Verizon Media will be discussing these new platform capabilities in more depth during its OTT Innovation Showcase on May 7.
Verizon Media has launched a range of capabilities to enable broadcasters, content owners and service providers to grow audiences and monetise content in new ways. These include advanced advertising tools that improve transparency in the bidding process and track ad performance. Additional features that maximise audience reach and enhance live event streaming have also been announced.
For advertising, Verizon Media Smartplay Prebid aims to expose inventory and conducts auctions faster with more demand partners using the prebid open-source framework. This low-risk solution is easy to implement and opens up content owner supply to more demand partners.
Verizon Media promises to enhance advertising data and analytics to provide customers with a deeper understanding of ad performance. Ad Data helps technical teams highlight any errors, timeouts, and tracking issues after they occur. Ad Analytics allows content publishers to identify and respond to trends in ad performance and segment data by areas such as environment, device, and demand partner.
For content control, Verizon Media Control offers optimised capabilities that make it possible to curate content, simulate live channels and syndicate to multiple platforms within a single platform.
Channel Scheduling allows content owners to create virtual live linear experiences using assets from their VOD library, a live feed, or a live event. This eliminates the need for expensive broadcast playout technologies to curate and develop new channels for their audiences.
Output Syndication empowers content owners to publish streams directly to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Twitch. Future enhancements will enable content owners to add elements of personalization beyond ads and publish directly to dMVPD and OTT platforms, all of which can be done from a single user interface.
The company has enhanced its ingest, encoding, and CDN capabilities which aims to deliver live content in 4K HDR, with the TV-like picture quality viewers expect.
Verizon Media provides a self-service dashboard for live event operators to stop and start events, trigger ad breaks, and create clips of the event. The dashboard has been updated with a new Live Event Markers feature, which enables operators to tag events of interest during any live event, for example scoring plays or end of quarter breaks. It publishes this metadata alongside the video streams, so content owners can design new features for on-screen overlays and interactivity.
Meanwhile, a new real-time streaming feature, currently in beta, enables live event streaming with sub-second latency.
Commenting on the enhancements, Ariff Sidi, General Manager at Verizon Media Platform, said: “Until now, there has been a generally accepted order of operations in filling ad supply that has not always maximised the value of a publisher’s inventory. Prebid addresses that by calling out to demand partners in an open and transparent fashion, maximising value and providing transparency in the bidding process.”
Sidi added, “In the future, we will be adding personalisation controls that will add an entirely new dimension to programming, redefining consumer expectations of TV.”
