Verizon Media has added some new advertising and livestreaming tools to its product lineup for broadcasters, content owners and service providers.
The division’s new Smartplay Prebid is a server-side integration that the company said exposes inventory and conducts auctions faster with more demand partners using the prebid open-source framework.
“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, in a statement. “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 pumping up advertising data and analytics to help technical teams highlight any errors, timeouts and tracking issues after they occur, and identify and respond to trends in ad performance and segment data including device and demand partner.
RELATED: Verizon Media names CTO, touts livestreaming biz
The company also said it’s improving its ingest, encoding and CDN capabilities to deliver live content in 4K HDR, and claimed that recent testing of concurrent viewers on the platform has now reached the 10 million viewer threshold. The company’s live operator dashboard has been updated with a new Live Event Markers feature, which enables operators to tag events of interest during any live event. The company also has a new Real-time Streaming feature, currently in beta, that it said will enable 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,” said 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.”
Verizon Media has also added Channel Scheduling – for content owners who want to create virtual live linear experiences using assets from their VOD library, a live feed, or a live event – and Output Syndication – for content owners who want to publish streams directly to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Twitch.