live events make the most engaging television because all viewers share the same experience. Dynamic ad placement opportunities are more valuable to the rights-holder as a result, but they are also more challenging to optimise in the programmatic ad marketplace because ad breaks occur for all viewers at the same time.

Peak concurrency during the tournament was recorded at over 1.5 million, which occurred during the dramatic penalty shoot-out between England and Colombia. Rather than delivering one ad for all, Yospace triggered many millions of ad requests for an ad break that was watched simultaneously by all viewers around the world.

Yospace is able to do this because it manages each viewer session. When an ad break is detected a call is made out to an ad server on behalf of each user. The ad server manages which ads are to be delivered to which viewer and will often make further calls out to the wider ad marketplace, where live auctions drive the highest possible CPM rate for the rights-holder.

All of the responses have to be managed within the strict timeframes of live broadcasting in order to maintain a TV-like viewer experience. Yospace’s advanced technology succeeds where others don’t because it is able to make ad calls in advance of an ad break happening, allowing the ad server and wider programmatic marketplace the time they need to respond. Given sufficient time, fill-rates are higher and the true value of each ad placement opportunity is realised.

The system also caters for the unexpected moments in major live events, which are often the most valuable but hardest to access. The biggest surge in SSAI traffic for Yospace during the World Cup was in the knock-out game between Croatia and Denmark, when audiences across the globe doubled during the period from the end of extra-time to the start of a sudden-death penalty shoot-out – a window of just a few minutes. The ad break just before penalties began suddenly became highly valuable and was successfully monetised by Yospace’s platform.

David Springall, CTO and Founder of Yospace: “Our technology has been, and continues to be, developed in tandem with the evolution of OTT streaming and advertising to the point that technical advancements from Yospace today are advancements for SSAI technology as a whole.”

Tim Sewell, CEO of Yospace: “Our SSAI platform was first to market in 2010 and today we stand as the only dedicated vendor with a proven track record for delivering at scale. The system has been architected to address the unique challenges the programmatic marketplace introduces to live streaming, and our continued focus on SSAI means we remain out in front when it comes to the development of the technology, as demonstrated by our continued adoption and loyal global customer base. Our World Cup figures show that our global reach is second to none.”