Channels/Streams
Last updated
Last updated
Go to your channels page https://staging.serverside.ai/app/ad-insertion/channels and click on the Add Channel button.
At first you have to decide if the channel you want to add is of type VoD or Live.
The Name and API-Key can be freely chosen. If no API-Key is provided we will use a random key.
Depending on the type of stream you selected (VoD or Live) we expect different types of sources.
Type
Description
Example
VoD
URL to one content from the MRSS you will use to request the ad-insertion
Live
URL to a live stream
After you entered your source URL click the Analyse button so we can gather the encoding and packaging format from your source. If you skip this step you will not be able to save your channel.
This section will appear after the analysis of your source is done. It is meant to perform advanced detailed adjustments to the encoding and packaging settings. In 99% of the cases, you can simply leave everything as it was analyzed by Serverside.ai and skip this section.
If you do not have an ad server configured already or do not have the exact settings at hand currently please leave everything as is to use the default Serverside.ai Equativ ad server. You can change these settings at any point of time later on.
You will receive an Ad Server URL after you finished setting up an account at Equativ, SpotX, FreeWheel, Google, or another ad server.
Depending on the ad server you select, default settings will be loaded to the Ad Source Parameters editor.
You can specify how many ads are displayed and how long the preroll will run.
If you desire to use a different ad server for your Prerolls you can use the Use dedicated ad-server toggle. Follow the instructions in section 4 to set it up.
If you want to add a Preroll to VoD channels define an ad break at position 0 seconds of your content in your MRSS.
If the ads that are returned from the ad server are in summary not exactly in the length of the ad break there will be a gap until the program continues. To prevent the stream from switching back to the rest of the original ads we introduced a concept called ad slates.
The ad slate will fill up the missing seconds to make the transition between ad-block and program seamlessly again.
If you do not have an ad slate in place yet you can choose the Serverside.ai default and change it later.
After selecting or uploading an ad slate an encoding and packaging job will start to run. Please stay on this page and wait until it has finished (usually within 1-2 minutes). Otherwise, the encoded asset will not be assigned as an ad slate to the content.
In the list view you can activate your channel by clicking the toggle button in the actions section.
It is important to understand that ad insertion will not work for the first ad block. We need to download all ads first from the ad server, encode and package them in the same formats as your channel and make them available on a CDN (Content Delivery Network). Depending on the number of ads that are available on your ad server that can take some time.
For testing, we highly recommend that you choose our example ad server with only a few ads that will quickly be conditioned for your channel by Serverside.ai.