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ABSTRACT

Video advertising is still one of the leading approaches with which content and service providers can monetize video content. Combine that with the common-sense approach of using open standards and surprisingly you find yourself facing a problem.

This paper presents the two main open standards for providing dynamic video advertising are SCTE-130 and IAB VAST.

But, SCTE was developed with Service Providers and traditional North American broadcast cable in mind and IAB VAST was developed for web-based advertising. Neither of these advertising standards options is ideal for the entire range of devices.

This paper presents a novel VAST server-side solution where a video streaming server acts as a VAST client fronting the client device, and merges the main video and the advertising returned from a VAST server into a single video stream.

This solution combines the advantages from both options above and thus allows ad and content providers to address the full set of devices with a single platform to operate.

INTRODUCTION

The two main open standards for providing dynamic video advertising are:

SCTE (Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers) – which allows a video streaming server to exchange video advertising with an ad decision server through SCTE-130, and
IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) VAST – that enables a video player to retrieve video advertising from an ad decision server to be played before, after and in the middle of a video stream.

At the heart of the issue is the fact that SCTE was developed with Service Providers and traditional North American broadcast cable in mind and IAB VAST was developed for web- based advertising.

Neither of these advertising standards options is ideal for the entire range of devices.

This paper presents a novel VAST server-side solution where a video streaming server acts as a VAST client fronting the client device. This server-side solution then merges the main video and the advertising returned from a VAST server into a single video stream.

This solution combines the advantages of both of the above options and thus allows advert and content providers to use a single platform to address the full set of devices.

First, the paper describes the two main video advertising standards mentioned above. Then, it presents the architecture and the advantages of a VAST server side solution.

Finally, based on our ongoing implementation and deployment experience here in Cisco, it discusses the challenges and next steps of such an approach.

SCTE APPROACH

SCTE 130 standard [1] provides a reference logical architecture and standardized interfaces allowing an Ad Management Service (ADM) to perform Dynamic Ad Insertion where the ad decisions are provided from an Ad Decision Service (ADS).

Although SCTE 130 can cover several use cases (including Video On-Demand, Linear services, Digital Video Recorders), this paper will mainly focus on the Video On Demand (VOD) case. However, the solution presented could be extended to these other use cases.

Logical Elements

The SCTE 130 reference architecture shown in figure 1 includes the following elements:

ADM: The Ad Management Service is usually located within the network element that performs dynamic ad insertion. The ADM queries the ADS to determine the ads to place inside the content. The decisions are conveyed using the PlacementRequest and PlacementResponse messages defined in SCTE 130 Part 3 [3].
ADS: The Ad Decision Service determines what advertising content needs to be inserted inside non-advertising (i.e. entertainment) content. It is typically linked with campaign management where a service provider defines how a particular set of advertising needs to be mapped to content depending on various criteria (such as subscriber data, time of day, type of content …).

Figure 1 ad insertion