Multichannel News reported yesterday that ESPN has come up with a method for dynamically inserting mid-roll ads into their live video content on ESPN360. The proprietary technology, developed by Disney Interactive Media Group is a major development as the ability to deliver live advertising from a third party without manually inserting it from the source has been a holy grail for live streaming providers for years.
No one can do this yet, the largest live video provider MLB.com has for years been manually slating video during commercial breaks, at the expense of potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue if they had a live ad solution, but still hasn’t figured out how to do dynamic ad-insertion. If ESPN has truly figured out a way to make it work, and as they claim they can now serve 15 and 30 second pods inside live streaming video, it will signal a major shift in the way live online video is monetized.
The trick with dynamically inserting advertising is that to do it well there are two major obstacles. First, it needs to be done in such a way that there is minimal interruption and the best possible experience for the end user. This means that when there is a break in the action a call needs to be made to an ad server and delivered flawlessly, without any pause or buffering, similar to the way advertising appears on TV.
For this to occur, end users must have sufficient bandwidth that they can view two streams simultaneously, with the advertising pre-buffered playing on top, and the live feed underneath (requiring, one could expect, at least a downstream connection of 800Kbps – 1000Kbps for decent looking video).
Second, it needs to scale to a high number of simultaneous viewers very quickly. I have never seen an video advertising platform (including the largest ones like DART) that can instantly scale to deliver live advertising 10,000 plus simultaneous viewers. If ESPN has truly figured this out, they may well be the first. And this would change the way content is monetized online.
So while we’ll need to wait to see how and if ESPN’s solution works (they’re not revealing much as can be imagined), if they have truly done what they say they have, the technology will catapult them to the forefront of live video on the internet, and we may soon see others licensing the solution from them.
Move Networks is their video provider, so did they have anything to do with this?
ESPN hasn’t said much about the technology other than that it’s proprietary and they appear to have developed it independently.
I’m sure Move is involved in the integration in some way some way since they deliver ESPN360 content. I’d also be interested to know how Black Arrow, which works closely with Move for ad serving is involved if at all. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.