The 2026 FIFA World Cup is on track to become the most profitable tournament in history. Expanded to 48 teams and 104 matches, it is creating more advertising inventory than any previous edition. The addition of hydration breaks has further increased inventory for some broadcasters, creating two extra advertising opportunities every match.

Yet despite the records being set in 2026, the industry is only beginning to unlock the full commercial potential of major live sports. The next wave of Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) innovation promises not only to improve the viewing experience, but also to create entirely new forms of inventory and measurement.

Better Viewer Experiences Create More Inventory

One of the most significant developments is Server-Guided Ad Insertion (SGAI), the next evolutionary step in DAI technology.

Because advertising is handled separately from the primary content playlist, SGAI makes long DVR windows easier and more cost-effective to support. Viewers can rewind further, while broadcasters gain new monetization opportunities through historic ad breaks being resolved dynamically at the point of viewing, which was previously much harder to do.

SGAI also enables addressable advertising without adding latency. As broadcasters push toward broadcast-comparable live streaming, the ability to combine low latency with addressable advertising ensures monetization can now evolve alongside improvements in the viewing experience.

The Rise of Non-Linear Advertising

Perhaps the biggest growth opportunity lies in non-linear ad formats.

Traditional commercial breaks remain highly valuable, but advertisers increasingly want formats that keep viewers engaged with the action. Industry efforts led by the IAB's Ad Format Hero initiative are standardizing overlays, lower-thirds, squeezebacks, side-by-side presentations, and other interactive formats.

Some 2026 World Cup viewers have already seen similar examples. During hydration breaks, Telemundo has displayed sponsored graphics on-screen while maintaining live match commentary. Standardized formats will make similar executions easier to buy, deploy, measure, and scale across multiple broadcasters and markets.

Importantly, these formats are not dependent on SGAI. They can also be delivered through existing Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) deployments, meaning broadcasters are likely to benefit from them sooner rather than later.

Closing the Measurement Gap

The final missing piece is measurement. Viewability remains one of advertising's most important metrics but measuring it consistently across connected TV devices has proven difficult—particularly for syndicated channels and distribution partners where the rights-holder does not control the player environment.

Two emerging standards are helping solve this problem. SVTA’s ad creative signaling provides a standardized way for players to process tracking information without custom integrations. CMCDv2, developed by CTA WAVE, enables players to report standardized playback information such as playhead position and user interactions, allowing the DAI platform to perform the tracking.

Together, these approaches create a path toward reliable, IAB-certified measurement in environments where granular reporting has historically been difficult to achieve.

Records Today, Bigger Opportunities Tomorrow

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is delivering more matches, more viewers and more advertising opportunities and is already driving record revenues.

But the industry's next phase may prove even more significant. SGAI promises better viewer experiences and new monetization models. Standardized non-linear formats will create entirely new inventory around live events, while CMCDv2 and related initiatives will close long-standing measurement gaps and improve advertiser confidence.

While this World Cup may be the most profitable yet for rights-holders, the next era of Dynamic Ad Insertion is set to create an advertising ecosystem with more inventory, better measurement, and greater flexibility—further increasing the value of major sporting events.

Since the beginning of commercial television, advertising has been a key part of broadcasting. Over the years, the technology for inserting ads into programs has developed to the point where there is now a whole technological subsection dedicated to it. Ad tech encompasses not only scheduling and playing commercials but also directing them to their correct destinations on the wide variety of platforms and devices now in use, increasingly with a high degree of personalization.

The growth of the streaming sector and the corresponding increase in the adoption of connected televisions (CTVs) have added to the reach and complexity of ad tech. Among trends identified by Allan Nicholson, senior director of advertising solutions and strategy at Harmonic, is the move by some broadcasters to enable programmatic buy-in—also known as programmatic advertising, using automated, data-driven techniques for buying and selling ad slots—on linear broadcast platforms.

“Some of them are also the broadcasters that are making the transition to become more streaming-focused and they’re adopting streaming ad tech for personalization,“ he said. “The other trend we're seeing is broadcasters enabling service providers to start monetizing services using DAI [dynamic ad insertion]. The way to think of this is as a linear to programmatic [application] for monetization, as opposed to the programmatic to linear trend, which enables linear broadcast.”

More Engagement, Less ‘Ad Fatigue’
In the streaming market, and particularly for live sports, Nicholson said operators are personalizing new ad formats, such as L-shaped double boxes (a form of nonlinear addressable TV advertising), squeeze backs (where the program is minimized to give prominence to the ad) and overlays (nonlinear ad banners, tickers and scrolling text alongside the main program).

“And they're all opting to do this server-side,“ he said. “These new ad formats are really all about increasing ad loads while maintaining new engagement and avoiding ad fatigue.”

The coming together of linear and streamed (digital) platforms—at least in the minds of viewers—is also highlighted by Dan Walsh, senior vice president of product management at Imagine Communications.

“Broadcasters and streaming providers are under growing pressure to bridge the gap between linear and digital operations,“ he said. “Audiences don't distinguish between platforms; they simply expect access to content wherever and however they choose to watch. But many broadcasters are still managing these environments separately, which creates inefficiencies and limits their ability to fully monetize inventory.

“To address these issues, the industry is shifting toward a unified advertising approach, often referred to as ‘Total TV,’ which focuses less on delivery mechanisms and more on audience value,” Walsh added.

This, he explained, is being driven by automation across ad sales, trafficking and optimization: “That reduces costs, improves yield and frees teams from the manual processes that have long defined traditional ad sales.”

With streamers now delivering linear programming as well as their core services, David Dembowski, chief revenue officer at Operative, said everything is now about a viewing experience, including the ads.

“The reason why streamers chose to use a digital platform is primarily because of impression-based sales or, put another way, addressable offerings,” Dembrowski said. “We have a client that was adamant about break-based ad sales, but recently has gone to impression-based sales. There are a lot of reasons for this, but it is mostly because of targeting and measurement.”

‘Unprecedented Opportunities’
Through the introduction of impression-based sales on what Dembowski describes as “the big screen” approach, TV has become a “full funnel advertising platform.” This, he says, goes from a broad approach—high-profile, big automobile or movie launches—to something based more on buying behavior.

“And it shows what's so exciting about CTV,” he added. “Take the example of Amazon [Prime Video], which was an SVOD streamer, always on-demand, up until about three years ago. Then they signed the relationship with [NFL] “Thursday Night Football.” What they've been able to do is expand the TAM [total addressable marketplace] of advertisers that had never even considered buying the NFL on prior platforms. It's created an unprecedented opportunity for new advertisers to get exposure to an audience that was out of reach for years.“

Paul Davies, head of marketing at DAI technology specialist Yospace, said the company prefers the term “addressability” to personalization.

“The reason is that personalization makes you think of an ad targeted at an individual,” he explained. “What we see is that the true value of CTV/OTT advertising is in measurement. We are able to deliver real-time viewing metrics on a one-to-one addressable level, which means that advertisers going to broadcasters to use their CTV inventory are able to get similar types of metrics to those they’re able to get in other digital channels, such as social media.”

Impact of AI
As with other areas of broadcasting, artificial intelligence is top of mind. Davies said he is hearing “lots of discussion” about it, including the potential for Generative AI to create “truly personalized ad creatives” for each viewer.

“I would say there are legal and technical hurdles to that, which would mean perhaps broadcasters aren't jumping on them as opportunities straightaway,” he observed. “One of the reasons why TV advertising is so popular is because of the premium quality and delivery and the fact that it's considered brand-safe.’

Dan Walsh at Imagine said the use of AI in ad tech is “in its early stages” but is being used to identify and enhance factors that produce good results. “By combining optimization tools with AI capabilities, broadcasters can further refine audience targeting and campaign performance,” he said.

Operative's David Dembowski said AI gives “the chance to accelerate the knowledge, workflows and outcomes” being used. “The application of AI to on-board data has cut times by more than half,” he observed. “It's created efficiencies that are so critical in today's world.”

For instance, Harmonic’s Nicholson said his company uses its "homegrown AI technologies" to help advertisers target audiences based on contextual information contained in frames of video prior to ad breaks. “This means you don't have to use personal identity information and can avoid regulatory issues,” he said.

The relationship between TV and streaming advertising may still not be a totally warm one, but ad tech is at least making it possible for broadcasters to show audiences commercials they might actually want to see or are interested in. Or at least are not driven mad by.

STAINES-UPON-THAMES, U.K.—Dynamic ad insertion specialist Yospace demonstrated a one-to-one addressable advertising breakthrough earlier this month at IBC2025 when the company used the new international standard for server-guided ad insertion (SGAI), MPEG-DASH Events and added less than one second of latency for the advertising, resulting in glass-to-glass latency of under five seconds.

This development is believed to be the first real-world implementation of the new Alternative Media Presentation, which was recently ratified by the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA) into the new MPEG-DASH standard.

For live sports, the need for live streaming latency to match, or improve on, that of live broadcast has long been a goal for live streaming, especially as more viewers are streaming content. Live broadcast latency generally is above 5 seconds. Latency in live streaming could be anywhere from 20-45 seconds, with low latency generally considered to be 1 to 6 seconds.

The addition of addressable advertising to live streams has been a major hurdle in making low latency commercially viable. One-to-one addressability requires time for ad tech systems to process ad requests, potentially run real-time programmatic auctions and respond to requests before missing the window and timing out, Yospace said.

With ad revenue underpinning much of video streaming businesses, it is critical that any low latency ad insertion does not impact the ability of streamers to maximize their commercial opportunities, it said.

Yospace developed its sub-5 second low latency solution using the new MPEG-DASH Alternative Media Presentation streaming extensions, which has been developed by a working group of the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA), to which Yospace has contributed.

In collaboration with Qualabs, which supported Yospace’s integration with Shaka Player, the demonstration included a non-disruptive L-Shape ad format that runs alongside the main content stream, the company said.

The L-Shape squeezeback is one of the CTV ad formats being promoted by IAB Tech Lab, which will also be subject to standardization. It also used an ad measurement technique that reported back real-time data on ad views to create IAB-compliant measurement, it said.

“Dynamic ad insertion is the backbone of live streaming monetization, and low-latency streaming of major sporting events is commercially challenging without ad revenue,” said Olivier Cortambert, head of solutions architecture at Yospace. “Our successful demonstration at IBC is a real breakthrough as it is not only one of the first-ever use cases of SGAI powered by MPEG-DASH Events, but we kept our promise to deliver low latency without any adverse effect on the user-experience or commercial opportunity.”

More information is available on the company’s website.

In today’s digital-first media landscape, broadcasters are under pressure to deliver premium viewing experiences while maximizing ad revenue. Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) has emerged as one of the most powerful tools for delivering both.

The real value of DAI isn’t just inserting ads. It’s scaling that capability across every viewer, device, and platform without compromising quality. Every unmonetized stream, unsupported device, or timed-out ad call is revenue left on the table. For broadcasters, scalability isn't just a technical goal; it’s a commercial imperative. The more effectively they can reach, measure, and monetize their entire audience, the more complete their revenue capture will be.

Here is an explanation of the five most effective ways to elevate DAI.

1) Elevate Viewer ExperienceAdd value with addressability

In digital advertising, relevance is key. But addressability is not just about ad targeting; it's also about enabling accurate, real-time measurement. That’s what advertisers want, and they’ll be more likely to spend on CTV if they get it.

Provide a seamless viewer experience

Ad transitions must be smooth without jarring audiovisual changes. Best practices include transcoding creatives in advance, accurately placing SCTE-35 markers, and co-locating content and ads on the same CDN.

2) Maximize DAI ReachSupport multiple streaming protocols

Broadcasters need as much of their audience as possible to be on a DAI-enabled stream. Supporting server-side ad insertion (SSAI) on HLS and MPEG-DASH protocols is a good start, especially where DRM is required.

Monetize legacy devices

Legacy devices, like pre-2020 smart TVs, often lack SSAI support. Broadcasters should support all devices to monetize their whole audience.

3) Unlock New Advertising InventoryMaximize ad opportunities in live events

Live events offer a unique opportunity for mass-reach monetization. Contingency ad-pods open up new inventory, without disturbing the ad pod for the next planned break.

Apply advanced advertising to pop-up channels

One-off live events often generate smaller audiences and become overlooked for DAI. Orchestration software allows monetization of multiple pop-ups without needing additional infrastructure.

Open up historic ad breaks

Around 12% of Yospace’s live sessions enter rewind mode. Resolving historic breaks with DAI opens significant previously untapped ad inventory. Server-guided ad insertion (SGAI) requires less server power than SSAI, making this more practical.

Support spot replacement

Multi-Avail Breaks allow broadcasters to replace ads within a break, increasing potential monetization across distribution partners.

Embrace new formats

Ad formats like pause-ads or L-shaped banners generate incremental revenue. These require client-side development, which will become easier to implement with SGAI.

4) Scale Monetization for Large AudiencesApply prefetch to live streams

Prefetch is critical for live events, like the Euro 2024 soccer semi-final, where a last-minute goal caused a sudden spike in mobile viewing right before an ad break. Prefetch ensured broadcasters could scale quickly, avoiding timeouts and revenue loss.

Support the adtech

Close adtech integration is equally important. Broad support for VAST (2.0 to 4.2) and multiple ad servers ensures flexibility and performance across all demand sources.

5) Apply Accurate, Transparent MeasurementMeasure ad views, not just ads stitched

To deliver the most accurate, trusted measurement, SSAI should be paired with client-side tracking to provide the granular level of reporting advertisers expect.

Standardize your approach

The soon-to-be-ratified Common Media Client Data (CMCDv2) standard will provide accurate data for IAB-compliant ad measurement where using client-side SDKs is impractical, or where the content owner does not control the end-user’s device.

Real-time monitoring adds value

Another advantage of real-time ad performance data is that it can be surfaced in a live dashboard to help analyze and adjust campaigns on the fly, improving ad performance. DirecTV achieved its highest-ever technical fill rate using this approach.

The Bottom Line on DAI: Scale, Trust, and Monetization
Simply enabling ad stitching with DAI isn’t enough; the real value comes from doing it reliably, at scale, and with the insight advertisers require to justify premium spending.

Scalability is where the stakes rise. Every limitation - whether in device coverage, playback environment, latency, or measurement - directly impacts revenue. DAI should no longer be treated as a bolt-on feature. It must be at the core of streaming infrastructure, integrated deeply across workflows, platforms, and partnerships. Only then can broadcasters ensure that ad revenue is not left on the table.

The growth in live sports streaming underscores the importance of dynamic ad insertion (DAI) to maximize monetization. Platforms are investing very heavily in content, recognizing its ability to attract dedicated audiences.

Prime Video’s exclusive rights to Thursday Night Football in the U.S. and English Premier League (EPL) games in the UK, alongside Netflix's NFL content, highlight this shift toward event-driven, addressable advertising. Streaming allows these platforms to cater to vast audiences while creating personalized ad opportunities—a feat made possible by DAI.

DAI, long established across the industry, is critical in powering this required revenue growth, seamlessly integrating tailored ads while maintaining the high-quality experience sports fans, in particular, expect (so long as DAI is correctly implemented). Now there are further advances happening in DAI from an ad-stitching standpoint.

Up to now, there have been two methods to deliver ads into video streams:

Client-side ad insertion (CSAI)
An early market approach that involves the client device pausing playback to fetch ads from servers. While it allows detailed tracking, CSAI is vulnerable to ad blockers and often results in inconsistent playback quality. These limitations restrict its ability to insert ads into live streams, so CSAI is only practical for AVOD.

Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI)
Shifts ad insertion to the server, stitching ads directly into the video stream for a smooth, broadcast-like experience and has proven very successful. This addresses many of CSAI’s issues, but has to efficiently scale during live events with potentially very large audiences and can place constraints on some of the UX features relating to DVR use cases.

There’s growing talk about Server-Guided Ad Insertion (SGAI), a new method for ad stitching which combines the strengths of both approaches. A big difference, however, is that SGAI is being developed in accordance with the latest HLS and MPEG-DASH standards, which sees the industry pulling together around ad insertion best practice to a level that has not been evident before.

While SGAI may not be the paradigm shift that SSAI was to CSAI, it does promise a range of benefits compared to what has gone before. In SGAI, the server and client share the ad insertion process, which reduces server load while maintaining the seamless playback experience of SSAI.

For live sports and events, SGAI enables scalable ad delivery, even during high-demand moments, by eliminating the need for servers to manipulate the primary content for each viewer. While server-side compute resources are needed to interact with the ad server, a well-designed SGAI system doesn’t have to manipulate the primary content manifest. For live streams with a long DVR window, SGAI has the potential to realize considerable savings.

Additionally, its compatibility with low-latency streaming makes SGAI ideal for real-time events. This is down to the separation of the primary content from advertising content (the motivation behind the HLS SGAI extensions, known as interstitials, was to make low-latency HLS more compatible with DAI).

With long DVR/live start-over and VOD, SGAI’s ability for breaks to be resolved dynamically is also important. For VOD, this has the potential to reduce start-up time as decisions about all breaks other than a pre-roll placement can be deferred. It allows the ad payload to reflect the user’s behavior within the stream, rather than needing ads to be loaded at the start of the viewing session, which is currently the case with SSAI.

For long DVR windows in live and start over, historic breaks within the timeline can be resolved dynamically — as determined by the user scrubbing around the timeline. Due to immutability rules within HLS and MPEG-DASH prior to their SGAI extensions, this has previously not been possible with pure SSAI.

A benefit of SGAI as a standardized approach — a process in which Yospace is playing a key role — is that it will ensure broader compatibility and adoption across devices and platforms, setting the stage for SGAI to become the industry norm.

Transition Period
SGAI has garnered a lot of interest and understandably so, but there are caveats. While it does provide significant optimizations to the fundamentals of ad stitching, in deployment terms SGAI-capable players and devices are in the minority at the moment. We will enter a transition period, as the players within the usual devices of interest to broadcasters implement the SGAI extensions. And it always has to be kept in mind that ad stitching is only one part, albeit a fundamental part, of a cutting-edge dynamic ad insertion ecosystem.

Consider the added load on adtech that an ultra-low-latency SGAI stream will bring. “Knife-edge” ad requests at scale will cause tremendous bursts of ad requests to the adtech system. In unpredictable live sports situations, the adtech system can end up being flooded with ad calls and overwhelm the SSP and any downstream DSPs. In such an overload situation, far more VAST ad requests to the SSP may end up timing out than expected, resulting in low fill rates during peak audiences. A prefetch system alongside ad stitching is crucial to spread out requests and deliver the highest possible fill-rates.

As SGAI treads its way to becoming the primary method for performing ad stitching over the coming years, it’s important to remember that ad stitching is just one of several responsibilities of a full dynamic ad insertion solution. DAI must collaborate effectively with adtech to elevate the core capabilities of SSAI or SGAI. Improving adtech interactions and scaling capabilities is the best way to improve DAI performance right now. It will also enhance the performance of SGAI as we transition from CSAI / SSAI to a hybrid world and eventually perhaps, a pure SGAI world.

STAINES-UPON-THAMES, U.K.—Dynamic ad insertion provider Yospace has named Stuart Barnes as vice president of international business development.

Working alongside Vice President of Commercial Ed New, Barnes is tasked with bolstering Yospace’s ability to accelerate adoption of digital ad insertion across North America, Europe and the APAC region.

“Stuart has a proven track record in building great customer relationships and delivering success for some of the best-known media companies in the world,” Yospace CEO Tim Sewell said in a statement. “He rejoins Yospace at a time when the role of advertising to media companies has never been more important.”

Barnes brings to Yospace more than 20 years of experience in the digital video industry, including a prior five-year stint with the company, Yospace said. He also led sales efforts for ad-tech firm Brightcove in London and then for the company’s media category in the United States. He later joined Vimeo as vice president, Americas, where he helped evolve the video platform’s enterprise sales division.

Barnes and his teams helped position both Brightcove and Vimeo for their initial public offerings in 2012 and 2021, respectively, Yospace said.

“Having worked with Stuart for a number of years, I know full well the added value he will bring to Yospace," New said in a statement. “His decision to rejoin the company is a further validation of the market-leading position the wider Yospace team has achieved. I cannot wait to work alongside him again and turbocharge our sales capabilities.”

Barnes also relaunched and chaired the New York Video Meetup, a community of several thousand video professionals, in 2023.

“Yospace’s impressive roster of global customers, including DirectTV, Fox, ITV, RTL,TV4, Nine Entertainment, Seven West Media and many more, is a testament to its value to media organizations worldwide,” Barnes said. “Reliable and scalable dynamic ad insertion is absolutely pivotal to their success, so it’s a perfect time to be coming on board. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to once again work with Tim, Ed and the rest of the team at such an exciting time.”

STAINES-UPON-THAMES, U.K.—Yospace will feature its ability to scale its dynamic ad insertion solution for major global events at IBC 2024, Sept. 13-16, at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Center.

The company will present insights gleaned from major sporting events this summer, which demonstrated the sheer scale of addressable advertising in the streaming age. Its technology powered the delivery of nearly 6 billion advertisements across four continents during Euro 2024 and 4 billion during the 19 days of the Olympic Games, the company said.

All ads were one-to-one addressable and benefitted from real-time, transparent measurement. These events point towards the type of scale that will become commonplace as the industry moves forward, it said.

Among the company’s highlights for IBC 2024 are:

• IAB Tech Lab certified measurement: Yospace’s dynamic ad insertion is enhanced by its IAB Tech Lab-certified Open Measurement SDK, which delivers better advertising value by opening up more sources for buying ads.
• Server-guided ad insertion (SGAI): Through demonstrations of server-side ad insertion (SSAI) alongside server-guided ad insertion (SGAI), IBC delegates will see the consistency of high-quality viewer experiences delivered by both methods for live streaming, AVOD and FAST channels.
• Live orchestration for pop-up channels: Yospace’s Live Orchestration demonstration with Capella Systems provides real-time curation of ad opportunities, ensuring that rightsholders tap into the benefits of Yospace’s technology, including for temporary channels. Capella’s tooling is seamlessly integrated with Yospace’s core platform and users can also elect to run Live Orchestration through Akamai’s Cloud Computing services for added efficiency and reliability.

To book a meeting with Yospace at IBC 2024 visit the company’s website.

See Yospace at IBC 2024 Stand 5.C77.

We are still some way from an all-streaming future but there is plenty of evidence that preparations for this outcome are accelerating, from sharpened regulatory interest in prominence on connected TVs, to a UK over-60s advocacy group demanding late broadcast switch-off dates rather than early ones. 

For broadcasters, larger BVOD catalogues, closer integration of FAST with BVOD, streaming-first windows for top drama, and next-generation free-to-air platforms all fit with a strategy to stream more.

'Broadcast Scale'
The challenge for commercial broadcasters is to rapidly carry their large broadcast linear audiences and their share of advertising revenue into an all-streaming world.  If they succeed on point one they have the chance to excel at point two because broadcasters will have a unique selling point in the streaming environment: broadcast scale with mass reach addressability.

Commercial broadcasters with aggressive digital strategies will be better placed to compete against the growing collection of global SVOD services offering ad-supported tiers, as well as against YouTube, or even TikTok. And ad-tech stacks are ready to support streaming acceleration, with server-side ad insertion (SSAI) one of the foundational technologies.

SSAI supports addressable TV ambitions at super-scale, whether for live or VOD, with the broadcast-standard, frame-accurate ad insertion that will protect the user and advertising experience regardless of the end device.

End devices are relevant here. Broadcasters will need to serve a multitude of Smart TVs including budget displays. The Smart TV OS market is fragmented, with no signs of consolidation. The next two decades will also see the growth of the connected car entertainment market, with its own entertainment OS hinterland.

SSAI removes complexity from device reach, and broadcasters will not have to worry about hardware capabilities. If their streaming app works on the platform/OS in question, SSAI will work seamlessly.

Future for Addressable Advertising
Client-side ad insertion could be an innovation drag in these circumstances, especially when you hit a long tail of devices that add only small incremental audiences in return for client-side development efforts. Recent work in server-side tracking of ad views would even remove reliance on client-side SDKs for audience measurement when using SSAI.

Server-side ad insertion is the future for addressable advertising in VOD, even if legacy client-side ad insertion has historically served broadcasters well enough. SSAI removes buffering and transitions that are still evident today, and brings consistency regardless of the platform served or broadband connection. 

SSAI is the gold standard—and "born digital" broadcaster rivals, coming late to the ads market, are adopting it.

Support for Interstitials in HLS and XLink in DASH is an important development for SSAI in the on-demand space. This means ad breaks can be resolved when the viewer reaches an ad break, rather than at the start of a VOD viewing session. The impact will be reduced start-up times and streamlined inventory and audience planning.

In linear and live television, SSAI has long trumped client-side solutions. The challenge here on the road to all-streaming is audience sizes, not just for sport but increasingly for hit entertainment shows.

A key to success is SSAI with smart integration into the programmatic advertising ecosystem so that ad requests from millions of concurrent viewers can be processed between ad servers, SSPs and DSPs at such speed that ad calls never ‘time-out’. Time-outs leave a media owner with a choice of showing viewers a UX-destroying ‘Your programme will resume shortly’ message, or falling back on in-house ads that earn them nothing, or giving up on programmatic break opportunities.

Media buyers like to trade programmatically, and more digital will mean more programmatic, so this is not a luxury but a must-have moving forwards. Pre-fetch is an innovation that makes SSAI more scalable with programmatic, by spreading out the ad calls ahead of an ad break, and it can also be applied to direct sold breaks. 

All the same SSAI benefits can be applied to broadcaster FAST channels. Here, the challenge is ensuring a highly automated streaming and SSAI infrastructure that keeps the incremental cost of a new FAST channel very low, while ensuring full monetization.

SSAI will be central to the successful migration of commercial broadcasting to all-streaming, however long that takes. It gives broadcasters the chance to fully monetize streaming audiences and offer buyers the mass reach addressability they want.

STAINES-UPON-THAMES, U.K.— Millennials accustomed to smaller ad loads in the online video content they watch pose a business challenge for traditional broadcasters — one that server-side ad insertion specialist Yospace says it has solved.

“The next generation of viewers is online and have grown up used to video with lighter ad loads,” says Yospace CEO Tim Sewell. “With the right ad-tech and data strategy in place, broadcasters can cater to that audience while increasing engagement with the advertising.”

The company has developed what it’s dubbed Non-Linear Startover (NLSO) technology to enable broadcasters serving up OTT content to reduce ad loads, thereby strengthening viewer engagement — especially among millennials — without sacrificing revenue.

The Yospace solution centers on allowing OTT viewers to rewind live content mid-stream and intelligently reducing the length of subsequent ad breaks to allow them to catch up with live action. While commercial breaks are shorter, broadcasters can charge a premium for the ads served by leveraging the individual addressability OTT platforms offer and targeting audiences with precise per-viewer advertising. Individual viewers are served only what’s relevant to them, which boosts engagement with advertising and drives up the CPM for the broadcaster, the company says.

Belgian broadcaster Medialaan has put the approach into practice. In late 2017, it launched Yospace’s server-side ad insertion technology with NLSO as part of its Stievie TV Everywhere service.

The broadcaster has seen an increase in long-form viewers since the launch and realized higher ad revenues via addressability, Yospace says. For its efforts, Medialaan received an IBC 2018 Innovation Award for Content Distribution.

“Providing a seamless viewing experience was more important than creating as many ad positions as possible, and Yospace understood that,” says Calogero Macaluso, Medialaan marketing director for Stievie. “Ultimately, we want to encourage the transformation from linear to digital by delivering a better customer experience.”

Medialaan “unlocked hundreds of hours of advertising inventory” since deploying the Yospace NLSO strategy, says Olivier van Zeebroeck, head of sales digital, for the broadcaster. “The introduction of server-side DAI [digital ad insertion] resulted in a 10% capacity increase for long-form views,” he adds.

More information is available on the Yospace website.

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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.

STAINES, ENGLAND—Giving broadcasters a way to monetize live OTT streams is a team effort for Yospace and NexPlayer, as the companies have announced an integration between their HTML5 SDK and HTML5 player products.

Yospace’s HTML5 SDK has been pre-integrated into the NexPlayer HTML5 player, which allows Yospace’s Server-Side Dynamic Ad Insertion to be accompanied by real-time, client-side tracking. The integration also allows viewers to click on ads for product information.

The Server-Side Dynamic Ad Insertion technology can work for live and VOD streams for high playback quality, interactive functionality and real-time measurement.

NexPlayer’s HTML5 enables video services and publishers to provide HLS and DASH streaming with an advanced feature set that includes CEA 608 closed captioning, time-shifting, multiple audio tracks and multi DRM.

MIDDLESEX, ENGLAND—The 2017 NAB Show will serve as a demonstration for Yospace and SpotX to spotlight their collaboration for programmatically-sold Dynamic Ad Insertion for live online television. Combining Yospace’s ad insertion technology with SpotX’s decisioning capability allows users to place ads with the quality of the original broadcast, per the companies’ press release.

Tim Sewell, CEO of Yospace, says that the relationship with SpotX “promises one-on-one user engagement with a robustness at scale to suite major online television audiences.”

Yospace has other partnerships that it plans to highlight while at NAB, including one with Japan’s ITOCHU Cable Systems Corporation for DAI for live online channels. Yospace has also written a joint paper with Adstream that will be presented; “Translating Broadcast Ad Copy Management Principles to the Dynamic Ad Insertion Age” outlines the steps for hyper-targeting and full programmatic delivery in an online broadcasting environment. Yospace technology has also been integrated with Keepixo for an end-to-end monetization system for live online TV channels; this will be shown at Keepixo’s booth, SU9120CM.

The rest of Yospace’s demonstrations and technology can be seen at its booth, SU5803.

MIDDLESEX, ENGLAND—Seven Networks provided full court coverage of the 2017 Australian Open—which took place in January—and with the help of Yospace was able to monetize its online coverage.

Seven Networks provide online streaming coverage of action from all 16 courts in play during the annual tournament, but in the past had encountered some problems with ad insertion for its live streams. Some issues included the performance of mid-roll advertising and the integrity of the stream. Using Yospace’s Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) platform, Seven was able to insert advertising before the stream is delivered to the platform/device, which it says is more in line with viewers broadcast television expectations.

The DAI platform translates established systems to an OTT environment, ensuring frame-accuracy and seamlessness to online advertising, while also being able to create customized streams for particular viewer requirements or interests. The Yospace system offers a server-side stitching approach designed for modern, multi-platform broadcast advertising strategy by allowing a single stream, with ads already stitched in, to be delivered across multiple platform/devices. The DAI system can also track ads through an SDK embedded in the player.

“Yospace offered great flexibility and really understood the broadcast workflow,” said Damian McNamara, head of digital video, infrastructure and operations for Seven West Media. “The platform excels at delivering a custom experience for each user, and that enabled a seamless delivery to premium and non-premium viewers.”