# Dynamic ad insertion engineering for live and on-demand video

Server-side ad insertion engineering for live and on-demand video, integrated with FreeWheel and Google Ad Manager, built by the team that ran dynamic ad insertion across more than 500 live channels.

## 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. 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.
- Ad transcoding: creatives conditioned to match the content ladder in codec, bitrate and timing.
- Beaconing and measurement: impression and quartile tracking that reconciles with the ad server.
- 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 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 prepare platforms for live sports.

## Experience

The Velostream team designed and operated dynamic ad insertion across the Vidgo lineup of more than 500 live channels (https://velostream.com/vidgo/), 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.

Contact: hello@velostream.com. HTML version: https://velostream.com/dynamic-ad-insertion/