Techniques for Online Video Ad Integration

Digital TV market has seen another year of steady growth in terms of viewership. The numbers look promising as the online views stood at 27% and ad views at 25% year-over-year.

Freewheel Video monetisation report 2014

The most performing among the content is its short form of duration 0-5 mins with 85% of ads viewed while the same content when viewed on other platforms like programmatic TV registers an ad view of only 40%, according to 2014 Q4 Freewheel Video Monetisation Report.

Freewheel Video Monetisation report 2014

As the growth pattern seems to be even across all devices with double digit growth rates, there is a phenomenal growth in the monetisation of streaming devices including OTT platforms and smartphones, registering growth rates of 236% and 70% respectively in Q4, and for the year 2014 the rates are 257% and 109% respectively.

Digital TV market has seen another year of steady growth in terms of viewership. The numbers look promising as the online views stood at 27% and ad views at 25% year-over-year.

Freewheel Video Monetisation report 2014

The most performing among the content is its short form of duration 0-5 mins with 85% of ads viewed while the same content when viewed on other platforms like programmatic TV registers an ad view of only 40%, according to 2014 Q4 Freewheel Video Monetisation Report.

As the growth pattern seems to be even across all devices with double-digit growth rates, there is a phenomenal growth in the monetisation of streaming devices including OTT platforms and smartphones, registering growth rates of 236% and 70% respectively in Q4, and for the year 2014 the rates are 257% and 109% respectively.

Three key trends can be understood from the collective reports on the online video industry:

• As videos are watched on multi-channels and multi-platforms, more coverage of devices gets converted into more dollars.
• More device coverage involves a lot of technical challenges despite offering high conversion. Challenges involve maintaining consistency of the playback content across platforms.
• Short content forms of duration less than 5 minutes still manage to attract more ad views, which says that a huge opportunity to generate revenue is lost in the mid rolls.

Thus, the above trends conclude and suggest one thing that the content owners should target the right ad monetisation strategy and a thorough understanding of the underpinning technology to implement them. This post will discuss the various advertising technologies, and you may very well understand the right fit for your business model.

Types of Ad Integration:

1. Client side ad integration

To monetize the video content client size ad integration technique is followed by a majority of the content owners enabling pay-per-click and interactive ad units and within player beacon events. These techniques have some flip sides to them which is necessary to be understood by the content owners.

• A lot of SDK integration is required to serve multiple ad units
• Disruptive viewing experience due to buffering and pausing
• Fluctuation in bandwidth due to inconsistency in play back
• Ad blockers being enabled by 25-35% of the online viewers
• Overlapping audio, buffering and varying quality of videos can impact the user experience pretty much

2. Server-side integration

Along with the advancements in players, formats and devices, there has been significant improvement in the ad technology as well especially in the server-side ad insertion technology, helping content owners balance the downsides of the client-side ad insertion technology. In the client-side ad playback technology, ads and content are combinedly transcoded in a single stream, which is called ad stitching.

Thus, the content owners can deliver customized dynamic ads without any need for player beaconing and thereby a consistent viewing experience to the viewers.

Advantages–

• Supports all devices
• No dependence on ad SDKs
• Advanced targeting with server side beacons
• Seamless viewing experience

Disadvantages-

• Expensive Ad Operations
• No click through due to lack of interactive ad experience
• No device and behavior targeting on playback
• No deep analytics as there is less interaction for the user
• No skip feature

3. Hybrid ad integration

The third type of ad technology is the combination of both the previous technologies. In this approach the ads are stored and delivered from cloud whereas the user interaction, events/beacons are managed in the client player side with an application. A lightweight client or a thin client is needed as the ad logics are being managed at the server end. Thus, it becomes possible to deliver a varied number of ads to multiple devices and platforms. Some of the advantages are:

• Combines the power of both the client and server-side ad insertion technologies
• Thin ad client to support interactive ad experience like click through, polls, etc.
• Beaconing on either client or server side
• Platform agnostic
• Seamless TV-like ad experience

Cisco System says that the traffic of video-on-demand users will exponentially go up by 2018, and the second-screen traffic will be majorly driven by live broadcasts. Be it Meerkat or Periscope or any live sporting events, we are witnessing a humongous growth in traffic. Hybrid ad insertion technology will help the content owners ride the wave of online video viewership and generate more revenue.

VideoReady, a leading turnkey OTT video solution of TO THE NEW, helps content owners in a few simple steps, launch their Video on Demand destinations across the platforms..

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