Paramount's Adtech Challenges for Live Streaming at Scale
What are some of the biggest adtech challenges for live streaming at scale? Jarred Wilichinsky, SVP Global Video Monetization and Operations, Paramount, speaks with Nadine Krefetz, Consultant, Reality Software, Contributing Editor, Streaming Media, about some of the technical issues that must be handled in order to effectively deliver advertising during live streaming events.
“It's not the Super Bowl because you're not essentially serving one ad to a lot of people, but you're serving a lot of different ads to a lot of people,” Krefetz says to Wilichinsky about the Paramount adtech operations. “What's the acceptable latency for you?”
“If it's a live event?” Wilichinsky says. “Latency is one of the number one enemies out there in digital land as you do in dynamic decisioning. So there are methods to mitigate that. I think prefetching is a term that is important in live, especially live with scale. There are different ends of the spectrum.” Wilichinsky emphasizes that the number of viewers must be taken into careful consideration in giving systems more time to adapt and prepare. “You spread out the load a little bit in that form of matter,” he says. “Adtech in general works much better when it's spread versus a condensed factor.”
“So you're load testing it?” Krefetz says. “You also said occasionally things break. What breaks the most often?”
“Everything breaks,” Wilichinsky says with a laugh. “I mean latency is always a never-ending challenge. Especially on live high concurrent stuff. You get into blank VAST tags. You know, people still to this day think FLV is a video format that is acceptable in digital advertising. Flash went away how many years ago? It still comes up. VPAID is still showing up in places. And those things cause problems. Audio levels - they're too loud, they're too soft. You know, we have to think about how do we normalize audio at scale? We review ads before they go live. We check their specs. We do that and we do that at scale.”
“Are you using technology to check the ads or are you actually eyeballing it?” Krefetz asks.
“We use technology and have partnerships in place to check the core specs of it,” Wilichinsky says. “Your bit rate, your file size, your audio levels, your frame rates, and release frames. You know, those core elements.” But he also notes that their operations team still directly watches ads. “We still make sure there's not cursing or anything inappropriate,” he says. “The whole standards and practices are important even though we're digital. You don't want to serve an inappropriate ad in certain types of content.”
Learn more about adtech at Streaming Media West 2022.
Watch full-session videos from Streaming Media Connect 2022.
Related Articles
How do you maintain five-nines uptime for tentpole event streams reaching hundreds of thousands or millions of users? CBS Sports Digital's Corey Smith, Bulldog DM's John Petrocelli, and EdgeNext's Joshua Johnson offer tips and best practices for successfully scaling up your streams in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2023.
10 May 2023
End-to-end workflows for live streaming at scale are complex affairs, with troubleshooting challenges at each stage when delivery breaks down. An expert panel from Paramount, Amagi, TAG VS, and Nomad Technologies discusses key best practices for troubleshooting large-scale streams when the pressure is on.
22 Feb 2023
How do you meet the challenges of monitoring stream performance and quality for dozens or thousands of live streams at once? Experts from Paramount, Dolby, TAG Video Systems, and Nomad Technologies discuss multistream monitoring tech and strategies in this panel from Streaming Media West 2022.
15 Feb 2023
The unforgiving world of ad tech means any mistake can cost millions of dollars. Ad tech is the key to a successful AVOD/FAST monetization strategy, but there are so many moving parts that it can be a challenge to get it right. Wilichinsky provides practical insight into what works, what doesn't, and how ad-supported delivery compares to subscription offerings.
19 Dec 2022
What are the most dynamic approaches for localizing live event streams? Dan Turow of Evertz and Marisa Elizondo of fuboTV talk about the ways their organizations are working to best integrate local and user-preference-based content and experiences into live event streams.
15 Nov 2022
What are some of the biggest issues encountered when handling interactive streaming at scale? The widespread increase of highly interactive streaming such as auctions, sports betting, and gaming has put pressure on networks while increasing the need to integrate interactivity into more traditional methods of OTT content delivery.
01 Nov 2022
Philo Director of Advertising Partnerships Aulden Kaye explains how addressability defines the value proposition for Connected TV advertising in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2022.
22 Mar 2022
Streaming Media's Tim Siglin and Harmonic's Rob Gambino discuss findings from a recent streaming industry survey on the timeline for new and expanded investments in addressable advertising and why it hasn't taken the industry by storm in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2021.
24 Mar 2021
Newsy Chief of Staff Tony Brown discusses the lingering expectation of providing equal time to disparate points of view in today's hyper-partisan news environment and how that impacts and drives reactions to programmatic advertising in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2021.
19 Mar 2021
Comscore SVP Strategic Partnerships Scott Worthem makes the case for addressable advertising vs. "an uncomfortable level of personalization" in national OTT broadcasts in this clip from a panel at Streaming Media West 2019.
26 Feb 2020
Companies and Suppliers Mentioned