2022年12月5日
By 斯科特Halpert Senior Vice President, Products and Partnerships, Penthera
博客

增加流媒体视频点播库存的流动性

当一个人看到CTV/OTT广告购买的世界, an odd trend emerges: There appears to be more buying against linear streaming inventory than against VOD streaming inventory. This seems odd because viewers are much more engaged with VOD titles—that is the very nature of on-demand viewing. 线性流, 电视经常是开着的, 只捕捉观众被动的注意力. Viewers select VOD assets with the intention of viewing them and, 结果是, 是否更有可能看到相关的广告. That VOD inventory should be more desirable from an advertiser’s perspective and therefore more valuable may appear to be, 先天的, 一个真理. 然而，市场上的情况并非如此.

当你深入研究视频点播vs的机制时. Linear inventory, you begin to understand why this is occurring. A likely cause is that VOD and Linear ad inventory are decisioned under different timing. The mechanics of VOD ad decisioning are quite different from linear and, 事实上, quite different from all other digital delivery in a meaningful way. 不像所有其他的数字广告决策, 哪些是在“及时”的基础上发生的, VOD ad decisions (except when using client-side ad insertion) are made before playback begins, well ahead of when the ads will be seen by the viewer.

An important implication of making all the ad decisions up front is that a substantially longer 生存时间(TTL) 必须为这些广告设置窗口. Whereas typical TTLs are set on the order of 36 minutes, VOD TTL’s are often set at 60–120 +分钟. The reason for this is obvious: Ads that run toward the end of a show/movie will be viewed well outside the standard 3–6分钟TTL窗口.

从实际的角度来看, this means that separate campaigns/line items must be set up for VOD delivery. Essentially, this segments off VOD from the rest of the inventory that a campaign is consuming. There are meaningful implications of this situation that result in the inability to easily “flow” budget between Linear and VOD.

Another approach at solving the problem is to enable the ad decisioning for VOD to be similar to linear by triggering much closer to when each ad pod will run, while maintaining these important user-facing functions. This is a more difficult way to do it, and it was a difficult nut to crack, but the team at Penthera 已经做到了. In doing so, both of the blocking criteria outlined above have been eliminated. 广告商现在可以保持较短的ttl, and know within minutes if their ads have been delivered on VOD streams.

Another challenge of the time displacement between ad decision and ad playout is that uncertainty regarding the likelihood of delivery is introduced into the process. 换句话说, they may sell ads that are never viewed because a user abandons the stream for some reason. Advertisers generally don’t want to hold out budget for long periods of time, 等着看钱花了没. 他们希望看到自己的钱花出去，并得到送货上门的服务, or know that it wasn’t spent as soon as possible so they can purchase other opportunities. With VOD, they have to wait, sometimes for well over an hour, to find out if delivery occurred. This can be a meaningful disincentive to purchasing VOD advertising, even if it is very attractive from a content/user engagement standpoint.

要解决这个问题, you would need to make the mechanics of the ad-decisioning process for VOD more closely match those of Linear. It’s not an easy problem to solve though, given how VOD delivery works today. One approach that I’ve seen in the market is to turn a VOD manifest into a linear manifest (e.g., HLS -> HLS Live). While this approach does enable decisioning on a “just in time” basis, 有一些明显的缺点. 例如, users lose the ability to “scrub” back and forth within the video as well as the ability to see the entire video duration.

As a result, VOD ad buys become indistinguishable from Linear. This would seem to be the goal for both advertisers and viewers alike.

[编者注:本文署名来自。 Penthera. 流媒体 accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]