Client-Side vs. Server-Side Ad Insertion: Which is Winning in 2024 and Why
Client-side or server-side? Ask five streaming ad tech experts, and you’ll get six opinions. In this clip from Streaming Media NYC, Streaming Media’s Nadine Krefetz asks execs from Roku, Paramount, JWP, Akamai, and Infinitive which they prefer and why.
Krefetz asks Charles Goodman, Head of Roku Ad Exchange, about his take on the client-side versus server-side debate.
“I think both have really good utility,” Goodman says. “I generally also lean more towards server-side. I think it's a much better streaming environment, but I think that's the reason why people do client-side interactive ads. But it's really kind of up to the publisher.” He mentions that Roku does a combination of both.
Krefetz asks Peter Chave, Principal Architect, Akamai Technologies, to define server-side ad insertion.
“Briefly, what it means is the stream being delivered to the user, there's a main stream and then we are going to insert the ad as if it's part of the main content,” Chave says. “So as far as the player's concerned, it shouldn't see any difference in the video. So, like a linear channel, you'd see on TV where there are ads mixed in the middle, but as far as the TV's concerned, it has no idea what the ad or the content was.”
Regarding client-side ad insertion, David LaPalomento, CTO, JWP, says that it requires more engineering work and testing, but offers more flexibility and can be less expensive. “One of the big draws of having the JW Player on the web is that it has deep capabilities in doing client-side ad insertion,” he says. “And there are some good reasons, like server ad insertion is more expensive to produce. If you do a little bit more of the work on the device as opposed to the server, that's fancy. You also get more flexibility if you can do it client-side versus server-side because you write a whole bunch of code on the client to actually do interesting things, like auctions, filling ad inventory, that kind of thing.”
“But essentially, if you are writing code on the client side, you have to have the engineers to write that code,” Krefetz notes.
LaPalomento counters, “Or you could grab a library off the [internet]. Google puts out the IMA SDK, which is a client-side library that does client side-ad insertion, and handles most of it for you.”
Krefetz says that even so, it is still not a completely hands-off experience. “You’ve got to have somebody doing something,” she says.
“What’s trickier is the server-side,” LaPalomento says. “Ad insertion is also very, very rarely hands-off client-side, especially as it gets more complex. And I actually prefer server-side ad insertion too, just to be clear. But the direction we're heading is that they're going to be virtually indistinguishable. That is my prediction.”
Chave says, “With client-side, you end up having to test a lot because anytime you change the code on the client, and if you've got one generation of devices, that's one problem. If you've got ten generations of devices, that's a hundred times the problem.”
“With server-side, you end up with devices that just don't work,” LaPalomento says. “So instead of being able to modify the client and be able to make changes, instead you've got dead playback and no video.”
Jarred Wilichinsky, SVP Global Digital Ad Operations, Paramount, highlights the further difficulties and complexities of client-side, especially for Paramount in particular. “[With] Paramount, with just the Pluto application, there’s probably 25 different clients. With server-side ad insertion, you don't need to do as much heavy lifting and with stream manipulation. The core of ad tech decisioning is server-side.”
C.J. Leonard, Director, Ad Operations & Technology, Infinitive, discusses the challenges of device compatibility, especially for those who are not engineers. “When I was at Local Now, I think I owned at one point every device that was on the market,” she says. “We were relaunching the apps, and they were client-side at the time. I, as the Director of Ops, was sitting there tethering to Vizio and tethering my Roku devices and calling people up, [saying], ‘Hey, I'm not an engineer.’ So when you start getting to a certain point, it's server-side.”
Goodman of Roku argues that it is best to have a generalized ad-insertion framework. “We're on a bunch of different devices, too,” he says. “You can watch the Roku channel on Fire TV. But really, I care about the user. A lot of the client-side work, you get an ad, and there's only so much that you can inspect ahead of time. You're not transcoding. And so sometimes it is very much like you try to play and pray, and hopefully it works. And on the server-side it's different. There's transcoding. I don't know if anybody's ever watched an app on their iPad, and all of a sudden, the ad comes on and blows you out of the room. Audio normalization is really hard. So it's nice to be able to transcode, make sure it's actually going be stable.”
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