BlackArrow, a provider of advertising systems for television platforms, has announced new technology that blends the outputs from traditional linear TV ad systems with dynamic ad insertion capabilities. The BlackArrow technology enables pay TV operators to monetize linear TV delivered to tablets and other IP devices in a number of ways.
The technology was demonstrated at the CableLabs Linear and IP Ad Interop event in Louisville, CO. last month. Collectively called Linear Extensions for Dynamic Ad Insertion, the system bridges the gap between traditional linear TV ad sales and ad execution on new platforms to extend pay television advertising to new screens.
It features a combination of services that manage linear schedules, linear placement opportunities, ad decisioning, subscriber and zone information services, as well as services that work in tandem with the new CableLabs Event Signaling and Messaging (ESAM) specification.
BlackArrow said these include linear replication, which uses linear schedule ingest and real-time dynamic ad insertion to replicate, on tablets and IP devices, the original linear TV ads; and linear addressability, which combines subscriber information from the BlackArrow Subscriber Information Service product and real-time dynamic ad insertion to deliver household-addressable linear TV advertising to any platform.
Working together with other leading vendors and leveraging ESAM and SCTE 130 standards, BlackArrow showed how the new technology interoperates with downstream signal acquisition, encoding, packaging and manifest proxy providers.
It provides, the company said, an end-to-end system for delivering and monetizing live and linear adjustable bit rate (ABR) IP streams to multiple screens.
At the Interop, the POIS component of the BlackArrow solution crossreferenced in-band signaling metadata delivered within the live TV feed against expected ad opportunities scheduled by a traditional linear ad system. This allowed encoder vendors to ensure the stream was conditioned properly for seamless ad insertion.
For packager vendors, the BlackArrow system provided the necessary metadata to be encapsulated within the stream to inform the ad decision process. The SIS and ADS components of the solution were used to select the appropriate ad — in the Linear Replication scenario, the same ad that aired during the original TV broadcast, and in the Linear Addressability scenario, a new addressable, dynamically inserted ad.
“Monetizing live and time-shifted television across multiple screens should not require individual silos for each platform,” said Joe Matarese, CTO of BlackArrow. “Linear Extensions, coupled with the sophisticated business rule and policy definition capabilities of our placement opportunity information service, provide multichannel video programming distributors with a single, standards-based platform for all of their multiscreen advertising needs.”
