LOS ANGELES - Verizon Media has launched a range of capabilities to enable broadcasters, content owners, and service providers to grow audiences and monetize content in new ways. These include advanced advertising tools that improve transparency in the bidding process and track ad performance. Additional features that maximize audience reach and enhance live event streaming have also been announced.

Advanced Advertising

Verizon Media Smartplay Prebid is a server-side integration that exposes inventory and conducts auctions faster with more demand partners using the prebid open-source framework. This low-risk solution is easy to implement and opens 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 maximized the value of a publisher's inventory,” said Ariff Sidi, General Manager at Verizon Media Platform. “Prebid addresses that by calling out to demand partners in an open and transparent fashion, maximizing 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. 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.

Content Control and Syndication

In order to maximize audience reach, content publishers want their content seen by viewers on the broadest range of platforms. Verizon Media Control addresses this need with optimized capabilities that make 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 their VOD library, a live feed, or a live event. This eliminates the need for expensive 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 personalization beyond ads and publish directly to dMVPD and OTT platforms, all of which can be done from a single user interface.

Sidi added, “In the future, we will be adding personalization controls that will add an entirely new dimension to programming, redefining consumer expectations of TV.”

Live Events

Already a leader in live event streaming, Verizon Media continues to provide a scalable platform backed by a managed service team. Verizon Media has enhanced its 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.

Verizon Media provides a self-service dashboard for live event operators to stop and start events, trigger ad breaks, and create clips of the event. The dashboard has been updated with a new Live Event Markers feature, which enables operators to tag events of interest during any live event, for example scoring plays or end of quarter breaks. It efficiently publishes this metadata alongside the video streams, so content owners can design new features for on screen overlays and interactivity.

Meanwhile a new Real-time Streaming feature, currently in beta, enables live event streaming with sub-second latency.

“Verizon Media’s massive global network and platform enables content publishers to reach broadcast-sized audiences with their OTT platforms and services. Customers are already using our streaming platform to reach millions of concurrent viewers anywhere in the world,” added Sidi. “At Super Bowl LIV, we were able to demo in-stadium experiences that saw latency faster than a television broadcast. This capability has opened up new use cases for interactivity, gamification, trivia, wagering, and 5G enabled experiences.”