One of the toughest job for the video content providers and broadcasters lies in delivering a crisp viewing experience to their audience by providing TV functionality such as start-over and time-shifted features. The challenge for providing over-the-top (OTT) video content will increase along with the growing number of viewers viewing the devices on connected devices. For optimizing the revenue opportunities of streaming videos, the advertisers are looking for a more innovative way which will help them to provide ads to the consumers which will match their interest.
The needs for innovative ads are required for reducing the demand of users for ad blockers. If the ad matches the interest of the audience, it will be beneficial for both the ad provider and the audience. Apart from interest relevancy, ad inserting in an innovative way will also help the service provider to connect well with the users which will bring abrupt change in the way of purchase.
As the demand for personalized ad insertion is growing rapidly, the pay TV operators, broadcasters, video providers and the content programmers are faced with the big question which is how to meet the demand of the video content while matching its relevancy with its audience. The video content developers are facing challenges daily for finding innovative ways of making ads that the audience could easily connect to. It is tougher as the monetization must be balanced with the high-quality viewing .And this is where server-side ad insertion comes to play. So, what is server-side ad insertion?
Well, server-side ad insertion can be defined as a blend of ad server communication along with the obvious manipulation along with resolution normalization and ad bitrate, the whole thing takes place in the server side before providing a manifest to the clients. It can also be referred to as ad stitching or dynamic ad insertion. It is difficult to get the right server-side ad insertion because:
- In Server-side ad insertion, there is a high demand for high scalable originating service
- The personalized manifests aren’t easy to cache
- The clients need to know about the ad which has been played is an important requirement for the reporting and the custom player behavior.
- Each ad servers and standards, player environments and the origin server complicates the workflow of the server-side ad insertion.
To keep up with the fluctuation of the demand of the server-side ad insertion, there is a requirement of high scalable architecture specifically for the broadcaster who needs to deal with the sudden demand such as sports event, breaking news and popular TV series. The cloud-based video processing, when merged with the server-side ad insertion, can enable the broadcasters to meet the demand of the audience. The main key behind the management of the viewer variance lies in the packaging and the encoding which can be virtualized for the rapid developments which are hosted in the cloud infrastructure for a quick auto-scaling. These are the main aspects of the server-side ad insertion which makes the whole process look complicated.
