SGAI, Live Sports Streaming, Scale, and Standardization
Server-guided ad insertion (SGAI), and the variety of squeeze-back and picture-in-picture (PiP) ad options it enables, creates great opportunities for brands to innovate and engage audiences in new ways, particularly for live sports events. But it’s still early days for SGAI implementation, and scale and standardization still pose significant challenges that old solutions and approaches won’t solve, as Ring Digital’s Brian Ring, SVTA’s David Hassoun, Fan Serv’s C.J. Leonard, and Eventually A Castle’s Andrew Baritz discuss in this clip from May’s Streaming Media Connect.
Benefits of Hybrid
Ring Digital llc Principal Analyst Brian Ring opens the conversation by calling SGAI by another name: hybrid ad insertion. He asks for a quick, top-level definition and how it could play out in terms of ad format standardization.
Co-Chair of the SVTA Advertising Working Group David Hassoun speaks to the evolution of SGAI, beginning with client-side ad insertion (CSAI) and server-side ad insertion (SSAI), which provided a better experience and more reach. “No longer is just the basic linear ad solution really going to solve for the problems” surrounding ad opportunity options in streaming, he says, noting that one of the major benefits of hybrid is that it “takes a little bit of server-side and brings that experience down to the client. It lets the server guide it to make it so it’s noncritical path.”
Hybrid “doesn’t break the whole stream as it can with server-side ad solutions, but [it] allows you to get that nice, seamless experience but also have more options for better experiences,” Hassoun adds. “So you can do non-linear ads, those overlays, those pullbacks, the PiPs, [and] the L-bars, and that’s the big driver” of hybrid.
Hybrid in Sports Streaming
Ring brings sports into the conversation, saying that as a baseball fan, he can see a pitching change being sponsored by, for example, Speedy Oil Change. He asks Fan Serv VP of Publisher Operations C.J. Leonard to confirm that SGAI/hybrid is built for sports.
C.J. Leonard agrees, saying she works with sales channels that are hyper-focused on live local sports. “They have the demand, they have buyers asking for L-bars, squeeze backs, things like that,” she explains. Leonard goes on to cite vendors that provide individualized solutions, such as Transmit or Harmonic, although she stresses that she doesn’t want to promote any particular vendor over another.
Leonard describes an issue with L-bars and squeeze backs being that “you’re not in the break. When you move out of the break and into the actual HLS of the game, there’s challenges there that are arising. So we’re excited to see—buyers are excited to see—this [new ad option] come about.” She recently watched a Rockies-Phillies game that had in-broadcast ads for Rally House, and she says deciding where to insert ads is an early-days challenge for live local sports. Another challenge is teams having their own technology that isn’t compatible with broadcast when they release individual direct-to-consumer (D2C) apps outside of, say, MLB TV or the League Pass. “[Y]ou’re going to have splintered fragmentation around implementation” because of this, Leonard warns.
Issues to Keep in Mind
Ring speaks to the broadcast options based on his time working at Amagi. “We could do actual squeeze backs. … But what happens is, you learn that there’s a direct buy in a linear world: I want that one or I want this one. It’s happening in the production room when you move to SSAI, it’s just much more complicated in terms of what you’re going to bring in, [and] how it’s going to work,” he says. “And so I think it’s really critical to point to that.”
Ring introduces another participant to the conversation by asking Eventually A Castle CEO Andrew Baritz what his take is on ad formats and what’s interesting to him in the virtual world.
Baritz replies, “I think these formats are amazing for the publisher. They can be really powerful for the consumer. It can increase viewership of the content you want to watch versus ad time.” However, the problem with their growth is that “it’s borderline a walled garden within a walled garden,” especially for large media buyers. He uses the example of HBO Max, which owns all of its media space. “It’s available on some of those SSPs and DSPs. But those squeeze-back units might not be,” Baritz says. “And to the note of [Leonard], there are different vendors doing this, and they’re in competition with each other for that same media by those different standards, those different SSAI solutions. And [Ring] mentioned it with [his] experience at Amagi: Who owns the stream?”
Baritz wonders how technology must be used to allow for different ad options, noting that standardization is an issue. He also wonders how publishers connect to the media, saying that “these units often take very deep integrations, so that can limit who has access to them to larger streamers. It needs major economies of scale to make it viable and it blocks certain publishers from being able to enact them due to how they may be distributed. These units are largely locked to owned-and-operated experiences where you are in control of the end platform, which means a channel in this FAST world who may not own that platform may be limited to what type of formats they’re allowed to integrate with.”
Baritz continues to ask questions, including, “Who has that control over the supply-and-demand relationship? Is it the publisher, is it the technology, is it the platform? And then we add that fun layer of broadcast of: Did the MLB put a squeeze back in that’s in conflict with the squeeze back the publisher may have rights to sell?” He comes to the same conclusion Leonard did, pointing out that new formats are still in the early days of implementation. He believes they’ll be a major part of CTV, similar to how they are important in broadcast.
“So I think it’s just going to take time,” he asserts. “It’s going to take alignment from the content owners. It’s going to take platform awareness,” and standardization will be important in opening up any walled gardens so buyers can run their ads across all of their partners. “That supply of those units [such as squeeze backs] can be commoditized versus locked into these walled gardens.”
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