Currently, there is a rapid merger of television and computer technology. Almost any site offers video content, TVs work with the Internet without connecting to a computer, and the ability to view video on mobile devices has appeared for the mass user. The income of IPTV / OTT operators and media sites can be obtained by displaying advertising, which usually occurs either before the start of viewing (pre-roll) or in the process of viewing (mid-roll). The vast majority of advertising display systems currently in use are based on the principle that a commercial is requested by the playing device separately from the main content.
The client device (web video player, mobile application, smart TV) accesses the advertising management server (VAST standard), receives a link to the commercial and plays it at a certain point in time. This display mechanism allows you to have several significant drawbacks:
A lot of programs blocking the VAST server call by a client device are available for download on the Internet. Since payment for posting video ads is usually determined by the number of its impressions, viewing content on devices with Ad Blocker will not be converted to media platform revenue. The high fragmentation of the types of client devices and video viewers requires advertising on all of these devices. This forces us to look for ready-made technical solutions or to make our own development of such solutions, which in turn takes time and is quite expensive.
Displaying ads using insertion on the side of the server broadcasting the stream is free from the above disadvantages. Inserting ad units directly into the video stream is in many ways similar to television advertising, but with the ability to target the show and get view statistics, which is fundamentally impossible for on-air television. Additionally, it becomes possible to insert regional advertising that does not require professional television equipment. The technical solution developed by PWI allows replacing commercials in the live stream received by the Wowza Streaming Engine from a translator with advertising tags in DTMF format or CSTE-35 digital tags. An ad source can be any VAST server, such as Google DFP.