Last week, CableLabs was host to 24 vendors and various cable operators and programmers during an advanced advertising interop at CableLabs’ Louisville headquarters near Denver.
The interop was held in conjunction with CableLabs, the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers’ DVS/Working Group 5 and Canoe Ventures. SCTE President and CEO Mark Dzuban and CableLabs President and CEO Paul Liao have both said this year that they planned on more closely coordinating their two organizations’ efforts. Canoe Ventures is backed by the nation’s six largest cable operators and was designed to facilitate cable adverting on a targeted, nationwide basis.
At the recent event, CableLabs said cable and programming executives attended demonstrations by the 24 participating companies and saw first-hand the companies’ end-to-end interoperability for a variety of ad formats, including interactivity – such as voting and polling and request for information applications – ad insertion in VOD content, ad insertion in linear content, telescoping and graphic overlays on VOD content. Some of the formats were enhanced with addressable advertising.
The vendors also demonstrated their ability to interoperate with one another using content formats and interfaces that meet the Advanced Advertising 1.0 specification jointly developed and released earlier this year by CableLabs and Canoe Ventures.
Advanced Advertising 1.0 standards and specifications allow cable companies to provide more innovative types of advanced ads on cable’s growing digital platform with consistent technologies, metrics and interfaces across a national footprint.
“We are extremely pleased with the enthusiasm of the vendor community for implementing a common, end-to-end architecture that will enable compelling new advertising products,” said Don Dulchinos, CableLabs’ senior vice president of advertising and interactive services. “The great turnout shows the increasing momentum behind the MSO and Canoe efforts to adopt standards that allow for the delivery of new ad forms to a national footprint.”
Companies in attendance included: Alcatel-Lucent, Arris, Avail-TVN, BigBand Networks, BlackArrow, Cisco, Concurrent, Ensequence, FourthWall Media (formerly Biap), Motorola, NBC Universal, NDS, Nielsen Claritas, OpenTV, RGB Networks, SeaChange, Sigma Systems, Softel, Strategy and Technology, Tandberg Television, ThinkAnalytics, This Technology, UniSoft and Visible World.
“This unprecedented collaboration among CableLabs, Canoe, SCTE and the vendor community moves us closer to our common vision. With standards, we can finally scale our products and offer national reach for marketers using our advanced ad products,” said Arthur Orduña, chief technology officer of Canoe Ventures.
Guests included representatives from BendBroadband, Cable Europe Labs, Cablevision, Canoe Ventures, Comcast, Comcast Spotlight, Cox, Disney/ESPN, Harris Broadcast Communications, NBC Universal, NCTA, Starz, Texscan, Time Warner Cable and Turner.
The vendor’s products included ad campaign managers, ad decision services, content information systems, placement opportunity systems, subscriber information systems, enhanced TV streamers, EBIF user agents and ad splicers. Using those products, groups of vendors demonstrated the end-to-end process of delivering a variety of ad formats.
CableLabs said the platform also enables customer response information to be aggregated (with no personally identifiable information exposed) through a common measurement format and shared with either the cable operator or the advertiser.
“This interop highlights the progress of interoperability based on SCTE 130 standards and CableLabs SaFI specs, which will enable the delivery of advanced ad forms that include interactivity and addressability,” said Paul Woidke, senior vice president and general manager of advanced advertising for OpenTV and chairman of DVS/Working Group 5, the SCTE committee that is working on advanced advertising.
CableLabs hosted another advanced advertising interop in June that drew 14 participants.
