Scenario: Ad supported content monetization
Advertising supported monetization is achieved by either inserting or replacing advertisements in the content. Targeted and personalized advertisements lead to higher engagement and maximize the return on investment for advertisers. With a well-designed ad insertion service, you can deliver a streaming media experience to millions of concurrent viewers across a range of multiscreen devices with personalized ad content, creating a seamless broadcast-like experience.
Tracking ad impressions is an important part of ad insertion and is accomplished through the client beaconing of quartile views as it plays ad segments. Capturing beaconing data directly from the players in this way reduces the effects of ad blocking software and adheres to established advertising open standards. Accurately measuring ad impressions and viewing behavior across web, iOS, Android, and other connected viewing devices, helps more effectively measure the revenue impact of every ad delivered.
Ad insertions can be achieved either at the client-side or server-side. Traditional client-side ad insertion requires working with various player SDKs across multiple platforms to maintain ad logic for different ad formats and content variations. In addition, ad blockers (software preventing online advertising from being displayed) are easily able to detect client-side ad insertion and can limit the impressions.
On the other hand, server-side video ad insertion (SSAI) is a method in which video ads are integrated into the stream at the origin. With SSAI, there is no need for the client to switch between content and the advertisement. Buffering and session initialization delay before and after the insertion of the ad are eliminated, providing a higher quality viewing experience. Compared to client-side ad insertion, SSAI typically improves the ad experience and impressions and provides an opportunity to personalize advertisements.
A common approach to SSAI is shown in the following figure. In this architecture, we reflect cloud services for the origin server, ad insertion service, and the content delivery network. These cloud-native services are highly available, natively redundant, and ensure that the customer experience is not compromised in the event of host-level failure.
Server-side ad insertion architecture
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Device requests content manifest to begin playback session.
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The CDN forwards the request for a personalized manifest to the ad insertion service (AIS).
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The AIS consolidates requests for the manifest from all players and forwards only one request to the origin.
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The origin responds back with the content manifest, optionally including ad markers.
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If the manifest has ad markers, the ad insertion service makes a call to the ads decision server (ADS) to get a list of personalized ads to insert for the playback session.
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The ADS returns a Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) response with a list of personalized ads.
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The AIS inserts the ads and returns a personalized manifest back to the CDN.
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The CDN returns the personalized manifest to the player.
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The personalized manifest points the player to content segments and ad segments.
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If the segment is a main content segment, the CDN passes that request to the origin.
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If the segment is an ad segment, the request for the segment is routed to the AIS.
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The origin returns the content segment.
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The AIS returns the ad segment.
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CDN serves the segment to the player.
Considerations
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Use the same AWS Region for both the ad insertion service and the origin server.
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Use a CDN to cache content and ad segments. However, personalized manifest responses must not be cached or shared between viewers. For more information, refer to CDN Best Practices.
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Select the ad insertion service that supports inserting ads into all the desired streaming protocols, such as, HLS, DASH, and MSS. AWS Elemental MediaTailor supports ad insertions to HLS and DASH streaming formats.
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Target an ad insertion latency that’s less than the segment length to minimize playback rebuffering.
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Design your client to handle a mix of encrypted and unencrypted content during playback. Content is usually encrypted while ad segments aren’t.
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To maintain consistent video quality between main content and ad segments, ensure that the ad insertion service processes advertisements to match the bitrate, frame rate, and resolution of the main content.
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Refer to This is My Architecture video
to learn how Amazon Prime Video scales ad measurement and tracking at scale on AWS.
With these definitions, design principles, and scenarios in mind, let’s move on to pillar-specific guidance that you can use to evaluate and continuously improve your streaming media workloads.
