What Is SGAI and What Are the Benefits for Live and VOD?
Server-guided ad insertion (SGAI) has been called the “best of both worlds” in a streaming adtech world long split between client-side ad insertion (CSAI) and server-side ad insertion (SSAI), and of course it’s more than squeezebacks and other frame-sharing ad formats with which it’s commonly associated. But what is it exactly? And what does it offer for live and VOD streaming? Moderator Nadine Krefetz, Google’s Sourya Roy, Muxed’s David Hassoun, and Paramount’s Jarred Wilichinsky discuss the answer to these questions in this clip from May’s Streaming Media Connect.
Defining SGAI
Contributing Editor, Streaming Media, and Reality Software Consultant Nadine Krefetz opens the discussion by prompting the panelists to answer the question, What is SGAI?
Google Senior Product Manager Sourya Roy provides the definition: SGAI is a hybrid approach to ad insertion that combines the seamless viewing experience of SSAI, which is now very popular, with the ease of use and troubleshooting of CSAI. “So in a nutshell, what [SGAI] does is, it takes the best parts of SSAI and it takes the best part of CSAI and … decouples the playback of the content [from] the ad stream,” Roy says. “[L]et’s say the player is playing a content manifest, and separately the player can play an ad manifest that does not need to be stitched directly into the content manifest.”
SGAI’s Particular Benefits for VOD
Krefetz states that SGAI offers benefits for VOD in particular and asks the panelists to explore them.
Founder of RealEyes Media and SVTA Advertising Working Group Co-Chair David Hassoun notes that one of the most powerful benefits with SGAI for VOD is that “you normally would have to resolve all your ads up upfront, and that can have an impact on your video start time or create more complex solutions.” SGAI “resolves the ads just in time, and it doesn’t matter if it’s VOD or live.” He continues, “And just in general, I think Sourya really hit a lot of the key points, but the idea here is that it allows you to have a noncritical path for your ads and your content so that if you’re having a problem with your ads, you don’t lose out on your content.” SGAI enables simultaneous streaming of content and ads, removing restrictions associated with single-stream ad insertion, Hassoun adds.
An Operations Perspective
Krefetz turns to Paramount SVP of Global Digital Ad Operations Jarred Wilichinsky to ask, “Jarred, so if you’ve got the ad decisioning happening just in time, what does it mean for the operation side, for instance?”
Wilichinsky asserts that from an operations standpoint, SGAI maintains similar responsibilities whether ads are called upfront or in real-time, but offers opportunities for increased revenue by refreshing bid requests during ad breaks, particularly in VOD. Live is all in real time, he explains—you have a break, make an ad call, and “maybe you’re prefetching the next break if you know what it is or you’re just doing another real-time [call]. But VOD, I think as David said, if you have a movie, you’re decisioning 10 to 12 breaks at [the] start.” He brings up doing a snapshot in time: “What are all my bids at this exact moment … which might be really good or it might be really bad. And if you decoupled doing it all upfront and you treat it a little bit more like live, you go from break to break—that’s new bid requests, new bid requests, new bid requests, and you have the opportunity to get more revenue.” He underscores that from an ad ops or ad revenue viewpoint, “It could be revenue positive in the right circumstances to keep refreshing those bids, especially if you have to throw bids out because of brand frequency capitals or categories or whatnot.”
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