On Demand: Standards Will Pave Path To Ad Scale

NEW YORK—On Demand Summit—Splicing and swapping ads into on-demand shows dynamically across platforms is clearly the future of “free” VOD  monetization, but the industry needs more common standards and practices to achieve true scale, panelists said at the advanced ad panel.

Prepping ads across dozens of formats, aspect ratios, metadata formats, and resolutions, with 4K on the horizon, has become “quite complex,” said Gregory Smith, general manager, Deluxe Advertising Services, in response to questions from panel moderator Dade Hayes, executive editor of Broadcasting & Cable.

Without those standards, it will be “unattainable” to execute advertising across platforms for those VOD inventories, he said.

Putting all of that together as video devices continue to proliferate “will be the key to success,” agreed Jon Shaver, senior director of content development at Comcast Wholesale, noting that many providers use different formats, requiring intermediaries between the MVPDs that are delivering the content and the advertisers and programmers.

For the full story go to Multichannel.com.