The current latency on streaming services, which means multiscreen viewers sometimes see live events and sports 30-60 seconds behind true-live and broadcast signals, will be eliminated within three years. That was the bold prediction by David Springall, Founder & CTO at the server-side dynamic ad insertion specialist Yospace recently, when he predicted that the streaming user experience will match and sometimes better broadcast TV.
But that is going to place a greater burden on ad insertion systems, as they will get less warning that ad breaks are coming and less time to communicate with direct sales schedules or programmatic exchanges and process decisions about which targeted advertisements should fill a break. “You have to make a huge number of calls in a very tightly defined moment in time, so the challenge is to scale that,” Springall told Future TV Advertising Forum last month.
Springall outlined some of the challenges that must be met to ensure a great user experience when people are watching live streaming with dynamically (and usually targeted) inserted advertising. That is because the UEX is the foundation upon which future ad-supported monetisation is built. He provided some innovative examples of how the UEX is already being improved, or guaranteed, for the online video advertising environment.
One of these is to allow viewers to rewind or restart a programme but then slowly catch up with live, by reducing the length of each ad-break they watch in time-shift mode. The recently updated ‘Stievie Premium’ online TV service from Belgium’s leading commercial broadcaster, Medialaan, provides an example of this in the field (more on that here).
Unrelated to this deployment, Springall revealed: “Sometimes an ad break can ‘crash’: something happens during the live coverage and you need to go back to the action. We provide an option [for the online streams] to play out the rest of an advertisement, then return the viewer in time-shift mode, but only until the next advertising avail, at which point they catch up with real-time.” In other words, you can introduce some manufactured latency between true live and ‘live’ streaming in order to save the advertisement.
As Springall noted, there are going to be more options for consumers to move about a ‘live’ streaming session as broadcasters give people the ability to ‘scrub’ backwards and forwards, or even jump directly to recent highlights (from the ongoing game) or watch their own instant replays. Thus, monetisation of advertising in time-shift mode on a ‘live’ stream, and monetisation of the live stream in real-time, are both going to be important.
Yospace commissioned the consulting firm MTM to study the state of live/linear TV, what the future of live streaming looks like, and what broadcasters should be doing to protect and enhance their position in ‘live’. Drawing out some of the conclusions, Springhall noted the ongoing value of live/linear for delivering mass audience reach to advertisers at a single point in time – something online advertising (think Facebook) is still unable to do. “As the media landscape fragments, the value to advertisers of reaching mass concurrent audiences is increasing,” he argued.
But there was a warning. “It is not just broadcasters, who currently own the [live sports and events] rights who see the value. Tech companies are moving into this space [referring to Amazon, etc.]. You cannot assume that this is a domain that will always belong to the traditional broadcast industry.” He quoted an unnamed global media agency that told the MTM interviewers that online companies can disrupt sports as ‘they are global and have cash, and that is an attractive combination to sports rights holders.’
The message from Yospace is that broadcasters must maximise the value of the live/linear rights and audiences they already have – and that means making more of their online distribution. He pointed to new revenue opportunities that present themselves thanks to dynamic ad insertion, especially in sports that are played out over a long time, like test match cricket, or which can vary notably in length, like tennis. New ad inventory can be opened up that was simply not there before, thanks to DAI.
“We provided DAI for an India vs Sri Lanka 2020 cricket match, which is a fast-moving version of the game, and it scaled to 1.5 million concurrent users,” Springhall revealed. “Someone was manually injecting ad breaks between every wicket [after someone is given ‘out’ and they must exit the field while someone else replaces them]. That generated a vast number of additional avails.”
In short and fixed duration sports there are sometimes unscheduled opportunities for ad breaks, with extra-time and football penalty shoot-outs being classic examples. Springhall reminded his audience that such moments can attract huge concurrent viewing, returning to his original point about the need to deliver a rock-solid user experience (in technical terms).
Yospace is well placed to discuss this subject: the company is working with an ever-growing collection of premium broadcasters for their online advertising. Among them is Seven West Media in Australia, which has been using DAI in dynamic sporting events including 7Tennis (including the Australian Open) and 7Olympics.
Clive Dickens, CDO at Seven West Media and David Springall will be presenting a case study on Seven’s experiences at Future TV Advertising Forum Sydney, which is on February 22. You can find more details about that event here.
Photo credit: iStock & mevans
