5 Best Practices to Unlock the Full Value of Streaming with Dynamic Ad Insertion
In today’s competitive streaming environment, content quality alone isn’t enough to win. Broadcasters are tasked with providing premium viewing experiences and capturing the full monetization potential of every stream. This is where Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) becomes more than just a technical feature, but a strategic lever for maximizing revenue.
DAI is where broadcasters should be looking, but doing it well means more than just stitching ads. Its true power lies in how effectively it can scale across platforms, adapt to all devices, and maintain high-quality ad delivery under pressure.
Here are five essential strategies to help streaming providers extract the most value from DAI.
1. Prioritize a Seamless, Personalized Viewer Experience
Make Ads Relevant Through Addressability
In an age of digital media, simply showing one ad to all isn’t enough. Viewers and advertisers expect relevance. Addressability ensures that ads are not just targeted but also measurable. When broadcasters enable precise, real-time audience targeting, advertisers are more likely to invest, especially in high-value connected TV (CTV) environments.
Eliminate Disruptions
Seamless transitions between content and ads are essential. Poor transitions, like audio spikes, blank slates, or mismatched resolution, can lead to viewer frustration and drop-offs. Best practices to avoid these include:
- Pre-transcoding ad creatives.
- Accurate placement of SCTE-35 ad markers.
- Co-locating ads and content on the same CDN.
A high-quality ad experience builds viewer trust and protects overall content value.
2. Expand Reach with Broad Device and Protocol Support
Cover All Streaming Protocols
DAI needs to work everywhere the audience is watching. That means supporting key streaming protocols like HLS and MPEG-DASH, ensuring broadcaster priorities over things like DRM do not affect their ability to monetize. Support for HLS Interstitials and MPEG-DASH Events is increasingly essential to support the next generation of DAI, which will be powered by server-guided ad insertion (SGAI).
Don’t Ignore Legacy Devices
Pre-2020 smart TVs and older devices often lack modern ad-insertion support. However, they still account for a sizable chunk of viewership. By enabling server-side ad insertion (SSAI) on older hardware, broadcasters can unlock previously inaccessible revenue.
Bottom line: If DAI can’t reach every screen, it’s leaving money on the table.
3. Unlock and Optimize New Ad Inventory
Capitalize on Live Moments
Live events can offer unmatched reach and engagement, but monetization requires agility. Contingency ad-pods can be inserted during unexpected breaks, opening additional inventory without interfering with pre-scheduled ad slots. Contingency ad-pods enable media companies to insert a quick ad during a stoppage, such as an injury timeout, thereby gaining extra ROI for their sports rights.
Maximize the Value of Pop-Up Channels
Temporary channels for one-off events are often neglected when it comes to advanced advertising, as they traditionally require extra infrastructure. Today’s orchestration tools enable efficient monetization of these channels, meaning an editor can manage and monetize multiple channels simultaneously, allowing broadcasters to scale across events without additional overhead.
Tap Into Rewind Viewing
Yospace sees around 12% of live viewers enter rewind mode during streaming sessions. Without DAI, ad breaks in these rewinds go unmonetized. Server-Guided Ad Insertion (SGAI) makes monetization of these “historic” ad breaks much more feasible, as it requires less server power than other ad stitching methods.
Leverage New Ad Formats
SGAI also makes it easier to apply ad formats like pause ads, side-by-side ads, and L-shaped banners to create new ad opportunities that generate incremental revenue.
4. Prepare for Scale with Smarter Infrastructure
Utilize Prefetch in Live Streams
In high-stakes moments, like a game-winning goal seconds before an ad break, viewer volume can spike instantly. Take the recent final of the UEFA Women’s Euro 2025 Soccer tournament between England and Spain as an example:
- Spain’s opening goal in the 25th minute drove a 17% increase in viewership within 60 seconds.
- England’s equaliser drove a 57% increase, also in under a minute.
- The game ended in a draw and went into overtime, with an extra 30 minutes played, followed by a high-drama penalty shootout.
- This created a series of extra, high-value ad breaks which were not planned for in the original schedule.
- By the end of the penalty shoot-out, the audience had increased threefold compared to the kick-off.
With prefetch applied, ad revenues can be maximized by calculating the ad requests the adtech ecosystem can handle at any given time and providing sufficient time for each ad request to deliver maximum value.
Without prefetch, ad requests can time out, leading to blank slates and missed revenue at the most valuable moments. Prefetch anticipates these moments and lines up ads, allowing the system to scale rapidly. So, if a sports event is anywhere near as dramatic as that Euro 2025 final, a sophisticated DAI solution integrating Prefetch is needed to handle those increases in scale.
5. Ensure Accurate, Transparent Measurement
Track Views, Not Stitches Alone
Advertisers often don’t care how many ads were stitched into streams; they care about what was actually viewed. Pairing SSAI or SGAI with client-side tracking provides advertisers with the detailed metrics they expect, as well as the metrics that will encourage them to spend more on CTV, including impressions, viewability, completion rates, and more.
These principles must be applied wherever the viewer is watching to achieve full monetization. That includes owned and operated apps across all devices, as well as syndication via third-party endpoints.
Monitor in Real Time
DAI systems should offer real-time dashboards to monitor:
- Ad-transcoding delays.
- SSP timeouts.
- Fill rates.
- VAST errors.
This visibility allows broadcasters to troubleshoot issues and adjust campaigns on the fly. Case in point: DIRECTV achieved its highest-ever fill rate by actively monitoring and optimizing its DAI workflow in real time.
The Bottom Line: Scale, Trust, and Always-On Revenue
DAI should be recognized and treated as a critical component of streaming infrastructure. To fully unlock its potential, it must be scalable, reliable, and integrated across platforms and workflows. From addressing legacy device limitations to monetizing time-shifted content, the success of a DAI strategy is measured by how completely it captures value from every viewer interaction.
In the end, it’s simple: the more complete the DAI coverage, the more complete the monetization. That’s how to ensure no revenue can slip through the cracks.
[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from Yospace. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]
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