Revolutionizing Viewer Engagement and Advertising: Server-Guided Ad Insertion with THEOads
Watch the recording of the NAB Show New York talk where we dive into how THEOads uses SGAI to revolutionize ad strategy in the streaming world.
- Overview of Server-Guided Ad Insertion: How it combines Client-Side Ad Insertion (CSAI) and Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) to overcome traditional limitations.
- Technical architecture of SGAI within THEOads: A deep dive into how Server-Guided Ad Insertion redistributes tasks between client and server.
- Expanded monetization opportunities and elevated viewer experience: Exploring innovative ad formats, increased ad relevance and elevated viewer experiences
- Future of streaming monetization: How SGAI helps you stay ahead in the rapidly evolving streaming landscape.
Webinar Transcript
Andrea: Good afternoon, everybody! Really exciting for me to be here today.
You might have noticed already that there is a lot of excitement, a lot of hype, around advertising nowadays. Let's find out why!
Today we will talk about THEOads and Server-Guided Ad Insertion (SGAI) - the technology behind it, and how we are using this technology not only to revolutionize the advertising space, but also to unlock endless opportunity in terms of user engagement for our customers.
My name is Andrea Cani. I'm a technical delivery manager at THEO Technologies, now part of the Dolby Group. I've been working in the digital video domain for over 15 years now, it's been an incredible journey, seen a lot of things changing and, since, I've joined THEO Technologies two years ago, it was very inspiring to see our small group of a very talented the video engineers contributed to massively shape the streaming industry. Today, I'm here with one of these guys, a good colleague of mine, Gilles Morris, would you like to introduce yourself?
Gilles: Yes, absolutely. Thanks, Andrea! I'm Gilles, at THEO, I steer the engineering team, the development team of THEOplayer, our universal video player, and also THEOads as a product owner. But I still like to consider myself a software engineer as well, it's how I started at THEO years back and how I learned and contributed to the entire THEO product stack from the player to our low latency streaming solution to now also THEOads, that we're talking about here today. So, Andrea, what are we talking about today?
Andrea: Yeah, let's have a quick look at the agenda:
We will start talking a bit about the current status of the ad insertion technology, showing how we took the road towards Server-Guided Ad Insertion (SGAI). Then we will be focusing on our product, THEOads, its key benefits, and we will discuss afterwards about other opportunities beyond advertising that this technology is unlocking.
Andrea: So, let's talk about the current status of the technology today. Many of you may be already familiar with the terminology Client-Side Ad Insertion (CSAI) and Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI). I will briefly discuss and highlight the differences, it will help us out to understand more about Server-Guided Ad Insertion (SGAI) afterwards.
So on Client-Side Ad Insertion (CSAI) the big portion of the advertising flow is managed by the player on the client side. So the player knows the data of the user, this allows a lot of real-time capabilities and a lot of personalization. It still can be challenging in terms of cross-platform support, so providing a smooth ad playback and smooth transition between the main content and ads can be challenging on the server side. On top of that, this setup is quite prone to ad blockers, which is one of the main reasons why many people then decided to switch to Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI).
Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) means that everything happens on the server side. So, this offers a better quality, smooth ad transition between ad and content. It's a setup which is definitely more robust towards the ad blockers. On the other hand, as everything needs to be prepared up front, this setup introduced most of the time some extra latency and the start-up time are increased.
Another thing that we need to take into consideration when talking about Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) - it can become expensive and difficult to scale. You need to take into account this stitcher that needs to be scaled to whatever amount of user you want to reach. So, in summary, we can say that Client-Side Ad Insertion (CSAI) offers a big level of personalization and insights and struggle with cross-platform implementation, while Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) is more resilient towards ad blockers, but introduce latency and become complex and costly.
So, to close off here, neither of the two solution is the best one. So at the end, it will be about what are your goals? What is the use case that you want to implement to decide which model to adopt? In this sense, we will see a bit later how server-guided (ad insertion) redistributes the responsibilities between client and server, allowing an overall better approach when it comes to ad insertion.
But what trends do we see now in the market? Increased demand for personalization - we are seeing indeed a growing demand for personalized ads, we often hear people saying - I do not mind actually ads as long as they are relevant to me, as long as they play smoothly, as long they do not interfere too much with the experience. So that's one of the main trends that you have seen in the market. Of course, we are looking for a solution that is more efficient, highly scalable, and a solution which can create more engaging experience on one hand, and on the other hand, increasing the opportunity to monetize. Because at the end, we don't have to forget this - the main goal remains monetization, right? We want to monetize while keeping the user super engaged.
Another trend that we see in the in the market is the broadcast-like experience. A lot of customers ask us - how can I still get the experience, the feeling I was used from the traditional broadcast television, how can I get the same latency? How can I get the same smooth experience when ads are played? And then of course, measuring the ad experience is crucial. Ads that are poorly placed, it's bad, not only for your brand, for your app, but of course, also for the advertiser, which rely on you to deliver high quality.
Andrea: So let's try to understand then why everybody is looking at optimizing the advertising space.
The current perception is quite bad actually, let's try to think about it: so you as a provider, you do everything to create the best experience possible for your user. You try to kill the latency as much as you can, and you try to increase the quality as much as you can, providing the same seamless experience across multiple devices, and then, bam - you shoot an ad which completely breaks the flow of engagement between the user and the content. That's something indeed that we all need to think about because again, it sounds like an old way of doing advertising.
So the market demands indeed more engagement. We need to find kind of a balance between monetization and user engagement. What we have noticed in the recent years is that actually we have observed a progressive change in the way users, digital users want to get digital content. We have observed a change from passive mode to active mode, if I can define it like that, right? So for the user, especially for the young generation, it's not enough anymore to just get passively a content and watch it, the users want to interact with it, user want to be part of the digital experience. And in this sense, it becomes absolutely clear that ads need to be part of that experience.
Also not only creating new opportunities for monetization, not only creating a new engagement experience, but we also hear often customers that are requesting just do the full content replacement, just do it better, make it more efficient, more scalable, and more smooth for the user. So those are more or less the trends that we are observing now in the markets. And, I think this leads me to give you the word to you.
Gilles: So the question becomes - how do we tackle those things? And, well, there's a new kid in town, but it's also been a bit the talk of the town already actually - Server-Guided Ad Insertion (SGAI).
Some of you may have already heard about it, but if not, let me give you a brief introduction. So in Server-Guided Ad Insertion (SGAI), it's a bit of a hybrid approach between the two: so control of where ad breaks need to be, how long they need to be, and also part of the control for what that ad experience should look like remains at the server side. But the actual ad request and the stitching of the content we bring back to the player side, to the client side of things. And so in this setup, the player gets a fully pre-transcoded, ready to play manifest that contains all of the ads for the entire ad break, and then takes care of the stitching on the player side.
And what we experienced and what we see is that this is a more simple and more logical redistribution of responsibilities in the ad insertion flow, which gives us a lot of the benefits from both CSAI (Client-Side Ad Insertion) and SSAI (Server-Side Ad Insertion) while tackling some of their shortcomings. So, for instance, already scaling wise - we bring back the opportunity to scale easily because all that stitching that doesn't need to happen on the server-side anymore, we bring that back to the client-side, the server is only doing signaling or where that needs to be. This scales just as well as, as CSAI (Client-Side Ad Insertion) essentially.
Aside from that, monetization wise there's also definitely advantages here when you compare to example for Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI). So in server side, for example, if you're filling up VOD or a long DVR window, you need to be pre-filling all of those ads while you're not even sure that they might all be watched. So that can have a negative effect on your rendering rate. While in SGAI (Server-Guided Ad Insertion), ads are only going to be requested right before the actual ad is going to play, which gives them a much higher probability of actually being viewed and possibly improving your rendering rates that way. And compared to CSAI (Client-Side Ad Insertion) as well, the fact that we integrate differently with the ad server and also the fact that we still have a server component there gives us different ways of being able to deal with ad blockers as well, also offering improvements over just playing CSAI (Client-Side Ad Insertion). And in terms of cross-platform support as well, by leveraging existing standards, but also upcoming standards like HLS interstitials or MPEG-DASH alternative MPDs, and together with that, in the case of THEOads, leveraging our expertise as a player company, we can still deliver solid cross-platform support and solid smooth playback across platforms. So, then the most important advantage of the setup is the simplicity that it brings and with that the flexibility that it gives by taking back some of that control to the player side, and I'll get into that a bit more later.
Gilles: Let's first talk about THEOads. So THEOads is the product that we at THEO have built around SGAI (Server-Guided Ad Insertion). It's an integrated solution together with our player that delivers innovative ad experience. So maybe first a few words on the why and the how that we built THEOads:
So first off, the challenges that we've already been discussing, the challenges we see in CSAI (Client-Side Ad Insertion) and SSAI (Server-Side Ad Insertion). As a player company, we're really in a position to know what kind of extra benefits and advantages we can bring by taking back some of that control to the client-side, and we were actually triggered in venturing into this ourselves by customers who are coming to us and saying - I'm experiencing these issues with scaling my SSAI (Server-Side Ad Insertion) solution, I'm experiencing other issues. Can't you help us find a better way of how we insert our ads? So that's why we started exploring and ended up at SGAI (Server-Guided Ad Insertion). And while figuring that out and while exploring, we actually ended up partnering with Google as well, so Google has also been looking a lot at SGAI (Server-Guided Ad Insertion) more and more recently, and they were also looking at partners to explore this technology with them and to develop it together with them. So we did, and now it's becoming a reality with THEOads. And I should also add that it's been a very interesting and fun process with the Google guys with innovation and experimentation, so that was really pleasant.
Another big reason why we ventured into this was low latency. So, as you may or may not know, at THEO, we're really at the forefront of low latency. We already were with our protocol HESP that we developed and our THEOlive solution around that, and now even more that we were acquired by Dolby, we also have Millicast coming into the mix. So low latency remains a very important thing for us. And in that case as well, we were experimenting with how are we going to do ads at super low latency? And we were trying that with existing ad insertion mechanisms and just running into limitations there as well.
So also for the low latency case, we really see SGAI (Server-Guided Ad Insertion) as an amazing opportunity to be able to do ads at low latency.
So let's take a look at how THEOads actually works:
There's two components to it - a backend component, which we call the signaling service and then the player, which of course in our case is THEOplayer.
Now, to help you get an idea of how it actually works, let's start at the player side. So on the right side, when you want to start playback, as always, it starts with a manifest request. So this manifest request through the CDN will end up at our signaling service. The goal of the signaling service is to make sure that the proper markers are embedded in the manifest to tell the player where ad breaks need to be, what they need to look like, how long they need to be, etc.
It can do that in two ways, either by markers that are already in the content stream that we consume and that we're monetizing. So all the existing markers that are currently commonly in use with SSAI (Server-Side Ad Insertion), like SCTE35 markers or date ranges, we can support all of those. Or if there's no markers in the stream, we also simply offer an API on our signaling service to allow you to just control through a REST API where you want ad breaks to be and what you want them to look like.
So either of two ways - we insert the necessary markers into the stream, the manifest goes back to the player and the CDN is mentioned here explicitly because this is the same manifest for all clients as opposed to SSAI (Server-Side Ad Insertion). This is a fully cashable manifest, the markers are the same for everyone, the personalization is really back happening at the client side.
So that manifest ends up back at the player. Player knows where the ad breaks need to be, as soon as it comes close to an ad break, it's going to do an ad request to the ad server, which in our case is a Google Ad Manager integration right now, from there, it's going to get back just a different manifest that has all of the ads pre-transcoded and integrated for the entire ad break, and then stitch that in on the player side.
So, that gives us a lot of flexibility in things that we can do with that. So let's take a look at the key benefits and what it can actually do.
So in terms of benefits, what we've already been discussing before the benefits of SGAI (Server-Guided Ad Insertion), in terms of scaling, in terms of a simpler, more cost effective set up, opportunities to improve your rendering rates, and doing personalized experiences at scale.
So some of the examples now of what we can do with that simple setup is still doing a single ad replace as you used to, but do it in a more cost effective manner. But we can do a lot more interesting things, for example, the double box where you insert an ad next to your content and content keeps remains visible on the left side of things, which is already a great example of doing a less intrusive ad insertion than a full replace.
Or you could think of an L-shape where it's either content playing in a smaller part of the view where you have a companion ad that's relevant to the content alongside it, like the example at the bottom of the slide, or you could show an ad, which is then enhanced with additional information on the side and maybe an interactive QR code.
So these are the experience that we already have in production now live. We can do a POC with this with anyone who wants to try it out tomorrow, essentially. But I've been talking a lot about the flexibility and the simplicity of the system, so there's actually a lot more that we're looking at doing and a lot more that we can do with this setup.
So let's take a look at that now.
This technology will allow us to unlock a lot of opportunities in terms of user engagement. And that's the message we want to bring a bit today, right? So the technology is there, is already quite mature, so it's time to sit together, setting up POC, testing stuff and see what we can do in terms of user engagement.
We don't have to limit ourselves to just using this technology to insert advertising. This one - what you see now in the picture it's already a good example on how we could use to engage the user even more. As you can see in this picture, we may basically still adopt this technology to provide the highlights of the game that you are actually watching. Latency in this case is critical. We have frontrunner latency, we will be able to smooth out the experience for the user. But this is just one of the many examples that we could think of. For example, using the same setup, you may think that you can subscribe to your favorite team, your favorite players, and while watching Team A on the main screen, you can get already personalized content on the other box coming from another team coming from your favorite teams.
And that's actually the revolution that we feel really confident to talk about today.
Andrea: And again, not only the flexibility, but also the fact that there is a redistribution of the responsibility between the server and client. So as I said at the beginning, the player knows the data of the user, right? So this will allow really to fine tune the setup in a way that you can get really one to one personalized highlights for the current user, so that's again a pretty cool use case!
And then flexibility goes also beyond the video. We are already working on a POC with a customer who wants to start using THEOads to insert image overlays on the screen, they want to have the flexibility to control the logo watermark, resize it, switch around the logos. And again, this setup will offer the flexibility to do it.
Gilles: Yeah, and we don't even need to be limited to images, you could think of interactive elements coming into play and triggering those with the same mechanism as well.
So especially if you're looking at the low latency interactive use cases, bringing up interactive elements at low latency with this mechanism could deliver a super interesting for your viewer experience.
Andrea: Indeed, latency will be of course, a crucial element in those kind of use cases, right?! So closing up.
We've presented a couple of use cases, but we're really still building this up together, we're very curious to hear what are your use cases. So we're eager to hear. I already see a hand up, so we'll be right down on the floor and very happy to talk to anyone, answer questions and have a chat about what use cases could be relevant for your business.
So with that, all that's left to say is - thank you, thank you for your support!
Speakers

at Dolby x THEO

at Dolby x THEO
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