Verizon Media enhances core platform to maximise reach and revenues
Details
Joseph O'Halloran
| 21 April 2020

New real-time streaming, distribution and advertising capabilities, including server-side Prebid technology, have been added to Verizon Media’s streaming platform to enable broadcasters, content owners and service providers to grow audiences and monetise content in new ways.

The new features include advanced advertising tools designed to improve transparency in the bidding process and track ad performance. Verizon Media Smartplay Prebid is a server-side integration that is said to expose inventory and conduct auctions faster with more demand partners using an open-source framework. The solution aims to open up content owner supply to more demand partners, allows for fair market competition, and provides visibility into content value with price transparency.

“Until now there has been a generally accepted order of operations in filling ad supply that has not always maximised the value of a publisher's inventory,” explained Ariff Sidi, general manager at Verizon Media Platform. “Prebid addresses that by calling out to demand partners in an open and transparent fashion, maximising value and providing transparency in the bidding process.”

Verizon Media is also enhancing advertising data and analytics to provide customers a deeper understanding of ad performance. Ad Data helps technical teams highlight any errors, timeouts, and tracking issues after they occur which Ad Analytics allows content publishers to identify and respond to trends in ad performance and segment data by areas such as environment, device, and demand partner.

Verizon Media Control aims to address the needs of content publishers who wish to maximise audience reach and want their content seen by viewers on the broadest range of platforms. The new feature makes it possible to curate content, simulate live channels and syndicate to multiple platforms within a single platform. Channel Scheduling allows content owners to create virtual live linear experiences using assets from a VOD library, a live feed, or a live event. This eliminates the need for broadcast playout technologies to curate and develop new channels for their audiences. Output Syndication empowers content owners to publish streams directly to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Twitch.

Future enhancements will enable content owners to add elements of personalisation beyond ads and publish directly to dMVPD and OTT platforms, all of which can be done from a single user interface.

The Verizon Media platform also has enhanced ingest, encoding and CDN capabilities to deliver live content in 4K HDR, with the TV-like picture quality viewers expect. Recent testing of concurrent viewers on the platform has now reached the 10 million viewer threshold, surpassing the scale seen in recent large live events. A new real-time streaming feature, currently in beta, enables live event streaming with sub-second latency.