Are AVOD OTT Services Ready for Primetime?

The OTT business continues in hyper-growth, and we continue to consume content when, how, and where we want at our convenience.  Monetization of the OTT AVOD service has therefore never been more important for OTT service providers than it is now with many asking the question of whether the AVOD service is ready for primetime, with its challenging ecosystem and many points of failure by harnessing the powerful AVOD Ad analytics ?

The monetization of AVOD uses a complex & ever-evolving ecosystem with acronyms that are ever evolving from the DMP to DSP and Ad Servers, Exchanges to Creatives. There is a lot that can go wrong, and frequently happens between the ad being created by an advertiser or agency, it arriving at the video player and the ad playback experience. 

The Fill-Rate Improvement Challenge

AVOD providers are well aware that fill-rate and impressions are all impacted by not only the quality of content, but ad failure rates, blockers and fraud which are all driving yields down. 

The challenge being faced by AVOD providers is being able to act immediately when an issue occurs so that yields can be maximized.  For this there needs to be an independent and most importantly real-time trusted single source of truth that measures experience from the player itself. There also needs to be immediate notifications with root cause analysis so that action can be taken when an issue arises.

Are you immediately informed with a point of failure analysis in real-time when something goes wrong?  How do you stop losing millions in potential revenue?

How does MediaMelon Help with its in-depth AVOD & FAST Ad Analytics?

MediaMelon SmartSight for Ads helps businesses understand the monetization inhibitors for AVOD, including:

• Inconsistent viewing quality between ads and content, where the wrong rendition is used.
• Ad failure rates, where they can be as high as 40%, that is that 40% of requests don’t create impressions.
• Ad fraud, that can be up to 18%. This is where slots are re-sold for much higher CPM’s
• Ad creative issues where creatives fail to appear or encoding and rendition quality problems
• Ad player startup times with the switch from content to Ads
• Buffering at the start of the ad and during the ad
• Ad blocking

With revenue opportunity set to grow as migration to OTT continues, is your AVOD service ready for that growth and can you improve the yields to support the migration?

Isn’t SSAI/SSDAI the Answer?

Server Side Ad Insertion, or SSAI for short also includes Dynamic Ad Insertion. This is where ads are stitched into a single content stream server side so that there is a more assured delivery of the entire content and ad experience.  SSAI will certainly improve failure rates, reduce ad blocking as well as fraud, although it depends how you utilise and access your AVOD & FAST ad analytics data. 

However, there are still huge gaps as errors happen during playback and without client side measurement those are unknown.

1. Who validates the video player actually presented the advert and the ads that played?
2. What was the completion rate?
3. Did buffering occur and was the viewing experience good?

Real-time Yield Improvement

MediaMelon SmartSight Ads helps answer all of these questions and works with Client Side Ad Insertion (CSAI), Server Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) as well as Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) across every player imaginable. Further benefit from a simple to deploy library style integration where there is minimal coding required. 

Time to say goodbye to complex SDK’s, and say hello to simplified and rapid integrations that provide immediate answers.

SmartSight for Ads measures from the start of every ad break and ad, continuously until it ends. It captures information such as start up time, playing time, completion rates, errors, buffering, bitrate, exits before the ads start, creative information as well as identifiers. 

It also provides important and valuable context of the content where the ad played. This is powerful insight for a publisher in the packaging of their ad offerings, especially with the move to personalized experiences. 

All of this information is available through the MediaMelon SmartSight for Ads User Interface in real-time, with multi-dimensional drill-down capability with the ability to analyze content and ads experience together.  Fully understand the total impact of the ad and content experience together.   

Real-time, anomaly based alerting with point of failure analysis provides instant notification of issues, to reduce the impact of errors.  Finally, powerful and real-time API’s make sure all the insight is available for integration into data architectures to create even more value.

How else does MediaMelon help?

MediaMelon helps with improving OTT service monetization, improving video ad fill rates and impressions, and reducing ad failures and fraud.  Contact us for more information, a demonstration and to discuss a POC

• SmartSight Analytics – Analytics that Act
• SmartSight for Ads – Improving Yield
• SmartPlay – Delighting Viewers