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TECHNICAL DOCUMENT

Improved Quality of Service (QoS)


For Advertisement Delivery Across
OTT:
Best Practices
Created and Approved by the Streaming Video Alliance
September 1, 2018

WORKING GROUP:
Advertising

GROUP CHAIRS:
Mourad Kioumgi, Sky
Improving Quality of Service (QoS) for Advertisement Delivery Across OTT: Best Practices 2
1. Contributors
The following people contributed to this document:

• Ryc Brownrigg (Liberty Global)


• Glenn Deen (Comcast/NBCUniversal)
• Thomas Edwards (FOX Networks)
• Bukola Fashola (Sky)
• Glenn Goldstein (Viacom)
• Simon Grist (Sky)
• Jens Loeffler (Adobe)
• Chris Michaels (Wowza)
• Sudhi Nada (Conviva)
• Michael Walt (Comcast)
• Olivier Wellman (Conviva)

Improving Quality of Service (QoS) for Advertisement Delivery Across OTT: Best Practices 3
2. Abstract
Advertisement insertion into OTT streams is a critical part of the overall user experience. Breakdowns in
services or delivery can have a detrimental impact on viewer churn. To provide users with the best
possible Quality of Experience (QoE), content publishers must take into account the advertising
workflow with regards to quality, duration, delivery, and failure. The best practices presented in this
paper, developed by a number of contributing companies in the Streaming Video Alliance’s Advertising
Working Group, address a myriad of considerations for any OTT service provider that is considering the
inclusion of advertising in their offering.

Improving Quality of Service (QoS) for Advertisement Delivery Across OTT: Best Practices 4
The Streaming Video Alliance (the Alliance) is an industry forum open to all companies from all sectors
of the online video value chain. The Alliance focuses on the ecosystem, architecture and best practices
needed to support the future of online video.

Membership is comprised of industry leaders from the entire online video ecosystem, including content
providers, service providers, commercial CDNs and streaming video technology providers.

Notice:

This document has been created by the Streaming Video Alliance. It is offered to the Alliance
Membership solely as a basis for agreement and is not a binding proposal on the companies listed as
resources above. The Alliance reserves the rights to at any time add, amend or withdraw statements
contained herein. Nothing in this document is in any way binding on the Alliance or any of its members.
The user’s attention is called to the possibility that implementation of the Alliance agreement contained
herein may require the use of inventions covered by the patent rights held by third parties. By
publication of this Alliance document, the Alliance makes no representation or warranty whatsoever,
whether expressed or implied, that implementation of the specification will not infringe any third party
rights, nor does the Alliance make any representation or warranty whatsoever, whether expressed or
implied, with respect to any claim that has been or may be asserted by any third party, the validity of
any patent rights related to any such claim, or the extent to which a license to use any such rights may
or may not be available or the terms hereof.

©2018 Streaming Video Alliance

This document and translation of it may be copied and furnished to others, and derivative works that
comment on or otherwise explain it or assisting its implementation may be prepared, copied, published
and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction other than the following, (1) the above copyright
notice and this paragraph must be included on all such copies and derivative works, and (2) this
document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing the copyright notice or references
to the Alliance, except as needed for the purpose of developing Alliance Specifications.

By downloading, copying, or using this document in any manner, the user consents to the terms and
conditions of this notice. Unless the terms and conditions of this notice are breached by the user, the
limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be revoked by the Alliance or its
successors or assigns.

This document and the information contained herein is provided on an “AS IS” bases and THE ALLIANCE
DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY
THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, TITLE OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Improving Quality of Service (QoS) for Advertisement Delivery Across OTT: Best Practices 5
Table of Contents
1. Contributors ......................................................................................................................................... 3
2. Abstract ................................................................................................................................................ 4
3. Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 7
4. Content Acquisition .............................................................................................................................. 8
5. Transcode ........................................................................................................................................... 12
6. Hosting ............................................................................................................................................... 14
7. Player Optimization ............................................................................................................................ 15
8. Events and Metrics ............................................................................................................................. 16
9. Dynamic Advertising Insertion (DAI) .................................................................................................. 17
10. Advertising Service Interruptions .................................................................................................. 18
11. Conclusion...................................................................................................................................... 19
12. Tables and Figures ......................................................................................................................... 20
13. About the Streaming Video Alliance .............................................................................................. 21

Improving Quality of Service (QoS) for Advertisement Delivery Across OTT: Best Practices 6
3. Introduction
The aim of this white paper is to recommend best practices for serving Video Advertisements across
Over-the-Top (OTT) content. This paper evaluates the entire end-to-end workflow, encompassing
timespan from the moment an advertisement is first acquired to its playback and consumption on a
typical OTT device. The scope of the paper is not limited only to technical issues related to an advertising
proposition, but also the operational considerations that must be addressed. It covers all the common
areas typical of the current ecosystem for an advertising-based OTT proposition. It is expected that the
adoption of these best practices will improve the Quality of Service (QoS) and possibly improve
advertising products for consumers by highlighting the common areas where faults occur.

Improving Quality of Service (QoS) for Advertisement Delivery Across OTT: Best Practices 7
4. Content Acquisition
Ensuring that your original source formats are of the highest picture and audio quality before they are
submitted to a transcode workflow is a must for any advertising-supported proposition. User experience
is affected if the advertisement is unreadable or blurry—it not only creates a bad user experience, but a
poor-quality ad also adversely impacts the relationship with the publisher since the campaign won’t be
as effective (due to poor picture quality) which will reduce the desired messaging impact for the brand.

Onboarding, the method of establishing a new operational relationship between content supplier and
publisher, is where quality is both gated and enforced. There are automated tools that can ensure
specifications and processes are maintained, but a skilled team is still required to define the metrics and
work with partners to troubleshoot issues with the initial video picture quality. Onboarding relies on
having a strong operations team in place to work with partners on resolving content issues early so as
not to affect live operations. Note that the Digital Ad supply chain in reality isn’t as standardized as a
typical broadcast supply chain. Meaning that it is far more challenging to apply these best practices as
there isn’t always a direct relationship with the Ad provider and publisher.

If the publisher is using an Ad server to acquire the Ad source content, then they should ensure:

 That any Ad inserted into the Ad server adheres to the same on boarding practices as pre-
acquired.
 when Using VAST. 4.0 and performing a transcode the publisher should use the Mezzanine asset
in the VAST response from the Ad server

Figure 1: Example of how a server-side Ad stitching process works using VAST 1

1 https://www.iab.com/guidelines/digital-video-ad-serving-template-vast-4-0/

Improving Quality of Service (QoS) for Advertisement Delivery Across OTT: Best Practices 8
Audio Levels
A portion of the onboarding process should ensure that the loudness of the source content, which is
device dependent, does not exceed a certain level. In the past, it has occasionally been observed that TV
advertisements sound louder than the main content. In theory, this has been to attract the viewer's’
attention, but instead has been shown to result in viewer anxiety and distortion of audio 2. This has a
negative impact on the overall Quality of Experience (QoE), and often alienates the publisher’s viewing
audience. For this reason, it is recommended to ensure that audio levels are normalized inside the
advertising creative you receive the dBFS levels set by the local TV regulations varies between -13 to -24
LUFS. This assumes a normalized gain state is consistent with all source, but in reality, this changes form
from source to source. It is reasonable to have a portable/mobile loudness level and a high-quality/in-
home loudness level, as ear buds or mobile phone speakers will never be able to deliver the same range
as a home theater 3.

Audio normalization can be controlled consistently when performing server-side Ad stitching by using
the Mezzanine asset type in the vast response for the Ad.

Duration
Advertising video creatives for OTT propositions tend to be shorter than traditional TV spots. This is
mainly due to OTT audiences tending to react poorly to several minutes of advertisements before they
watch an on-demand (VOD) program 4. Pre-rolls and mid-rolls for VOD viewership tend to range between
5 seconds and 60 seconds total which means you can have a mix of five (5 second,10 second, and 30
second advertising spots. The matrices of advertising plays vary, but if the advertising creative does not
fit correctly within your intended matrix, you risk impacting the viewing experience and compromising
audience numbers. If a two-minute advertisement starts appearing as a pre-roll due to absence of
technical oversight, many viewers may abandon because of the extended wait time.

The video advertisement provided by a partner may not match the intended length specified by the
advertising campaign due to two scenarios:

2
In the U.S. market, the FCC has even stepped in to ensure volume parity between advertisements and the
content they accompany. In the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, Congress
directed the FCC to establish rules, which went into effect on December 13, 2012.
https://www.atsc.org/recommended-practice/a85-techniques-for-establishing-and-maintaining-audio-loudness-
for-digital-television/
3 A good reference for loudness normalization is provided by the EBU (EBU R128) and can be found here
https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf

The Audio Engineering society:


http://www.aes.org/standards/blog/2017/12/loudness-guidelines-for-ott-and-ovd

Loudness guidelines for OTT and OVD content are documented in **TD1006**
http://www.aes.org/technical/documents/AESTD1006_1_17_10.pdf

4
https://econsultancy.com/blog/63277-pre-roll-video-ads-is-it-any-wonder-why-we-hate-them#i.1lnc43td7jfpoy

Improving Quality of Service (QoS) for Advertisement Delivery Across OTT: Best Practices 9
 Longer than intended, and overruns its placement or is interrupted
 Shorter than intended, resulting in black frames, or unintended presentation of underlying
linear ad for linear DAI scenarios

Both scenarios may have a negative impact on Quality of Experience (QoE). To prevent this, the
publisher must implement a series of quality checks that both validate the duration of the video asset
and compare it to the supplied metadata. Ideally the advertisement should be rejected and excluded
from a public campaign if the data does not match. If there is no way to perform a comparison between
the video length and metadata, the publisher should trust and honor the most reliable metric.

Another method would be to introduce a default video slate that is inserted in the video timeline for
linear DAI to fill gaps. For example, if the publisher relies on the actual length of the video of the asset
and then discovers that it is five seconds short of the target duration, they could add an internal promo
or another ad campaign. If this wasn’t done and black screen is displayed, the viewer could be
misinterpreted it as a fault or buffering, and thereby reduce the perceived QoE for that user. Adding
slates as a method to prevent black periods in a stream is efficient across all operational models include
client and server-side Ad insertion methods

Codecs and Resolutions


The principle of “garbage in, garbage out” applies to the relationship between source content and
output. If your source content is not of the highest quality, the resulting output video will not conform
to a high standard. It is imperative to ensure all your video sources start with a high level of quality,
using near-lossless compression, such as ProRes, XDCAM, or AVC-Intra. Bitrates must be set at a
minimum of 50Mbps for SD content and 100Mbps for HD content. Note that the higher the resolution
used in video sources, the better the resultant picture quality, even if you target transcodes into sub-SD
resolutions. In other words, low quality files must be avoided if possible.

When pre-acquiring ads prior to distribution the following video specs are recommend. Note if your
using a server-side Ad stitching model the publisher should always use extract the Mezzanine asset
inside the VAST response for the source of its Transcode.

A High-Level Options Summary


Video Setting Specification Notes
Bitrate 50Mbps SD, 100Mbs HD If the original source is not natively at this quality, re-
transcoding to a higher specification will not result in higher
video quality
Aspect Ratio 16:9 (HD) or 4:3 (SD) 16:9 preferred, where 4:3 is legacy but may be needed for
other cases
Resolution Either HD resolution always preferred, 4K resolution is an option but
• HD 1920x1080 (square pixels) has not been established in the ad sector across OTT
• SD 720x576 (anamorphic)
Frame rate Options: Native frame rate of source preferred
• PAL (25 fps)
• 24p (23.98 fps)
• NTSC Video (29.97 fps)
Codec • Options:MPEG2 ProRes and AVC Intra are favored
• Apple ProRes
• AVC Intra

Improving Quality of Service (QoS) for Advertisement Delivery Across OTT: Best Practices 10
Format Options: .imf containers are still in their infancy, but typically are used
• .mov with 4K asset distribution
• .mxf
• .mpg
• .imf ( future )
Audio Uncompressed PCM 24 bit 48khz

Table 1: High Level Options Summary

A detailed reference highlighting options for file types and standards on picture quality broadcast
operations is provided by the Advanced Media Workflow Association, Inc 5.

Additionally, the IAB provides a highly-detailed summary of ad ingests for many use cases in the VAST
4.0 specification Digital Video In-Stream Ad Format Guidelines 6.

5
http://www.amwa.tv/downloads/specifications/Technical_Overview_of_AS-11_Specifications.pdf.
6
http://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/DVAFG_2015-01-08.pdf.

Improving Quality of Service (QoS) for Advertisement Delivery Across OTT: Best Practices 11
5. Transcode
Adaptive Bitrate (ABR)
Depending on your device or destination it’s a requirement to always use an adaptive bitrate (ABR)
format for ad delivery. Apart from the Quality of Experience (QoE) that ABR offers, it is also compatible
with dynamic ad insertion since it can seamlessly interleave with live streams (which should be in an
ABR format). Single MP4 containers may satisfy most publishers, but it can have drawbacks.

 For example, delivering Static MP4 may send a high-resolution bitrate to a user on a low speed
connection which will delay the playback experience and could even result in an exit of the
video player
 High quality HD ads won’t be able to be sent to unknown bandwidth constraints at the last mile
 Startup video times may suffer
 Clients find it hard to troubleshoot timeouts

The ABR format should match the main preceding asset, including the available bitrates and renditions.
Codecs and framerates should be aligned with the main asset to avoid audio blips as well as playback
errors on the device player. Less important for client-side stitching because video sessions tend to be
independent of each other allowing for some flexibility. Server-side stitching is very inflexible as the
player is expecting all the video elements to be consistent and must be in order to prevent playback
errors.

It should be noted that in many server-side ad insertion implementations, the stitching server examines
the ad VAST response for the highest quality MP4 available, downloads it, and just-in-time encodes and
packages for HLS or DASH delivery. To best serve these implementations, it is recommended that all ads
contain at least one high quality HD mezzanine rendition for this purpose.

Other Points of concern to Address:

 Players that consumer HLS video may not see the framerate changes
 If using DASH as your delivery format use Periods to indicate where Ads who’d be inserted
 For HLS Uses discontinuity tags to help prevent Ad insertion glitch’s, and make sure that the
player supports these tags that inform the player when a switch occurs

Chunk Duration
Advertisements and promos tend to be short durations lasting anywhere from 10 seconds to 60 seconds
Players consuming ABR video tend to start playing the lowest bitrate or the first item in the manifest
before the others. A video player will require up to 3 chunks of video before it can start to render the
first frame of video. This means that if the video chunk size is large (e.g. 10 seconds) the player would
have to buffer and play 30 seconds of low quality video before switching to the optimal bitrate. Having
such large chunk sizes on advertisements will probably result in low quality picture video for the viewer.
As such, it is recommended chunk sizes remain as low as possible for short duration video and not below
2 seconds. Some video players can override this option, but it is not consistent across all devices.

Improving Quality of Service (QoS) for Advertisement Delivery Across OTT: Best Practices 12
Dynamic Ad Insertion Solutions are not typically affected since the advertisements are intermixed with
the main video stream. It does, however, affect pre-rolls and mid-rolls where the player retrieves a new
manifest and loads a new video play.

To summarize, you want to keep the chunk size as low as possible that is evenly divided evenly by the
length of Ad break you have available.

Improving Quality of Service (QoS) for Advertisement Delivery Across OTT: Best Practices 13
6. Hosting
Asset Origin
The advertisements themselves should be hosted on the same client-facing hostname as the main
content. Doing so prevents an additional DNS query call from the device to fetch the fragments and
provides the same reliability and performance as long tail video.

Content Delivery Networks (CDN)


Harnessing a content delivery network to accelerate video delivery and offer a level of scalability is a
MUST for any ad-based OTT proposition. If an ad play stalls or buffers, it will cause frustration with the
viewer, who may then abandon the program they initially intended to watch.

CDNs are a must for handling the distribution of video to mass audiences, but also act as a barrier for
resilience for your video origin. If a CDN is not used in front of your video origin for advertisement
serving, your origin is at risk of unexpected traffic spikes. An unexpected spike will impact video requests
and the throughput, resulting in video start failures of major buffering issues. Worst case, it may even
impact the entire video service if main assets share the same location.

If the AD creative is unique for each session then a CDN will not help because it’s a unique object, and
CDNs only help when it’s a common highly cacheable element shared amongst many sessions.

Third-Party Advertisement Hosting


It is quite common for many publishers to open their advertising inventory to third- parties or
marketplaces to sell unsold advertisement stock or harness programmatic advertising. Both models can
affect the advertising supply chain, introducing many challenges outside of your operational control.
One of the largest challenges include not adhering to a publisher’s requirements for a good QoS.

Extra diligence should be applied to the supply chain by either:

 Identifying and controlling a whitelist of preferred parties who adhere to your best practices via
strict onboarding procedures, or
 Applying a smart layer of logic to check for any potential issues and reject unsuitable items by
pushing the ownership back to the provider and not the publisher
 Establishing a CDN pull configuration at the publisher’s end for 3rd party ads which are not
hosted by the publisher. Ensuring that the AD is cached by CDN. Achieved by applying a CDN
generated CNAME is the Ad URL before its served to the player in question.

To aid and smooth operations, apply the same onboarding procedures with QC checks within this
document is critical.

Improving Quality of Service (QoS) for Advertisement Delivery Across OTT: Best Practices 14
7. Player Optimization
Build Vs. Turnkey Solutions
Most advertising management solutions for video advertisement serving will provide a turnkey Software
Development Kit (SDK) for client applications. This standard SDK handles everything from recording an
advertisement impression to building the video playback experience inside the player. For most
publishers, this may seem appealing at first because it reduces time to market and does not require any
internal development experience. While these turnkey solutions are designed to ensure an
advertisement is always shown, it sometimes comes at the expense of the Quality of Experience (QoE).

To keep the QoE level high, the publisher must own and control the placement of video inside their own
code base. The advertisement management solution SDK should only be used for gathering impressions,
metrics, and retrieving the correct campaign creatives. Doing so reduces the complexity of the player
code base while ensuring unnecessary player resources are not loaded (such as a third-party player
application). Higher complexity increases latency and wait times for advertisements to be initiated and
increases the chance of instability within your player product. Controlling the advertisement player
allows you to fine tune the enablement of the following optimizations listed below.

Advertisement Loading Failures


To safeguard the user experience, if the publisher player applications fail to load or time out after a set
duration, they must ignore and skip advertisement placements. Ensure these circuit breaker methods
exist in your player application so that if the advertisement play fails due to a technical issue, it does not
inhibit the main viewing experience. (ex. display slate vs black video with silent audio)

To assist in troubleshooting and help resolve issues in a faster timeframe, all advertisement play failure
errors should be reported in a standard error framework with a clear error code labeling the failure.

Improving Quality of Service (QoS) for Advertisement Delivery Across OTT: Best Practices 15
8. Events and Metrics
To enable Quality of Service (QoS) measurement of your video advertising campaigns, start recording
key metrics across all advertisement plays at the client level. This will ensure real insight into the end
user experience. It is recommended that you follow the player events in the “Quality of Experience: Key
Network Delivery Metrics” defined by the Measurement/QoE Working Group of the SVA 7. In addition,
The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) is working on a video Quality of Experience (QoE) standard
within its Video Systems Committee (R4) in the Working Group 20 (WG20). This new standard could be
well suited for future advertising event collection and metric definition.

The VAST and VPAID events should be recorded as well as the basic metadata of the advertisement and
its campaign parameters. This offers a unified view of both the video stream, the communication with
an advertising server, and what the player experiences.

Below is a list highlighting some of the most important events to capture to during advertisement
playback.

Ad Metric Name Description


Video Start Time Calculated The time it takes for the first video frame to load from the initial request for the video
URL
Buffering Calculated Buffering events when playing the ad, when the video player exceeds the local
buffer and has to wait for addition data to be loaded before playback can resume
Resolution Event based Resolution of the video served
Bitrate Calculated Bitrate of the video consumed
Video Start Failure Event based
Failed to load video resource such as a 404 or similar
Ad Start Event based The time the Ad started playing
Ad End Event based The time the Ad ended playing
Ad Skipped Event based
The user skipped the video ad during playback
Ad Blocked Event based
If an Ad blocker existed on the device and prevented the Ad from playing

Ad Completed Event based If an Ad was played for its full duration


Ad Failed Event based Ad playback failed at start or during insertion
VAST / VPAID Event Event based Id of the event for correlation to the Ad campaign
Video Click through Event based Occurs when a user clicks on the linear ad and is taken to the advertiser’s
destination, if applicable
Pause Event based Indicates the Ad has been paused at one point
Audio mute/ unmute Event based Indicates when a user activates the mute control
Duration Calculated Duration of the Ad play
Ad campaign Meta data Event based • Advertiser Name
• Campaign ID
• Ad Name
• Agency ID
• Ad source

Table 2: Advertising Metrics to Measure

Additional Vast errors suggestions can be found on IAB Tech labs


https://wiki.iabtechlab.com/index.php?title=VAST_Error_Code_Troubleshooting_Matrix

7
https://www.streamingvideoalliance.org/download/4482/)

Improving Quality of Service (QoS) for Advertisement Delivery Across OTT: Best Practices 16
9. Dynamic Advertising Insertion (DAI)
Dynamic Ad insertion (DAI) solutions are primarily incorporated within the main video linear workflow.
As they are tightly integrated, you must have adequate monitoring on the effective components,
running in active pairs where possible. The monitoring solution must be able to identify when in the
workflow advertisement insertion has failed, such as failed SCTE triggers, VAST response errors, VAST
responses with references to missing creative, insertion success or failure, or incorrect manifest
generation. Have the correct monitoring tools in place to identify the fault domain to prevent these
incidents.

Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) Triggers


To perform frame-accurate replacement of advertisements within a linear stream, you must either
provide a data source from your scheduling system or include SCTE markers within the video stream
that flag those sections of the video which can be dynamically replaced. Regardless of the method, the
challenge is to accommodate real-time events that may drift beyond the original schedule, such as a
sporting event that overruns or an unplanned last-minute schedule change. DAI components must be
able to process and handle these unpredicted changes, otherwise there is a risk of clipping the main
program and disturbing the viewer experience.

Other potential risks can result in broken messages or an interruption of services. These include
unplanned and unexpected SCTE markers, or the component responsible for injecting the SCTE
information failing to process the message correctly. It is best to plan for such events, introducing
contingency plans for failed components and messages across the entire workflow.

Further Monitoring could be considered for ESAM signals, as this would have an impact to any service

A good reference for SCTE standard can be found here


http://www.scte.org/SCTE/Standards/Digital_Video_Subcommittee__DVS_.aspx

Improving Quality of Service (QoS) for Advertisement Delivery Across OTT: Best Practices 17
10. Advertising Service Interruptions
Often third-party services to determine what advertising campaign should be used may even be
responsible for creating personalized manifests or playlists that are unique and non-cacheable. A user in
real time performs most of these processes upon request, which requires that you must plan to scale
these components so that they can handle the same peak concurrency of your audience.

If an advertising-treated Manifest is dynamically created by a single component and that component


fails, while a video player is waiting for that advertisement, the user will be presented with a blank video
screen. For this specific reason, the publisher should invest in a feature switch to revert to an untreated
manifest, in the event the service is broken. Typical behavior is a configuration command sent to the
player application to bypass the advertisement play journey. This command ensures the audience can
still use the publisher’s service while the problem is being addressed. Otherwise all users are faced with
a broken service, which may discourage them from returning to the publisher’s portal due to poor
Quality of Service (QoS).

Improving Quality of Service (QoS) for Advertisement Delivery Across OTT: Best Practices 18
11. Conclusion
As the market for advertising propositions across OTT grows, there will be a greater need to provide
advertisers and publishers confidence that their advertisements are being successfully viewed by a
human. Custom or proprietary systems that are generated by a different measurement system will not
provide the consistency the entire industry requires to be uniform.

There are many bodies and organizations providing their own methods (BARB 8, Nielsen 9, JICWEBS 10,
Moat 11, Wicket Labs 12) but there is no single unified standard. Progressing with standards to have a
unified, consistent method of advertisement measurement will give the advertising ecosystem a
transparent and reliable means to record advertisement views.

Across the traditional TV space, audience measurement is compiled and regulated in a consistent
manner, where there is one standard and one body regulating the data. The OTT ecosystem should
follow suit by encouraging:

 A measurement specification for advertisement plays across OTT which would help resolve the
problem of inconsistent data and simultaneously provide a baseline to improve visibility across
publishers, advertisers, and networks.
 Measurement collection should be easily syndicated to third-party regulatory auditing bodies to
offer confidence in advertisement plays while providing baseline data to improve the
advertisement serving experience.
 In the validation of the data, it is crucial that the validation includes a standardized method of
calculating the metrics. For example, introducing a viewable CPM which requires
advertisements to be viewed for at least two seconds would pave the way to full transparency
on advertising campaigns, and allow advertisers to buy only viewable advertisements and not
just impressions.
 Improving the Quality of Service (QoS) of advertisement serving as described in this paper.

8
http://www.barb.co.uk/
9
http://www.nielsen.com/us/en.html
10
https://www.jicwebs.org/
11
https://moat.com/
12
https://www.wicketlabs.com/

Improving Quality of Service (QoS) for Advertisement Delivery Across OTT: Best Practices 19
12. Tables and Figures
Tables
Table 1: High Level Options Summary ........................................................................................................ 11
Table 2: Advertising Metrics to Measure .................................................................................................... 16

Figures
Figure 1: Example of how a server-side Ad stitching process works using VAST ......................................... 8

Improving Quality of Service (QoS) for Advertisement Delivery Across OTT: Best Practices 20
13. About the Streaming Video Alliance
Comprised of members from across the video ecosystem, the Streaming Video Alliance is a global
association that works to solve critical streaming video challenges in an effort to improve end-user
experience and adoption. The organization focuses on three main activities: first is to educate the
industry on challenges, technologies, and trends through informative, publicly-available resources such
as whitepapers, articles, and e-books; second is to foster collaboration among different video ecosystem
players through working groups, quarterly meetings, and conferences; third is to define solutions for
streaming video challenges by producing specifications, best practices, and other technical
documentation. For more information, please visit www.streamingvideoalliance.org.

Streaming Video Alliance


5177 Brandin Court
Fremont, CA 94538 USA
(510) 492-4000
streamingvideoalliance.org © 2018 Streaming Video Alliance.

Improving Quality of Service (QoS) for Advertisement Delivery Across OTT: Best Practices 21

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