It looks like Akamai haven’t abandoned advertising after all, as the cloud-based solutions provider has just launched a new ad integration service that is “designed to simplify the insertion of individually-targeted advertising video content into video streams”. Last month Akamai sold its ‘Advertising Decision Solutions (ADS)’ data cooperative to MediaMath, a media buying platform, which led some to question whether Akamai were to move away from advertising.
The new service will be integrated in Akamai’s ‘Sola Vision’ offering and is designed to simplify the workflow for ad insertion.The back end is powered by mDialog’s Smart Stream Platform technology, which will allow publishers to dynamically insert targeted ads from multiple ad decisioning/ad network platforms into both linear and on-demand video streams.
Akamai say that by shifting the complexities of online video advertising insertion from the player to the cloud, their ‘Ad Integration Services’ can ‘simplify or remove many of the functions and third-party integrations that are required with a client-based ad insertion approach’.
“This approach is designed to eliminate the risk of quality problems due to last-mile bandwidth contention between ad and video content during the critical transition from content to ad playback. The player/client for this new solution uses a lightweight SDK to ensure accurate Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) compliant measurement beaconing. This easily integrated SDK also supports interactive video ads and ad-skipping prevention in order to deliver a seamless TV-quality viewing experience across devices.”
Greg Ireland, Research Manager, Multiscreen Video, for IDC, said, “A network-based approach to ad insertion has the potential to address some of the key challenges that have stood in the way. Specifically, the ability to scale to meet broadcast-size audiences and using ad content from a variety of sources in a simple, device-agnostic way.”
