Assets

Conditioning of Ads

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. The channel format specs are adjusted automatically once your Live or VoD source content is ingested initially.

By conditioning ad content we can not only guarantee a user experience from a qualitative perspective (such as audio level normalization), but assure stream integrity so that an ad cannot "break" a user's streaming experience. We have an ad-asset-management to allow the 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 coincide with the known insertion points. We support the acquisition and encoding of VOD content as part of our service which optionally includes frame-accurate segment conditioning.

Media workflows consist of the following features:

1. Downloading an asset from an Ad server (pre-ingested or from the VAST response)

2. QC of the Asset

3. Multi-Bitrate Encoding

4. Audio Normalization (Loudness Normalisation following EBU standards)

5. Multiformat Packaging in DASH, HLS (Static, JITP)

6. Streaming delivery via Origin / CDN (Azure)

7. Cloud Storage

You can manage the ads and contents you are using to enable VoD and Live channels to your customers in the Asset section.

Creating and Maintaining Assets

There are different kinds of Assets that are created by different processes:

• Ads will be created when a previously unknown ad is returned from an ad server. It will be downloaded and conditioned in the format that fits your channel.

• Ad slates will be created when you add a new live channel via the user interface.

• Contents can be uploaded by Nowtilus and later on be used as part of your playlists to build VoD channels.

Assets consist of the following sections:

1. The Title is the logical reference. It will hold general information about your ad, ad slate, or content.

2. A title can have multiple Media which represent a file on a storage or CDN. Media are differentiated in the types of source and deliverables. Sources are unprocessed entities e.g. the ad that was downloaded from the ad server. Deliverables are already processed and are available to be stitched into your channels.

3. A title can have multiple Jobs. They represent the process that is running in the background to produce ads, ad slates, or content that exactly fit into your channel settings.

It is always possible that issues occur. To get insights you will get deeper insights in the Job section of the Asset. You can navigate to the details to get insights on the issue that occurred.

We also recommend you activate the notification in case a Job failed in https://admin.serverside.ai/app/settings/profile

As a Professional Service project we can integrate with the encoding workflow of your choice.