Verizon reveals new advertising functions
April 21, 2020
Revealing what it would have unveiled at NAB Verizon Media said new solutions include advanced advertising tools for transparency and enhanced live event streaming, all designed to provide broadcasters, content and service providers with more opportunities for audience growth and monetisation.
Verizon Smartplay Prebid is a server-side integration that exposes inventory and conducts auctions faster with more demand partners using the prebid open-source framework. Ariff Sidi, general manager at Verizon Media Platform says: “Until now there has been a generally accepted order of operations in filling ad supply that has not always maximised the value of a publisher’s inventory […] Prebid addresses that by calling out to demand partners in an open and transparent fashion, maximising value and providing transparency in the bidding process.”
The company said that it is also enhancing its advertising data and analytics in order to give its customers a better understanding of their advertisements’ performance.
The company also revealed Verizon Media Control, which promises operators the ability to curate content, simulate live channels and syndicate to multiple platforms from a single platform.
This is broken down by two main features: Channel Scheduling and Output Syndication. The former allows content owners to deploy their VoD libraries, live feeds and live events to create ‘virtual linear experiences’, in effect eliminating the need for broadcast playout technologies.
Meanwhile, Output Syndication, allows content owners to link up accounts from a variety of social media sites including Twitter, YouTube and Twitch, and publish streams directly to them.
Verizon Media is also enhancing its ongoing developments in live event streaming, following a previously announced jump to Microsoft Azure. Already a leader in live event streaming, Verizon Media continues to provide a scalable platform backed by a managed service team. Verizon Media has enhanced its ingest, encoding, and CDN capabilities to deliver live content in 4K HDR, with the TV-like picture quality viewers expect. Recent testing of concurrent viewers on the platform has now reached the 10 million viewer threshold, surpassing the scale seen in recent large live events.
Verizon Media provides a self-service dashboard for live event operators to stop and start events, trigger ad breaks, and create clips of the event. The dashboard has been updated with a new Live Event Markers feature, which enables operators to tag events of interest during any live event, for example scoring plays or end of quarter breaks. It efficiently publishes this metadata alongside the video streams, so content owners can design new features for on screen overlays and interactivity.
Meanwhile a new Real-time Streaming feature, currently in beta, enables live event streaming with sub-second latency.
“Verizon Media’s massive global network and platform enables content publishers to reach broadcast-sized audiences with their OTT platforms and services. Customers are already using our streaming platform to reach millions of concurrent viewers anywhere in the world,” added Sidi. “At Super Bowl LIV, we were able to demo in-stadium experiences that saw latency faster than a television broadcast. This capability has opened up new use cases for interactivity, gamification, trivia, wagering, and 5G enabled experiences.”