DMW Awards Partner

53

Harmonic - VOS360 Ad SaaS with In-Stream Advertising

harmonicinc.com

Category  Streaming

DMW Awards Finalist

Rethink Research predicts that sports media rights revenues for the top 16 global leagues will grow from $45 billion in 2023 to $68.8 billion in 2028. For media companies that stream live sports, the ever-increasing costs associated with sports rights acquisition have created a pressing demand for innovative monetization solutions without sacrificing fan engagement.
Harmonic's VOS360 Ad SaaS is an innovative cloud-native, server-side ad insertion solution that enables personalized full-screen and in-stream ad delivery to millions of concurrent viewers for live and VOD streaming. Featuring a user-friendly interface and developer-ready APIs, the industry-proven solution provides a complete workflow for creative processing, manifest manipulation and delivery.
VOS360 Ad represents a significant advancement in ad-insertion technology with its latest enhancement: in-stream advertising utilizing new split-screen ad formats. In-stream advertising revolutionizes monetization strategies for live sports streaming, offering a seamless blend of content and advertising to ensure an uninterrupted viewing experience while unlocking new revenue opportunities for service providers.
VOS360 Ad provides in-stream advertising through server-side insertion of new addressable ad formats such as double-box and dynamic L-bars. In-stream advertising with split-screen ad formats is particularly crucial in the context of live sports streaming, where maintaining viewer engagement is paramount. The split-screen ads can be strategically placed at high- and low-action moments of the streamed event, either through manual operation or by automated triggering from external data feeds. This dynamic integration of split-screen ads within live programming preserves viewer engagement, amplifies brand awareness and maximizes monetization opportunities.
A key highlight of the solution is its ad reporting dashboard, which provides KPI metrics to easily monitor performance and maximize yield. VOS360 Ad delivers advanced advertising capabilities at scale, with low latency and programmatic ecosystem compatibility. With an expanding in-stream partner ecosystem, the solution enables video service providers to create new ad inventory without increasing full-screen ad load, maximizing monetization potential.
Reshaping Live Sports Streaming Monetization
Server-side ad insertion (SSAI) has become essential for monetizing sports streaming, providing service providers with an opportunity to tap into projected multi-billion dollars of ad spend. Harmonic’s VOS360 Ad SaaS with in-stream advertising offers several innovative features and benefits:
• Low Latency: VOS360 Ad supports low-latency HLS and DASH formats, ensuring a latency of about three seconds or less with targeted ads, which is critical for live sports streaming. By delivering in-stream ads with significantly lower latency than other solutions, VOS360 Ad SaaS ensures a smooth and uninterrupted viewing experience for sports fans.
• Maximizing Revenue Opportunities: VOS360 Ad enables publishers to create new ad inventory by delivering in-stream ad formats that are less intrusive to the viewing experience.
• Field-Proven Reliability: A major challenge with delivering targeted advertising is scalability. Fully cloud-native, VOS360 Ad SaaS enables targeted ad delivery to millions of viewers across various platforms. Deployed at scale, the solution provides industry-acclaimed reliability for ad revenue streams.
• Seamless Compatibility: The new split-screen ad formats integrate seamlessly with the traditional ad serving ecosystem for efficient deployment and impression-based selling.
• Geo-redundancy: VOS360 Ad includes ad ingest, ad processing and SSAI, all deployable in a fully geo-redundant fashion.

Pushing the Boundaries of Live Sports Streaming Monetization
Harmonic's VOS360 Ad SaaS with in-stream advertising is a groundbreaking achievement, allowing broadcasters and service providers to stay competitive in the evolving live sports streaming landscape. Featuring state-of-the-art in-stream advertising with new split-screen ad formats that can be targeted to the individual subscriber, the solution seamlessly integrates advertisements without disrupting the viewer's experience, elevating sports streaming monetization.