The Best Way to Monitor Ad Insertion for FAST Channels and Streaming Workflows

Consumers’ unwavering appetite for content anytime, anywhere and on any screen represents a significant opportunity for service providers. The Business Research Company’s research on the? OTT streaming? market ?forecasts, the global OTT streaming market size will grow from?$149.34 billion in 2022?to?$171.99 billion in 2023?at a compound annual growth rate?(CAGR) of 15.2%.?The global OTT streaming market size is expected to grow?to $302.67 billion in 2027?at a?CAGR of 15.2%.

Given the drastic growth and rising consumer demand for video streaming, OTT service providers and broadcasters are looking for a more profitable business model. Subscription-based, pay-per-view, ad-based and FAST models are common revenue models for OTT.

We’re increasingly seeing ad-based models being used due to their potential to generate high revenues. Free Ad-supported Streaming?TV (FAST) is a shining example of an advertising video-on-demand model. FAST provides a similar viewing experience to linear television but is delivered at no cost through internet-connected TVs. FAST channels are supported by video advertisements that typically run 15-30 seconds. Currently, the top watched channels are mainly from broadcasters: Pluto TV (ViacomCBS), Xumo (NBCU), Tubi (Fox), Peacock (NBCU), The Roku Channel (RokuTM), IMDbTV (Amazon), and Samsung TV+.

Dynamic ad insertion (DAI) technology enables broadcasters to insert ads, specifically targeted to end users, into OTT content on the fly.

The Opportunities and Challenges With DAI

Today, DAI is used across platforms for linear broadcast, VOD, mobile, and OTT, enabling service providers to target specific platforms, devices, audiences, and geographies. Media owners rely on ad revenue by achieving a higher Cost per Mile/Thousand (CPMs). Thus, delivering well-targeted ads provides media owners with more revenue.

There are many challenges involved with implementing ad insertion in a media streaming workflow, including:

·???????Multiplatform and multiscreen delivery issues

·???????Checking for the presence of SCTE35 messages in the linear workflow

·???????Enabling seamless ad insertion at segment boundaries

·???????Assuring correct alignment of ads across all profiles/variants

·???????Consistency of ad insertion in the workflow

·???????Accurate ad-insertion at the correct position

Three Ways to Monitor DAI

At Interra Systems, we have just the right solution to resolve DAI challenges. Interra Systems’ ORION monitoring suite consists of ORION, ORION-OTT and ORION Central Manager. These three solutions work at different stages of the workflow.

Let’s look at multi-point monitoring facilitates easy and quick fault isolation, and why having a comprehensive, three-pronged approach to monitoring DAI is effective.

Step 1: ORION for linear streams:?Deployed at the headend of the workflow for the linear streams, ORION is a real-time content monitoring system that enables service providers to deliver error-free, superior-quality video. It performs ad-insertion monitoring, including SCTE-35 cue messages and post-insertion verification for regulatory compliance. Ad-insertion monitoring features include:

·???????SCTE-35 compliance checking

·???????Checking for the absence and presence of SCTE-35 messages

·???????DPI pair monitoring for pre-insertion and post-insertion feeds

·???????Ad quality analysis

Step 2: ORION-OTT for ABR content:?ORION-OTT is a software-based OTT monitoring solution that enables you to monitor Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) content integrity and related network performance in an OTT environment. ORION-OTT monitors both VOD and live ABR content, leveraging user-defined automated or manual schedules. It checks for inconsistencies pertaining to ABR package compliance, manifest and playlist syntax, download errors, content quality, and more.

Monitoring of ad markers from Source to ABR packaged outputs at origin stage, help to ensure that all avail opportunities in the upstream signal are correctly propagated downstream. SSAI happens post ABR packaging, thus any missed avail (that was present in the source stream but was not properly translated to ABR manifests) will mean lost revenue opportunity.

Specific to ad monitoring, ORION-OTT offers the following monitoring checks:

·???????The presence of respective ad markers in MPD or HLS playlists and out time, in time, ad duration, etc.

·???????Inconsistent ad start segments across variants

·???????Duration of ads

·???????Minimum and maximum duration of content between ads

·???????Download failure or delay for ad segments

·???????Stale manifests in ad slots

·???????ABR compliance issues in ad chunks

·???????Audio and video quality issues within an ad stream?

Step 3: OCM for enterprise visibility:?ORION Central manager (OCM) provides enterprise-wide visibility by enabling central management of multiple ORION linear and ORION-OTT setups present at the same or diverse geographic locations. OCM can be used to track all ads being inserted at different locations of the workflow. It has helped our customers to get an overall picture of all ad markers coming in and out of their streams.

OCM aggregates ad marker information from Source to Origin to show the complete trail of ad markers for a Channel, and reports issues with ad marker propagation. It helps to identify the stage at which point the ad information was missing thus minimizing time for fault isolation and recovery.

OCM also computes Ad KPIs like Number of ad events/hour, ad duration/hour, average break duration etc. to verify ad policy compliance.

Detecting DAI issues in the real world

One of our customers, who is one of the leading broadcasters in US, was getting complaints from users that a change in network bandwidth and switching to a different profile or variant while an ad is playing, was leading to the ad occasionally playing all over again or skipping entirely. At times, the ad would not play at all, and the end user would experience a black screen. Sometimes this would happen when an ad was playing because the source of the ad was not the same as the content.

The customer wanted to know: how can we find out the source of the problem and its root cause? Without a proper monitoring tool, this is an extremely hard task. With the help of our content monitoring solution ORION and OCM, they could immediately see the exact stage and location where the ad insertion problem was detected.

Two issues were found. While the ad markers inserted at the source propagated correctly through the linear stage of the workflow, they somehow went missing at the origin server. This created an issue for end users because the player did not know when to play the ad. A second issue was detected at the origin server. ORION-OTT showed that ad markers were misaligned across different profiles and variants. Due to this, ads were either skipped or played again on profile/variant switching at the end-user device. Clearly, the problem was occurring at the origin server and packager. Our customer gathered all these details using ORION suite and went back to the packager technology provider to successfully resolve the issue.?

Ensuring a High QoE for End Users

On numerous occasions the ORION suite has helped leading media providers around the world correct their ad insertion woes. OCM along with ORION-OTT and ORION is the perfect solution to monitor all ads and related data to ensure the highest quality of experience for end users.