Ad conditioning and asset management
Overview
This guide explains how Serverside.ai conditions ads, manages assets, and handles encoding and delivery for VoD and live channels.
Ad conditioning
Serverside.ai offers pre-integrated media services for ad conditioning and provides built-in workflows to encode, package, and deliver video creatives and content assets. Channel format specifications are automatically adjusted once your live or VoD source content is initially ingested.
By conditioning ad content, we can not only ensure a high-quality user experience, for example, audio level normalization, but also maintain stream integrity, preventing an ad from "breaking" a user's viewing experience. We provide an ad asset management system that allows preloading of ad assets as part of the ad trafficking process by your ad operations teams.
To achieve frame-accurate ad insertion, your VoD encoding should ensure that segment boundaries align with the known insertion points. As part of our service, we support the acquisition and encoding of VoD content, which can optionally include frame-accurate segment conditioning.
Media workflows
Media workflows consist of the following features:
- Downloading an asset from an ad server (pre-ingested or from the VAST response)
- QC of the asset
- Multi-bitrate encoding
- Audio normalization (loudness normalisation following EBU standards)
- Multiformat packaging in DASH, HLS (static, JITP)
- Streaming delivery via origin/CDN (Azure)
- Cloud storage
You can manage the ads and content used to enable VoD and live channels for your customers in the Assets section.
Asset management
There are different types of assets, created through different processes:
- Ads: ads are created when a previously unknown ad is returned from an ad server. The ad is downloaded and conditioned in the format that matches your channel.
- Ad slates: ad slates are created when you add a new live channel via the user interface.
- Contents: contents can be uploaded by Nowtilus and later used as part of your playlists to build VoD channels.
Assets consist of the following sections:
- Title: the logical reference that holds general information about your ad, ad slate, or content.
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Media: a title can have multiple media items, each representing a file on storage or a CDN. Media are differentiated by type:
- Sources are unprocessed entities, for example, ads downloaded from an ad server.
- Deliverables are processed files, ready to be stitched into your channels.
- Jobs: a title can have multiple jobs, representing background processes that produce ads, ad slates, or content that exactly fit your channel settings.
Issues may occur at any time. To investigate, view detailed information in the Jobs section of the asset. We also recommend enabling notifications to be alerted if a job fails.
As a professional services project, we can integrate with your preferred encoding workflow.