Broadcast Ad Insertion – Linear & Second Screen
October 5, 2013 – At the Screen in the Home conference held by the Santa Clara Valley IEEE Communication Society and Consumer Electronics Society, they were lucky enough to be able to have a presentation by IEEE BTS Distinguished Lecturer Patrick Waddell of Harmonic Corp, to speak on Broadcast ad insertion. This technology was primarily focused on the two markets of linear content insertion for national broadcast and local / regional broadcast ads. The involvement of second screens, and regionalized IPTV rebroadcast has changed the complexity of the ad insertion flow and the hardware / software needed to provide this service.
The ad insertion system has evolved from the analog relm where content insertion was linearly submitted into the single data stream. In current digital systems involves splicing into a digital domain stream that is encoded and compressed without decoding/re-encoding and decompressing / re-compressing the data stream and then reintroducing it to the digital domain network prior to the mutiplex distribution network and transcoders. The full system is built around SCTE standards #35, #104, #30 and #67.
The presentation by Patrick covered the whole flow as an overview and included the new technology for going to the multiple formats of second screen, the need for meta data and the simplification/unification of the streaming environment with the use of MPEG DASH vs mutiple protocol standards. The slides for his talk can be found at the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society Chapter web site for past event at –http://ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/ce/meetings/comsec-ces/index.html
