The concept of server-guided ad insertion (SGAI), first introduced by Hulu in 2019, is getting increasingly popular in the industry. It is markedly more scalable than the traditional server-side (SSAI) approach, but nearly as resilient. It is more interoperable and more resilient than the client-side (CSAI) approach but is nearly as efficient and versatile.

Client-side graphic overlays are to a degree a reincarnation of the banner ads plaguing the web since the ’90’s. Their main use is not necessarily ad-related — they are used in a variety of roles from station identification to localization to emergency notification. Their traditional implementation in the video was inserting them in baseband (i.e., pre-transcoder) in a playout system, which is the least scalable and the highest-latency approach possible in the video world. The streaming ecosystem has standardized and maturing support for SGAI. Interstitials are used to implement the approach in HLS. XLink was used in the original MPEG DASH implementation of the approach; however, XLink suffers from a number of design flaws and was never widely implemented in context of live channels and events. Media Presentation Insertion, a recent addition to MPEG DASH, revisits this concept and allows spawning a new media presentation while pausing the main channel. As opposed to HLS interstitials, media presentation insertion allows asynchronous termination (“return to network”), supports VAST tracking, and more. The same server-guided model can be applied to the overlay use case and has a potential to improve scalability, targeting, and glass-to-glass latency in a dramatic way. This talk will first describe the new MPEG-DASH media presentation description approach and its application to SGAI and blackouts. It will then cover the application of the same principles to the graphic overlays in MPEG-DASH. This presentation will conclude with a description and a demo of an open-source implementation of both technologies. This talk was presented at Demuxed 2024, a conference by and for engineers working in video. Every year we host a conference with lots of great new talks like this in San Francisco. Learn more at https://demuxed.com