Addressable TV

Introduction to Addressable TV

INTRODUCTION

Icareus Suite enables broadcasters to maximise their revenue with Addressable TV formats. Icareus Suite in collaboration with Icareus Playout can be used to trigger and synchronise Display Ads and replace the broadcasted commercials with online ads.
Supported Ad formats are:
  1. Active Ad (Interactive Display ad synchronised with the linear broadcast ad)
  2. SwitchIn Ad (Display ad that is shown when a user switches to your channel)
  3. VideoSwap (Replacing a broadcast linear ad with an ad from Internet, ad servers)
The base requirement is that Icareus Addressable TV Library is loaded by a HbbTV autostart application on the channel on which the ads should be shown. Icareus Launcher Application includes this.

FLOW

The basic flow of Addressable TV campaigns is as follows:
  1. Launcher application is loaded on the terminal and it starts to listen to triggers (stream-events) from the active channel
  2. Icareus Playout sends the trigger based on e.g. video playout or ad platform (integration is needed)
  3. Once the trigger is received by the Launcher app with Icareus Addressable TV Library, Icareus Suite is checked for the validity of the campaign
  4. Ad is shown and reported

Components


A) Inputs

In order to synchronise the campaign with TV Spots, it's necessary in some cases to ingest advertising playlists and EPG data, or manually configure correct ad ids to Icareus Suite.
Icareus Suite provides API to ingest advertising data to Suite. This data can be ingested both for Active Ads and Video Swap advertising. The parsing of data can be customized based on the what the broadcaster/customer can provide as input. This is usually in the form of XML or TXT files. The files can be pushed to suite campaigns via HTTP API. The data can also be manually input (for Video Swap).

Once the data has been parsed with file upload or manually input, the advertising campaigns are automatically updated with the advert data. This can include information about the launch times, durations and IDs of the ads.
Please refer to details in Active AD and VideoSwap configuration pages.

B) Delivery of Ads

Campaign data that is present on Suite is available via CDN to requesting clients. This can include both the meta data and even content of the campaign (banner images, videos). The data is served via CDN and is cached there to optimize the serving for numerous requests coming from devices.

C) Data sychronization between Icareus Suite and head-end at broadcaster premises

The campaign data available on Suite is pulled by Icareus Playout servers to synchronize information about the valid campaigns and the channels they are running on. This way, for triggering adverts, the Playout always has up-to-date data on what to trigger on which channels. This is a regular scheduled update job that is running at intervals on Icareus Playout.

D) Triggering ActiveAd and VideoSwap formats

Once campaign data has been configured between Icareus Suite and Icareus Playout server on the broadcaster's head-end campaigns can be triggered. Each trigger would mean that a display ad or dynamic ad insertion is done on Smart TVs at correct times. Usually these ad formats are synchronised with TV Spots, but can as well be with TV shows.