59 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE Yospace
“Even if the primary ad server has been correctly configured, the SSPs and DSPs in the workflow may not be expecting that profile of traffic,” Sewell continues, “so there is a lot of preparation from an ad op perspective that needs to go into it. “From an SSAI perspective, there is also the obvious fact that it’s live; we can’t wait an indefinite amount of time to get a response back from the ad technology ecosystem. Otherwise, we risk damaging the end user experience by, for example, introducing buffering.” PLAY FETCH Yospace has been in the ad space for some time and has a wealth of experience when it comes to addressing these challenges. It operates a mode it calls ‘prefetch’ which, as its name suggests, makes ad requests on behalf of each user ahead of an upcoming commercial break. “Whenever a new user joins a stream, we start a prefetch process for them for the next commercial break, even though we may not know when the break is going to occur – and equally, for the users who are already watching the stream, when the last break finishes, we start to prefetch for the next break,” Sewell explains. “We effectively guarantee that we won’t exceed an agreed transactions- per-second between our network and the ad technology ecosystem. This means that even for the very, very large events, you won’t ever see any slowdown of ad platforms,” he adds.
“It also pledges to advertisers the highest possible fill rates in terms of sold inventory, because rather than allowing only 750 milliseconds for all of the hops
between the primary ad server and the programmatic platforms to take place, we allow up to two and a half seconds for all those various handshakes in the ad tech workflow.” Yospace also has an advanced feature on top its prefetch feature that allows it to have a contingency break, which means that if a programme has to take an unscheduled break – a segment which hasn’t necessarily been sold to a specific set of advertisers – the broadcaster will still be able to monetise on that break with a separate pot of ads that have been prefetched. “This concept exists because in major sport events, there are premium advertisers who pay high CPM (cost per thousand) to
have a very specific set of ads shown at a particular break,” says Sewell. He also notes an increasing debate in the industry about reducing ad load to cater to the younger audiences who are being brought up on ad-free experiences. He believes that more and more OTT services will begin offering a “freemium model”, which has a lighter ad load but is still ad supported. “With a customer in Belgium, we pioneered the concept of enabling users who join a live stream, perhaps ten to 15 minutes after the programme has started, to watch it as if it were live. In other words, to rewind to the start of the programme. Then, when it cuts to the previously scheduled commercial break, we are able to dynamically shorten the break duration.” “For instance, if there had been a three-minute ad break in the live stream at half-time for a major sport event, we would be able to shorten that ad break to 60 seconds and the user would gradually be able to catch up with it live.”
IN MAJOR SPORT EVENTS, THERE ARE PREMIUM ADVERTISERS WHO PAY HIGH CPM TO HAVE A VERY SPECIFIC SET OF ADS SHOWN
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