PARIS—Ateme, a provider of video compression, delivery, and streaming solutions, will be at the 2024 NAB Show, highlighting new developments in its ad insertion platform. 

Specifically the company will focus on how its Server Side Ad Insertion solution now supports the latest Apple HLS Intersitials specification. This development of the Ateme NEA solution for targeted advertising ensures a superior viewing experience while enabling content and service providers to increase revenue streams through wider reach and more effective ad targeting, the company said.

Implemented initially for a leading content and service provider in Europe, the solution is one of the first SSAI solutions in the market to include support for HLS Interstitials Ateme said, offering seamless transitions from content to ads and back to content, despite differences in codec parameters and audio tracks; the ability to enhance or restrict player control actions during ad breaks as well as the ability to reverse or change inserted ads after initial decisions. Ateme says its “stronger technical solution” will be more resiliet to ad-break conditioning and segment boundaries in the HLS manifest.

"Content and service providers are struggling to find new ways to increase their revenue,” said Ahmed Swidan, Director of Personalized TV at Ateme. “One way to achieve this is to reach more viewers, on more devices, with the best ad-insertion techniques. The latest HLS Interstitials specification from Apple enables a wider reach, while also introducing advanced functionalities for ad-break replacement logic and making the system more resilient. We are thrilled to be among the first vendors to implement this standard, helping the media industry reach its full monetization potential."

Ateme will discuss the latest advances to its SSAI solution at Booth W1721 in the West Hall of the LVCC during the 2024 NAB Show in Las Vegas,  April 14-17.

The OTT and CTV landscape has gone through a lot of changes during the last few years, and there has been a particularly significant growth in supply.   

According to the recent figures by Pixalate, the industry has seen a 232% rise in the number of OTT apps supporting programmatic. Also, there's been an increase in ad volume: between Q1 2019 and Q4 2019, the number of OTT/CTV ad impressions increased 4.3 fold, or by 330%. 

The figures look impressive, and they are expected to only increase, partially due to the rising CTV and OTT overall viewership during the COVID-19 pandemic. For instance, based on Nielsen estimations for January, CTV usage in the U.S. alone accounted for 12.5 billion hours monthly. Shortly after the lockdown began, total hours spent with CTV devices were up 81%, equating to nearly 4 billion hours of CTV use per week.

What else is drawing attention is the growing importance of SSAI—Server-side ad integration technology. Back to Pixalate's report, in Q1 2020, 40% of all programmatic OTT/CTV was delivered via SSAI. 

Yet, along with the interest, buyers and sellers across ad tech, look at SSAI technology with caution. Being one of the most crucial innovations since 2017 that has allowed OTT video to become a viable industry, SSAI, at the same time, is fraught with the risk of ad fraud. 

But, before taking a closer look at issues SSAI brings in, let's first figure out what makes it so attractive.

USING SSAI ACROSS THE CTV LANDSCAPE

Unlike traditional video ad serving, where ad requests originate on the client-side and ad content is delivered separately via a third-party ad server, SSAI allows the delivery of ads and the video content in a stitched stream.

SSAI is common for OTT/CTV video advertising. With the growth of personalization and ad insertion opportunities, SSAI has become a resolution for CTV and OTT publishers. Specifically, it helps to eliminate video latency and significantly improve the viewer experience, which is essential for increasingly sophisticated audiences. 

WHAT SSAI BRINGS TO THE TABLE

SSAI was originally created to help publishers bypass ad-blocking measures and provide users with a better viewer experience, eliminating any latency issues and buffering. Though, these are not the only benefits SSAI implementation brings to the table. The other advancements are: 

• Transparency: It's one of the core benefits to the industry, bringing trust to a formerly opaque way of transaction. This is where SSAI provides publishers with metrics and insights into the supply chain, and ensures transparency. 
• Measurement: SSAI can take care of most of the data management and measurement attribution across OTT and CTV environments, which is essential for platforms like Roku or PlayStation. Besides, with SSAI, publishers don't need to get too sophisticated with client-side code. 
• Fraud analysis: So far, there's still no one-size-fits-all solution, but efforts made by the ad tech flagmen allow to identify untrustworthy servers, as well as whitelist and blacklist the activities more efficiently. 

THE DARK SIDE OF SSAI

On the other hand, SSAI integrations are extremely sensitive to ad fraud schemes. Moreover, as the ad spends shift to OTT and CTV channels, SSAI gets exploited on a large scale. Partially, it's due to the tendency to whitelist all SSAI servers. This security gap in SSAI allows fraudsters to spoof the user request by faking all the associated HTTP header fields, and other actions and interactions with ads.

There are also some risk factors across the CTV and OTT landscape in general, not just related to SSAI. Recently the ad tech industry has witnessed two OTT cases in point: Monarch and DiCaprio. 

Put briefly, DiCaprio scheme spoofed ad requests, imitating real users interaction with an app (accessing it via real users devices). This resulted in a violation of 114 unique Roku store URLs, 98 unique app Bundle IDs and at least 134 unique app names.

While the DiCaprio scheme was implemented mainly through users' mobile devices, the more recent case, Monarch, performed spoofing on actual OTT/CTV devices and apps.

These cases have different mechanisms behind them, but both show how easily scammers can abuse security loopholes that exist in OTT and CTV. 

Apparently, the premium brands like Lexus, Uber, Chipotle and others like them, are the main target of fraudsters. And, well, they do that through the exploitation of SSAI.

COMBATING INVALID SSAI TRANSACTIONS

For every action, there is a reaction. This is where the vocal supporters of high ad tech standards in the industry come in. 

For instance, IAB Tech Lab works closely with the Advanced TV committee to craft the guidelines for improving measurement in SSAI and, more broadly, across OTT/CTV advertising.

Also, the work towards accreditation of SSAI measurement metrics is under way. These metrics include the OTT and CTV environment, display tracked ads and impressions, plus SIVT detection and filtration across display and video traffic within the desktop and mobile environments.

Besides, there are the critical points implemented by Pixalate—the opportunity to evaluate both individual IP addresses and the overall reputation of the proxy without going "all-in" (whitelist) or "all-out" (blacklist) on proxy servers. 

FINAL THOUGHTS

Similar to a double-edge sword, SSAI can both power up CTV and OTT publishers with a new and more profitable way of ad serving, and at the same time, leave space for fraudulent activities.

The good news is that technologies aimed to fight ad fraud also evolve. By working together on standards, guidelines and metrics, as well as their further adoption, the ad tech industry will find ways to go through and stay ahead of bad actors. 

Daniel Elad is the chief strategy officer for The View Point.

The amount of video accessed online, particularly by mobile devices, is expanding exponentially. As a result, there is a need to maximize the monetization opportunities by delivering ads across multiple devices and platforms with a uniformity of presentation and minimum of overhead, regardless of the platform type or content type.

Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI, or dynamic ad insertion) has emerged as a technology solution that can deliver a consistent experience akin to TV at the same time as opening up addressable advertising opportunities. This consistency is a by-product of the “ad copy normalization” that is built into SSAI. “Ad copy normalization” is a process through which ad content is encoded with the same bitrates, frame rates and audio levels as those of the original content, therefore ensuring a smooth transition between primary and stitched content and vice versa (with the same CDN being loaded for both content and ads).

CLIENT-SIDE AD INSERTION

SSAI technology is already being used with increasing success by broadcasters to deliver a seamless, engaging Live experience. However, the principal means of monetization for catch-up remains Client-Side Ad Insertion (CSAI), where, at the start of every ad break, the primary player has to be stopped and the ad player put on top, with the primary player having to be resumed at the end of the break. For a broadcaster with both Live and VoD, it makes sense for a single advertising workflow to be applied across all content.

It is, of course, possible for broadcasters to deliver a near-seamless experience using the CSAI model, by preloading the ad player and buffer in the background and swapping the players over at the exact moments when an ad break starts and resumes. However, there is always the risk of playback issues caused by inconsistent encoding of the ad copy. In addition, considerable effort is required in terms of implementation, with code having to be continuously duplicated from one device type to another, and from one environment to another, with the inevitable testing and maintenance overhead to achieve this result consistently across devices.

Many of those broadcasters of VoD streams who have a working CSAI solution in place are finding it increasingly hard to maintain, so there is a growing interest in the SSAI approach. This is partly driven by positive experiences of SSAI for Live, where CSAI is not an option owing to the strict requirements around ad break timings. There are a number of reasons why SSAI should appeal to broadcasters over CSAI:

• Implementation: The code is decoupled from the ad server, with the work on stitching and interfacing to the ad server being performed by the backend SSAI platform, providing overall flexibility in that the inventory and decisioning engine is abstracted from the actual delivery. SDKs have also been developed, which means that there is effectively a middleware layer, with the SDKs talking to the backend, and the backend talking to the ad server, making it possible to swap out the ad server without changes to the SDKs.
• Control: There can be a single point for all ad insertion calls across Live and VoD, a single interface providing access to a single set of Broadcast Streams, Promotions and VoD assets, and a single API providing real-time analytics.
• Interactivity: The aforementioned SDKs can support the use of clickable linear content and dynamic overlays, and also allow broadcasters to customise the instances when skipping, seeking and pausing are allowed.
• Ad blockers: The stitching used by SSAI mean that ad blockers are unable to decipher where the call to the server is being made, and so cannot differentiate between an ad and the content itself, making SSAI highly resistant to ad blocking.

Besides being able to deliver SSAI at scale and to provide all of the existing benefits of configurable user interactivity, SSAI has enormous security benefits, which cannot be totally covered in this article. In brief:

• With SSAI, the aforementioned middleware layer affords control over the systems with which viewers are interacting. By contrast, with CSAI, the viewer’s device is touching the ad server and presenting its IP address (and potentially other information). The first party ad server might, in turn, involve the use of multiple third party servers and expose the same viewers to being tracked by unknown companies, to the possible detriment of a broadcaster's commercial model.

With the correct deployment, there is no logical reason why broadcasters should not consider SSAI when deploying VoD streams. As OTT audiences for Live and VoD continue to thrive, providers are increasingly likely to seek a joined-up SSAI strategy, and by so doing, not only safeguard their current ad revenues, but also enhance them.

Click here for more on server-side ad insertion for live and VoD streams.

David Springall is the founder & CTO at Yospace.