IBC 2024: Four Things You (Might Have) Missed at IBC
1. One Simple Trick to Boost Ad Fill Right Now
I’m not saying SSAI is dead. But it took a big hit at IBC 2024.
There’s a new sheriff in town and it’s called SGAI. Server-Guided Ad Insertion, which cleverly rhymes with “server-sided,” is a fun new acronym for us but quite confusing to me. My proposal? Hybrid Ad Insertion, which—well, now you probably have a sense of it.
Don’t let the flubbed acronym distract you. This is a massive solve for low fill rates, picture-in-picture programmatic ads, and variable-length ad pods.
Dolby THEO, long the biggest innovator in Video Players announced THEOads (in partnership with kingmaker Google Ad Manager, no less!) and I’m predicting Server-Guided Ad Insertion will be a huge boon to low ad fill rates, not to mention personalized and innovative ads.
Why? How? It gets complicated.
Simplest take? It’s a hybrid approach between Client-Side and Server-Side.
Slightly more detail: In SSAI, When a viewer clicks Play on a 30-minute show, the streaming manifest file needs to be created at that instant. So, an ad avail 15 minutes into the show needs to be filled on start, not “just in time” 14 minutes into the show.
Ask any programmatic ad expert, and they’ll tell you that more time to fill will directly result in more fill.
Client-side ad insertion—meaning at the video player client level, not at the server level—provides precisely that kind of just-in-time ad delivery. But it has two problems: buffering and susceptibility to ad blockers.
Viewers and services alike love the seamless playback of SSAI, where the streaming server’s manifest file does all the heavy lifting and the player does little, and viewers get beautiful, buffer-free experiences that look like “real” TV.
But what if we could couple that seamless playback with just-in-time ad insertion?
Server-Guided Ad Insertion, or what I hereby declare as Hybrid Ad Insertion, does just that. It’s built on an HLS feature called Interstitials. Leveraging this new feature of the HLS spec gets us to the just-in-time fill of client-side ads with the seamless stitching and playback of server-side. More on this below.
With clever video players like THEO, you can also do much more with this. At IBC they showcased a brilliant “hit the yellow button” booth demo which immediately launches the picture-in-picture ad you see in Figure 1.
THEO/Dolby.io VP Engineering Michel Roofthooft, Ring Digital’s Brian Ring, and THEO/Dolby.io VP of Product & Architecture Paul Boustead
(Digression: I’ve been in this business for twenty-five years and the only booth demo I’ve ever loved more was my own “Piracy Den” created while at Synamedia in 2018. The Yellow Button hereby receives my #FutureOfTV Marketing Award! ??)
Server-side ad insertion leader YoSpace, with a booth just around the corner from THEO, added more credibility to the trend when SGAI fan and YoSpace Commercial Director Edward New educated me on the longer cloud DVR buffer times this technology enables—yet another unlock that leads me to believe this thing is worth paying attention to.
So, how does SGAI’s Hybrid Ad Insertion magic happen?
It started with Apple and their brilliant HLS streaming format team, who launched the interstitial feature three years ago. Essentially, HLS Interstitials enables a main manifest file to be created on stream startup. but with a pointer/placeholder to a second streaming manifest file.
Yes, you read that correctly: two (or more) manifests at the same time. The first is a main/primary manifest that then points—or “guides”—to a secondary manifest.
This main/secondary relationship—which reminds me of master control playlisting structures—enables all the whizbang mentioned herein: variable-length breaks, dynamic ad decisions, picture-in-picture programmatic, and longer DVR buffers.
One final related note: For those following the streaming standards battle, it’s notable that the only real contender for an alternative streaming format to Apple’s HLS, which is called DASH, doesn’t have this feature. Apparently, they’re working on similar support they’ll call “Alternative MPD”—only a whisker better than SGAI!
Evidence that Human Computer Interaction Matters
“Turning Newsroom Personnel into Superhumans” is my new proposed mission statement for Belgian upstart newsroom computer system (NRCS) Cuez.
It may seem crazy to those outside the TV business that a major news network control room might have 10 to 15 (or more) staffers in it. But it’s a hugely complex task to run a live news show.
While we sit back like couch potatoes letting high-quality, informationally dense live news content wash over us, that control room is filled with intense creatives and technicians deploying graphics, running teleprompters, and creating stories. All these tasks are built around the core content outline of the production, otherwise known as a rundown.
Some of the most widely used and deployed newsroom computer systems have been around for decades with interfaces to match. The Cuez NRCS, by contrast, has a fast, beautiful and intuitive computer interface for news collaboration and production (Figure 2). Indeed, while no newscast would try to have the broadcast anchor also producing the show simultaneously, Cuez shows that it is indeed possible due to their beautiful interface.
The Cuez NRCS interface
It turns out Cuez hired a PhD in Human Computer Interaction to help design it. Chalk one up for expertise! You really can’t fake it on the most difficult task of software interface design. And is there anything that matters more for driving media productivity higher?
Dramatic Cost and Carbon Reduction with High-Utility Fingerprinting
Ad Signal is a company on a roll. While their initial flagship product is used by UK TV regulators to ensure compliance and verification of ad plays during playout, the core technology they have developed is in the realm of video fingerprinting and de-duplication of media assets. In other words, they can expertly and immediately detect specific frames of video and, having identified them, remove and replace them for certain downstream processes. This technical foundation has surprisingly useful economic applications.
I found two growth use cases on display at the show to be of particular interest.
First, Ad Signal can reduce the cost of AI processing. By removing all duplicate frames from content before sending it to AI workflows, media companies can dramatically decrease the cost and environmental impact of AI. Ad Signal CEO Tom Dunning (Figure 3) says their product can reduce the image and audio sent to AI by 75%.
Figure 3. Ad Signal CEO Tom Dunning
The second product they showed off at the show involves the rationalized, just-in-time creation of IMF packages for media distribution. Ad Signal can deduplicate video content, regardless of format, codec, or resolution, which can potentially enable a major studio (for example, the BBC) to move from managing what the company says is approximately 127 versions with an existing workflow down to around 20 unique versions.
Using another example, Dunning explained that Ad Signal can convert 20 different language file versions of 100GB each to a single IMF package of 130GB, representing a 93.5% reduction from the original 2TB combined file size.
The result is a dramatic reduction in storage cost and carbon emissions.
Simpler Cloud Storage, Elegant Innovation with AI Implications
Storage and media management form two economic pillars of our industry and shows like IBC. What fascinates me is the impact that AI might have on these two intertwined market segments which will likely converge further over time. Let me explain.
As you can imagine, there were indeed a wide range of advanced, agentic, multimodal, Gen AI LLM innovations at IBC this year. The Periphery, Omnisearch, Wasabi, Strada, Moments Lab, Axle.ai, Twelve Labs, deepVA—these are but a few names (in several different categories!) to put on your watchlist, all with notable innovations to show off in Amsterdam. Amazon Bedrock also deserves a special mention for its nifty, inviting agentic workflow dashboards which have me chomping at the bit to use.
If a MAM is a place to store media and attach metadata to it and use those to kickoff workflows—and AI enables you to easily do a lot of these things without the traditional architectures of media management and workflows and metadata—then what’s the future state of the MAM category?
That’s the question that popped into my head while watching Danny Peters, VP Business Development at Elements (Figure 4) show off their simple yet elegant Open AI metadata enhancement implementation. Don't get me wrong; I don’t think a MAM is superfluous yet, and I saw plenty of world-class—and lightweight—MAMs at the show as well. But it’s still worth pondering the question.
Figure 4. Elements VP, Business Development Danny Peters at IBC 2024
The second storage innovator that caught my eye was Storj Labs, based in Atlanta. Storj is an AWS S3 alternative that—according to their models—costs 7 times less than AWS. More importantly, they claim to have a unique approach that is completely secure, spreads a single copy of a file across a globally distributed network, and does not require replication or geographic zone management.
But what caught my ear was their new startup division, Valdi, which has entered the fast-growing GPU on-demand market. As I heard it, matching Storj with Valdi provides a flexible architecture for lowest-possible-cost inferencing at the edge. This is really important. In fact, even fine-tuning can be done for the right use cases without H100s. (Email me at brian [at] RingDigital.tv for a chart on the cost & AI capabilities of NVIDIA’s GPUs.)
All in all, IBC 2024 felt like a big success to me. Plenty of people, interesting demos, and innovations and more than a few great cocktail parties on The Beach to boot. What did I miss? Reach out at the above email with questions, comments, or curiosities
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