Verance Technology Overcomes Risks of Dynamic Ad Insertion in SVOD Content

Verance developed a “mechanism” for addressing the risks of fingerprint-based dynamic advertising insertion (DAI) technologies marring subscription VOD content viewing, said the company Thursday. It enables over-the-top services to “privately identify their content to TVs” to safeguard their content against audience measurement functionality while preventing insertion of unauthorized dynamic ads, said Verance. With DAI technologies newly “baked” into smart TVs, subscription VOD services and TV makers worry about the risk of “ads or measurement functions meant for broadcast being mistakenly placed into the streams” of OTT video services, it said. “We believe this will create a path forward for the subscription VOD and ad-supported broadcast worlds to co-exist,” said Verance CEO Nil Shah. Though TV makers are able to deactivate automatic content recognition (ACR) when apps run natively on a smart TV, “they currently have no way to do that for SVOD content played or casted from devices connected to the TV via HDMI,” said Verance. “SVOD content is indistinguishable from broadcast content when each is received from attached devices including media sticks, set-top boxes and A/V receivers.” With broadcast TV becoming more interactive through the advent of platforms like ATSC 3.0, it’s important for TVs “to have more advanced ACR technology,” said Verance. “We not only need to know what content each person is watching but how it is being distributed,” said Shah. “If I am watching Seinfeld on Netflix and hit pause or playback, that shouldn’t be an opportunity for an ad that is supposed to appear in broadcast syndication to play and ruin my ad-free viewer experience on a subscription service.”