LOUISVILLE, Colo. – CableLabs hosted 14 companies at an Addressable Advertising Interfaces interoperability event the week of June 1 at its laboratories here. The event included multi-vendor interoperability testing for dynamic VOD ad insertion and other addressable advertising technologies. Second in a series, the event is part of the ongoing technical support CableLabs is providing to enable new forms of advertising on cable networks.
Participating companies demonstrated interoperability among their products based on Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) 130 standards for advanced digital advertising and CableLabs’ Stewardship and Fulfillment Interface (SaFI) standards for advanced advertising. The interop demonstrated the ability to dynamically insert ads into VOD avails based on addressability.
“We greatly appreciate continued vendor support of MSO interest in an end-to-end architecture that can support a variety of advanced advertising products,” added Don Dulchinos, Senior Vice President, Advanced Platforms at CableLabs.
“The collaborative effort by companies in this interop, as well as others in SCTE Digital Video Working Group 5, is helping to greatly refine and validate common standards for advanced advertising,” said Paul Woidke, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Advanced Advertising for OpenTV, and Chairman of DVS/Working Group 5, the SCTE committee that is working on addressable advertising.
The participating companies were ARRIS, BIAP, BlackArrow, Cisco Systems, Concurrent, Ensequence, Motorola, OpenTV, RGB Networks, Sigma Systems, TANDBERG Television (Part of the Ericsson Group), This Technology, TVN Entertainment, and UniSoft Corporation.
The vendors’ products included ad campaign managers, ad decision servers, and information systems that segment subscribers, organize content, and define advertising placement opportunities. By coming together, the vendors were able to demonstrate critical components in an end-to-end process showing how an advertisement can be selected, dynamically inserted into an on-demand programming stream, and delivered to a digital television customer. The customer responses can then be processed for fulfillment and/or aggregated (with no personally identifiable information exposed) through a common measurement format and shared with either the cable operator or the advertiser.
The week culminated with vendor demonstrations, which were observed by business and technical executives from several cable operators and programming providers, along with experts from Canoe Ventures LLC. Both SCTE 130 and CableLabs’ SaFI interfaces are elements of the Advanced Advertising 1.0 specification recently announced as a joint effort of Canoe Ventures and CableLabs.
“We are very pleased with the strong, ongoing show of support from the vendor community for the Advanced Advertising 1.0 specification,” said Arthur Orduna, CTO of Canoe Ventures. “The increasing number of compliant products and the significant progress being made by leading technology providers are critical elements to making the advanced advertising market real for all players.”
This interoperability event was the second in a series of Advanced Advertising activities that CableLabs has supported and hosted in 2008 and 2009. Using SCTE 130 and SaFI as a framework, CableLabs and participating vendors will work to further the technology to enable additional Advanced Advertising applications and to test additional parts of the standard as they near completion. Vendors who have a competency in digital ad insertion, placement or management should contact Sheila Keller, Vendor Relations Program Coordinator at CableLabs, for information on how to participate in future interoperability events.
CableLabs’ interoperability events provide vendors with an informal, laboratory setting in which they have the opportunity to test their latest products within CableLabs’ headends and testing environment, determine compliance with industry specifications, and observe the performance of their products as they interoperate with other devices in an end-to-end system. There is no charge to participate in Advanced Advertising interoperability events.
Information on all CableLabs activities focused on advanced advertising technology, along with information on industry standards, may be found at http://advancedadvertising.tv/
Founded in 1988 by members of the cable television industry, Cable Television Laboratories is a non-profit research and development consortium that is dedicated to pursuing new cable telecommunications technologies and to helping its cable operator members integrate those advancements into their business objectives. Cable operators from around the world are members. CableLabs maintains web sites at www.cablelabs.com; www.packetcable.com; www.cablemodem.com; www.cablenet.org; and www.opencable.com.
