Dynamic ad insertion that holds up on live television.

What dynamic ad insertion is

Dynamic ad insertion (DAI) replaces the ads in a video stream with ads chosen for each viewer at the moment of the break. Done on the server (server-side ad insertion, SSAI), the ad is stitched into the stream itself: it plays like broadcast, it cannot be blocked by the client, and it scales to millions of concurrent viewers because the player sees one continuous stream. Client-side insertion (CSAI) hands the decision to the app and pays for it in buffering, blocking and inconsistency. For live television, SSAI is the only approach that survives contact with a real audience.

What has to work

• Break detection. SCTE-35 markers in the source signal, and reliable handling when they are late, missing or wrong.
• Manifest manipulation. Per-session HLS and DASH manifests that swap content segments for ad segments without a glitch at the splice.
• Ad decisioning. VAST and VMAP requests to FreeWheel, Google Ad Manager or another decision server, with targeting and frequency capping applied per viewer.
• Pod construction and slate. Filling the break to the second, and falling back to slate when demand is short, so the stream never goes dark.
• Ad transcoding. Creatives conditioned to match the content ladder in codec, bitrate and timing, so the splice is invisible.
• Beaconing and measurement. Impression and quartile tracking that reconciles with the ad server and the sales team’s numbers.
• Latency and failover. Decisions made inside the live window, and a path to continue the stream when any piece of the ad chain fails.

What we build

The whole chain, or the piece of it you are missing: SSAI for live and on-demand, the integrations to your ad server, the measurement pipeline, and the operations tooling to see every break as it happens. We also audit existing deployments, and we prepare platforms for live sports, where the breaks are unpredictable and the inventory is worth the most.

Experience

The Velostream team designed and operated dynamic ad insertion across the Vidgo lineup of more than 500 live channels, integrated with FreeWheel and Google Ad Manager, on a platform certified to carry ESPN networks. The same engineers have built streaming systems for Fox and Disney. The team works from Salt Lake City, Utah.

Why it pays

Live inventory, and live sports inventory in particular, commands a multiple of on-demand rates, but only when the insertion is clean. Every missed marker, dark break or unreconciled impression is revenue the platform already earned and could not bill. The engineering is the difference.