fuboTV Using Server-Side Ad Insertion

What is fuboTV?

fuboTV has a mission to provide a sports-first live TV experience through the greatest breadth of premium content, interactivity, and integrated wagering.

They operate in the U.S., Canada, and Spain.

Leveraging its proprietary data and technology platform optimized for live TV and sports viewership, fuboTV Inc. aims to turn passive viewers into active participants and define a new category of interactive television.

fuboTV, subscribers can stream a broad mix of 100+ live TV channels, including 42 of the top 50 Nielsen-ranked networks across sports, news, and entertainment — more than any other live TV streaming platform (source: Nielsen Total Viewers, 2020).?

Playlist Service And The Problem Statement

fuboTV had a problem with putting the right modularity in front of the player.

Like any other OTT service that implements SSAI, the system serves unique manifest files for each user, and these files are not cached.

In the case of fuboTV, their manifest files are complex. Here's why:

• There are 600 linear feeds that they receive collectively for all their broadcast partners. These get encoded into over 900 feeds
• These multiple feeds are attributed to geo-restrictions, device restrictions, user packages, etc
• Device restriction eg: for mobile, would also entail swapping the steam or presenting a blank slide.

Earlier Work Flow

Manifest files get extracted from the video that comes from the encoder. The manifest files have markers to find the next segment. And this information is stored in the database

fuboTV has also implemented SCTE 224. They act as triggers that dictate which streams are available based on parameters - user-wise, region-wise, device-wise, etc.

This information bubbles up into a key-value which later serves up the manifest files.

When the user requests playback it checks the user location, user status, and device information and merges all the information to serve the right content to the right person.

The manifest file is complex as there are dependencies, for example on the zip code and time because there are different couch rights and different hotel rights for sports leagues and channels.

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AWS Elemental MediaTailor: A Welcome Move

Ready previous article on Elemental MediaTailor

This AWS service is used as a reverse proxy for the playlist files. Complex logic, with multiple parameters, is encapsulated into the manifest playlist service.

And this talks to the Ad decision server.

This insert in the ad gives a very personalized experience.

CDN is placed in front of the MeidaTailor which does the logic of deduplication*

* Deduplication refers to?a method of eliminating a dataset's redundant data. In a secure data deduplication process, a deduplication assessment tool identifies extra copies of data and deletes them, so a single instance can then be stored. Data deduplication software analyzes data to identify duplicate byte patterns.        

source: druva.com

An example in this case of deduplication could be the multiple requests from the same player in a short amount of time.

fuboTV already has the client-side ad insertion. When they encounter the ad blockers they now have a fallback option to the server-side ad insertion, thanks to MediaTailor.

MediaTailor Use Cases for fuboTV

• fuboTV has used MediaTailor for live & time-shifted TV
• It has been effective in handling over 1 million requests per minute & growing
• They have been able to Custom tags from various agencies for reporting, and have been able to do this with a quick turnaround time.
• The additional configuration has not been required in the workflow