Cable industry equipment vendors demonstrated interoperability among a variety of systems that need to work together in an advanced advertising ecosystem at CableLabs’ recent Advanced Advertising Interop.
The interop was designed specifically to test interfaces described by the SCTE 130 standards.
CableLabs called the event “a true working interop” in which new integration relationships were formed. In addition to ad insertion into linear channels, the participants demonstrated inserting addressable advertising into VOD content, as well as dynamic ETV application insertion.
“We are extremely encouraged to see the progress toward interoperability, not only in the VOD space but also in the linear space for advanced advertising,” said Terri Swartz, director of advertising technology at Cox Communications, who attended the open house event held Thursday during the interop.
Another goal of the interop was to develop profiles for SCTE 130 and the CableLabs Stewardship and Fulfillment Interfaces (SaFI).
“A new feature in this interop was our first use of an SCTE 130 emulator tool,” said Don Dulchinos, senior vice president of advertising and interactive services. “The tool will help us define recommended practices for SCTE 130 equipment, establish a roadmap toward better compliance testing, and ultimately help MSOs assemble scalable solutions for ad insertion.”
Participants included Alcatel-Lucent, Alticast, Arris, Avail-TVN, BigBand Networks, BlackArrow, FourthWall Media, Nielsen, OpenTV, SeaChange, Sigma Systems, Softel, Strategy and Technology (S&T), Texscan, This Technology and UniSoft.
The products involved included ad campaign managers, ad decision servers, ad managers, content information systems, placement opportunity systems, subscriber information services, content marking systems, ad splicers, ETV streamers, EBIF user agents, and ETV applications implementing the CableLabs SaFI specification, CableLabs said.
“The widespread adoption and implementation of these standards such as SCTE 130, as well as the SaFI specifications, are critical for Canoe’s market deployments,” said Arthur Orduña, CTO of Canoe Ventures.
The interop was held in conjunction with the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers’ DVS/Working Group 5 and Canoe Ventures, and the weeklong interop sought to further the capability to deliver new and compelling forms of advertising on cable.
