Generally speaking, you can monetize video content in two ways: either the end-user (partly) pays for it, and/or you get the revenue by attracting a pool of companies willing to pay to sponsor a promoted message. Amidst the corona pandemic, consumption of media content through smart TVs surged significantly. According to the latest State of Streaming report of Conviva (Q1 2021),
viewing time on smart televisions has shown a year-over-year growth of a whopping 115%.
While OTT consumption through smart televisions is still a young, developing segment, it has been growing consistently over the last years, making it an interesting new market to invest in. If your business model is based on advertising revenue, it also raises other questions: can I use sponsored content here as well? And are there quirks?
On more established platforms such as desktop and mobile devices, client-side is still the dominant approach compared to server-side ad insertion. On smart TV web applications, we observed additional challenges getting client-side ad insertion working. In this Mini-Guide, we take a deep dive into the biggest problem we encountered: start-up performance and present the suggested solution as well as how to implement it.
