MSV Advertising - The Video formats Part 2 Apple HLS

Source : Surfmobee: Vid.ly video views for 2011

Last blog I started with an overview of the market penetration of the various video formats. Here's the link msv-advertising-video-formats-part-1
In this blog I am going to focus specifically on the Apple format.


Where Apple HLS works and where it does not. 

Due to the increasing relevance of Apple as a computer, smartphone and tablet vendor this is a must support format in the Multi Screen Video space. Any Apple device or software from ios3.0 onwards supports HLS for video streaming. This basically covers:

1. Iphone 
2. Ipad 
3. MacOS (Apple Mac computers)
4. Safari (on Mac and PC) 
5. Android phones ( Ice cream sandwich onwards)*

More on Apple HLS introduction can be found here Apple HLS Introduction
So one question that arises is: "Can we just use HLS and have one format"? Well the answer is unfortunately NO (that may end up being HTML5 more on that later). There are a few other devices  that don't support HLS. For video delivery and particularly video delivery of premium content a few other platforms that are not covered by HLS are:

1.  Android smart phones and tablets. However starting with Android Ice cream sandwich version HLS support will be provided.
2. Windows PC's or basically web browsers such as Internet Explorer (of course Safari does work but the penetration of Safari on the PC is not very high)
3. Windows Smartphones 
4. Blackberry 
5. Traditional cable set top boxes

What is Apple HLS ?

HLS is Apples HTTP Live streaming format. Apples HLS format is used for streaming video to all Iphones, Ipads (all the Apple devices and computers basically). As mentioned in the basics section it's a streaming format so not all the video is downloaded by the player at one time and its adaptive bit rate, that is it can switch the quality of the video based on the bandwidth that it sees is available upto the video media player.
The streaming format has two major components. The manifest file that is downloaded first by the Apple player that tells what are the video chunks that need to be further downloaded to actually get video (it's basically a list of the next N chunks of video that should be obtained). The second part are the video chunks themselves. 

The standard is open and freely accessible. If you want more information on the format you can ask me and of course Apple has a lot information for example here Apple HLS format. 

What about Video Advertising in Apple HLS ?

There are a number of ways to support video ad insertion. These fall into two broad categories:
1. Client side
In this case the Media player on the device is aware of the ads and actually at the right points in the content asks a back end server what ad should be inserted. This in turn can be done in two ways. Either using a standard called IAB/VAST on a custom player or with a custom player that supports a proprietary format. (Side Note Microsoft's player and Adobes both natively support IAB/VAST). Thus if the client is going to do the ad insertion, you need to install a custom player on all the target devices. This is a major handicap to adoption. (Imagine trying to get millions of people to download your custom player or trying to distribute it yourself to all Apple devices).

2. Server Side
Here the client side media player is unaware that there are video advertisements that have been inserted into the video. There are a couple of different ways to do this and some clear advantages to following particular techniques. But at the end of the day the big deal is if you use this technique to put in the advertisements you DON'T have to upgrade the software on all the Apple devices (specifically install the custom media player) to make the advertisement insertion work.

Is that it for Apple HLS video streaming? Not quite.

There are a number of other topics that need to be thought through in order to do Apple video streaming. As I am focusing on video advertisements I have glossed over them here. These are:

1. Encoding - how you take the video that you originally have and convert it into Apple HLS. Both the live content or video and the ad copy.

2 Access control - Who can see the video feed. There are encryption technologies and SSO for user authentication. (Basically making sure the signal can't be hacked in transmission and that the right person has access to the content).

3. Client application - there is normally an application that the end user interacts with that is built. This can be a pure web application or a client application on the Apple device.

However in the US many content providers/content distributors have solved the issue of streaming video to Apple devices. The opportunity is now for putting different video advertisements in. For more on where the opportunities are for premium video advertising have a look at these two older blogs that I have posted: 

Multi screen advertising evolution - talks about the phases of Multiscreen video advertising 

MultisScreen Video Advertising : Replacement advertisements the immediate opportunity