A Primer on SCTE-130 and IAB VAST

In the past year, I have been involved in building next generation advertising solutions based on SCTE-130 and IAB VAST standard. I have been asked countless times of what these standards are for and how they have been adopted. This blog is my attempt to give a brief introduction to SCTE-130 and IAB VAST, discuss how each standard is adopted in today’s advertising industry. In a second blog, I will discuss how these standards are different and discuss the possible convergence of both standards.

SCTE-130

What is SCTE-130

SCTE-130 is a standard from The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) aiming to build a unified platform for addressable advertising. SCTE-130 standard consists of a set of XML based protocols and will work in traditional cable deployment, i.e. setup boxes, for both linear and VOD programming.

Core Elements in SCTE-130

SCTE-130 consists of the following core elements and each of them plays a crucial part in selecting, playing, and tracking an ad.

Core Element	What does it do?
Ad Management Service (ADM)	Initiating ad insertion request to ADS Reporting activity events (whether ad was successfully placed, if the ad was skipped, etc)
Ad Decision service (ADS)	Deciding which ad to play
Content Information System (CIS)	Storing availability of an ad
Placement Opportunity Information System (POIS)	Storing the opportunities to place an ad
Subscriber Information System (SIS)	Storing subscriber related information, like demographic, geographic information

Who services Ads

Once a decision has been made on what ads to insert, the insertion device will insert the ads in the right place and will report back the activity events (whether ad was successfully placed, how much of the ad was viewed, paused, skipped, etc) to ADM.

Basic Flow for Ad Placement Decision and Tracking

In the following section, we will show the basic flow for two different types of ad insertions, VOD and schedule-based linear ad insertion.

VOD Ad Insertion

Schedule-based Linear Ad Insertion

Linear Ad insertion is typically based on a schedule that contains what Ad to play within a specific time window on a particular channel. For example, when an Ad placement opportunity comes in between 7-7:30 PM, play the soda ad.

IAB VAST

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 500 leading media and technology companies that are responsible for selling 86% of online Advertising in the United States.

What is IAB VAST

IAB’s Digital Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) is designed to standardize the communication protocol between online video player and Ad services.

What is in IAB VAST

1. Defines a standard ad response for in-stream video
2. Includes guidance for most on-demand video players (i.e., Adobe’s Flash, Microsoft’s Silverlight and Real Player)
3. Includes accommodations for linear video and interactive ads (e.g.”pre-roll”) as well as non-linear ads such as clickable banners and overlays
4. How to track ad playback

Who serves Ads

Online video player (Flash or Silverlight) is the one that carries out the actual Ad insertion.

Basic Flow for Ad Placement Decision and Tracking

What is not in IAB VAST

In contrast to SCTE-130 standard, IAB VAST defines what Ads to play, but not when to play it. It is up to the player to decide when to insert the Ads. The Media Abstract Sequencing Template (MAST) format specification proposed by Akamai is an attempt to address the sequencing of in-stream advertising content.

In short, VAST standard defines what Ads to play and MAST standard defines when to play Ads.

MAST has been widely supported by Flash Strobe Media Framework as well Microsoft Silverlight Media Framework.