22 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE Edgeware
CHOOSING OTT For our very first TT TV Files, we explore how OTT is impacting and improving television viewing and look at new technologies by Edgeware
e are well past the tipping point of OTT TV delivery becoming a mainstream viewing technology. We’re now
somewhere in the middle of it. What tends to happen is the client might start playing the ad a second too late or early and you get a glitch in your ad experience. It’s particularly hard for DASH, which is the Android standard, to get right.” Edgeware’s ad enablement manages the segmentation of the ads and prevents this unwanted clipping. The company is demonstrating the technology in partnership with ad insertion company YoSpace at IBC2018. With the ad experience now completely fluid, ads of varying lengths need to be delivered effectively to highly segmented audiences across different devices, watching different types of content. The challenges and opportunities in this kind of highly targeted customised environment are only going to increase. GETTING SPIKE-Y One of the biggest challenges in OTT video is dealing with spikes in traffic. Around big live events, this has in the past proved a tricky – or at least expensive – stumbling block. “Last summer, with the Mayweather fight in the US, people had to wait about 20 minutes to get onto the system,” says Brandon. “Those sort of things have to be fixed and they can be fixed.” extending and multiplying CDN technology and has recently been developing CDN selection technology. This allows providers to build a certain amount of capacity for their own regular use, but then offload peak capacity traffic, or select different CDN service providers based on user geography or a lower quality video offering or any other parameters. Edgeware has long worked with customers to develop solutions for
into the OTT 2.0 phase, where existing OTT video delivery methods are being honed and augmented, and trials of new OTT technologies are everywhere you look. In fact, OTT is proving itself not just as an alternative delivery method, but as a preferred one, and video delivery has entered a phase where some content is only available online. “It feels like it’s been a while now since OTT was the poor relation of television, where you expect slightly less quality,” says Richard Brandon, CMO of OTT technology provider Edgeware. “If you want to watch BBC content in 4K, for example, you have to do it online. It’s struck us that OTT actually is the way to get the best possible TV experience now.” From a viewer’s perspective, OTT TV offers all sorts of benefits. But from an operator’s perspective, there are substantial – and largely untapped – advantages. AD ENABLEMENT While OTT has disrupted the traditional TV advertising model, it has offered a host of new opportunities, including the ability to target individual viewers with ads, but replacing and customising ads in a video stream takes some finesse. “We’ve got a lot of interest at the moment around ad enablement when you’re doing the repackaging and segmentation of the ad,” says Brandon. “If you’re replacing an ad in a live stream, the default way you do it is to simply chop the ad up into segments. That segment will normally have an ad start marker
THE UNIQUE THING ABOUT LIVE EVENTS IS EVERYONE WANTS TO START WATCHING THEM AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME
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