Introduction
Penthera has a long history of working with the video on demand providers across the globe. In the past few years, with the introduction of our 2nd Look ad monetization product, we’ve worked closely with the leading ad-supported publishers and server-side ad insertion (SSAI) vendors. We’ve learned a lot about this market and the challenges and opportunities for major publishers looking to keep their audiences engaged while fully monetizing every stream.
Server-side ad insertion in the market
The pros and cons of SSAI vs. client-side ad insertion (CSAI) are well documented. While there are benefits to CSAI, including low cost, we see a very clear trend that publishers are moving to SSAI from CSAI for VOD. The main drivers are ad stack simplification, scalability, and viewer experience.
Although VOD using SSAI is increasingly common, the vast majority of SSAI traffic is from streaming live and linear content. Live and linear streams are a natural fit for SSAI because latency, a common problem with CSAI, cannot be tolerated in a continuous, scheduled, or live event stream. As a result, most of the major vendors in the market, including Amazon MediaTailor, Amagi, Google, Brightcove, and others derive most of their SSAI revenue from live and linear.
SSAI for VOD
Large-scale premium VOD publishers with new and exclusive content have generally used SSAI for years to ensure the best user experience and maintain scalability as their audience and device population grow. These publishers usually work with leading SSAI vendors like Amazon or Google, but some manage their own technology.
We also see mid-sized publishers using the leading SSAI vendors as part of a publisher-managed end-to-end ad flow. Publishers can monetize content directly or through revenue shares with content owners. Inventory shares can also be handled this way with a secondary ad server.
In some cases, publishers and platforms use multiple vendors like Amagi or Wurl to deliver VOD assets and FAST linear streams. As a viewer scrolls through a library of VOD content, one title may be delivered (including SSAI) by one technology partner, while another would be delivered by the next. This strategy works for publishers when they initially build out, but often comes with the natural costs of fragmentation including inconsistent data and multiple external partners to manage.
Increasingly, we see these publishers looking to control their ad stack and migrate to a less complex end-to-end solution.
Future of SSAI for VOD
VOD content has always been important to publishers, but as the market for viewer attention gets more competitive, building out a VOD library is critical to getting audiences to return regularly. Large publishers that we work with understand that linear channels and a deep VOD library create a rich environment for viewers to discover content and return on their own terms to watch more. For this reason, VOD is an important growth opportunity for publishers and SSAI vendors.
We often hear about the need to address video start-up time issues, ad timeouts causing underfill, and render rates as areas of focus for ad-supported publishers. All of these issues are impacted by the unique nature of how ad decisions are made for VOD with SSAI. Server-guided ad insertion (SGAI) solutions address the impact SSAI has on VOD ad insertion timing by enabling just-in-time (JIT) ad insertion. Just-in-time ad insertion enables ad decisions before each break on VOD, driving faster start-up times, higher render rates, and better fill.
Penthera offers 2nd Look, the only fully cloud-based SGAI solution, and we increasingly see just-in-time ad insertion as a new must-have feature for SSAI implementations.
Summary
Content distribution and consumption keep moving in one direction – more streaming, less cable and satellite. Ad-supported publishers, whose revenue depends on time spent watching content, are investing in their VOD libraries and SSAI technology with just-in-time ad decision-making to drive better user experience and monetization.
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