ACCELERATING ADVANCED ADVERTISING: SUPPORTING EBIF WITH CLOUD- BASED SOLUTIONS Jeremy Edmonds ActiveVideo Networks

Abstract At best, the cable industry is leaving The cable industry faces severe advanced advertising revenue on the table; challenges in the race to enable advanced, at worst, it is losing that revenue to interactive advertising. Cable-led efforts like competitors, which are using their support Enhanced Binary Interchange Format for Web standards to gain the early high (EBIF), tru2way and Canoe all offer ground in advanced video advertising. compelling solutions for advertisers, but cable’s fragmented legacy infrastructure, Cable’s strengths, including its particularly in terms of customer premise unparalleled subscriber footprint and its equipment (CPE), is preventing these superior video delivery infrastructure, standards from fully satisfying advertisers’ remain noteworthy and compelling for current needs for targeted, interactive and advertisers. However, a near-term need dynamic advertising at scale. exists for cable to muscle more quickly into the nascent advanced advertising area with a To generate significant advanced platform that both leverages the capabilities advertising revenue today, cable providers of and supports a migration to EBIF. must embrace tools and technologies that provide advertisers with opportunities to Solutions are available that enable engage viewers that are similar to those that operators and advertisers to leverage exist on the Web. This paper will examine existing Web platforms such as DoubleClick the cable industry’s current advanced to support advanced ad delivery. Through advertising challenges and provide the use of a Web-based platform and cloud- information that can help the industry based transcoding of Web content to MPEG, deploy cloud-based solutions that leverage cable can quickly gain market share in the Web technologies and standards. advanced advertising space. In addition to offering advertisers access to cable’s subscriber base, the best programming and INTRODUCTION unsurpassed video quality, the operators Advertisers are demanding the ability to gain access to an existing advertising deliver Web-style television advertising ecosystem and would be able to draw on that’s targeted, interactive and dynamic. countless advertisers and agencies that They want to pinpoint receptive audiences would be familiar from Day One with the with the right messages, engage them tools necessary to develop and manage through the point of purchase, and measure advanced advertising content. viewer activity at every point in the process through new levels of technology This paper discusses existing challenges development. The cable industry is to mass cable operator rollouts of advanced responding to these needs, but, despite its advertising, and reviews ways in which best efforts, it’s running into significant operators can capitalize on existing Web technical challenges.

2010 Spring Technical Forum Proceedings - Page 347 tools and technologies to support their living room couch. Advertisers desire these advertising efforts. kinds of interactive ads because, like those on the Web, they can provide interested viewers with additional information, ADVANCED ADVERTISING: measure viewer activity at multiple points in OPPORTUNITIES AND RISKS FOR the process, and deliver those measurements CABLE to the advertiser. Traditionally, television advertising has been a passive endeavor for the consumer. Such advanced ads present significant Ads, typically 30 seconds in length, are revenue generation possibilities for cable broadcast to all viewers of certain channels systems operators, as well. Operators or programs, with the hope that one or more uniquely have a broad base of subscribers target audiences are viewing them. Any calls that can be targeted geographically, to action associated with the ad require the demographically or by interest; they provide user to get up and do something: visit a a video environment that is far more stable store, call a phone number, log on to a Web and of higher quality than the Web; and they site. However, with the advent of DVR, have a broad range of content that is VOD, sites like and other products and delivered directly to the television, which technologies, many of these linear ads are remains the dominant viewing device in the now being viewed by only a fraction of the home. audiences they once reached. But although personal, interactive As a result, advertisers are now seeking experiences are the order of the day, and to establish more compelling and personal would seem to be a good fit for cable, the connections with their target audiences. industry faces a significant challenge in Today’s consumers clearly demand terms of the difficulty of most existing cable increased choice and control, even over set-top boxes to meet this demand. advertising. Younger consumers, in Advertising dollars are already starting to particular, want a more Web-like TV to the Web, where targeting and viewing experience. interactivity are more easily achieved. The rise of Internet-connected televisions Advanced television advertising basically presents advertisers and CE manufacturers mirrors Web advertising, in that it enables with another chance to deliver “over-the- the user to participate in much more active top” content and advertising to consumers. and even impulsive activity. These focused If cable doesn’t respond to the need for and targeted ads are more integrated with interactive advertising, other parties are the individual’s user experience, with the well-positioned to grab those dollars. ability to engage the viewer all the way through the “purchase funnel,” from THE CURRENT CABLE introduction to a product to the point of ENVIRONMENT purchase. For example, the viewer can click Advertisers want advanced advertising to on the remote for more information, access a be part of the normal viewing experience, microsite devoted to the product or service, rather than an “interactive TV” application. talk about the product or service through There is precedent for this. When an social networking functionality, and even “interactive application” gains consumer make a purchase, all from the comfort of the traction, it exits the perceived realm of

2010 Spring Technical Forum Proceedings - Page 348 “interactivity” and becomes part of the nationwide, but that goal has not yet been “normal” viewing experience. Examples of reached. such interactive applications pioneered by cable include the electronic program guide With tru2way, application developers can (EPG) and video (VOD). Both create customized interactive services that have ceased to be considered “interactive can be deployed seamlessly to millions of TV” applications, and have passed into the cable customers. It offers “write once, run realm of the “normal” viewing experience. everywhere” Java-based programming capability to developers. However, the However, applications like EPG and programs will only run on set-top boxes and VOD, as “normal” as they are, are still other devices that support tru2way. “destination-based.” To access VOD, for Deployment of such devices is minimal at example, consumers must “go to” a place to this time. find and order titles. The same is true for EPGs, which exist as separate menu Canoe Ventures, backed by prominent destinations. These applications are separate operators, is working with CableLabs to from, not seamlessly integrated with, the develop EBIF templates that advertisers can normal viewing experience. use to deliver interactive ads to major operators around the country. Canoe also Immersive interactive video applications offers backend services that will allow for such as advanced advertising strive to bring campaign management and reporting across the desired content “to the viewer,” not operators. This effort, however, is still in make the viewer search to find a development. “destination” in an unnatural way. This “delivering the content to the viewer” These activities are promising for the (versus “destination-based interactivity”) future, and show that cable is working to can be found on many video streaming Web offer advertisers a national, ubiquitous sites, such as YouTube, where the activity of platform for advanced ad development and viewing any given video stream is provisioning. But although cable continues augmented by metadata links to several to devote considerable energy to them, these other video assets (as well as non-video standards can’t effectively deliver advanced applets). advertising today.

The cable industry, to its credit, is fully Significantly, none of these standards aware of the challenges advertisers face with currently can reach all of today’s deployed the current subscriber environment. It has cable set-top boxes. This is due to cable’s created a number of new standards and fragmented infrastructure, characterized by initiatives designed to provide advertisers its various models of customer premise the interactivity and targeting they desire, equipment and head-ends from multiple notably EBIF, tru2way and Canoe. manufacturers, and of different ages and capabilities. This infrastructure has grown The EBIF specification was created by organically over time among the nation’s CableLabs to deploy interactive applications operators, and has served it well. But this over a two-way video plant to all existing diversity is hampering cable’s efforts for a and new digital set-top boxes. The cable national advanced ad platform. industry is working to deploy EBIF

2010 Spring Technical Forum Proceedings - Page 349 Let’s take a closer look at the issues that to build a scalable business around a popular are impeding national cable rollouts of interactive application. advanced ad campaigns. A specific example of the workflow The Workflow Issue conundrum is the notion of the “bound” Cable’s ability to provide advanced application, which executes synchronously advertising is hampered by a workflow with a program or advertisement. impediment. It lacks an automated systems infrastructure to connect the “sales order Current cable solutions to this problem process” with the “creative process” to the are still to come. EBIF’s strength is its “content management and provisioning overall potential reach, which could be the process” and finally to the “delivery entire installed base of digital cable set-tops. process.” The EBIF specification defines the client execution engine and the data formats for For the traditional multichannel video sending applications to the client. Such subscription business, this workflow is well definition is critical and necessary, but for established. In its simplest form, movies and EBIF-based “bound” applications to become TV shows are produced, licensed to an mainstream, a necessary scaffolding of aggregator (e.g., NBCU), wholesaled to an workflow must emerge. The purpose of operator (e.g., ) for distribution, and Canoe is to create ubiquitous end-to-end then retailed to the consumer. The workflow for advertisers, and to shield advertising and subscription models are well advertisers from the need to deal with established for this process. multiple cable operators and their separate workflows. But Canoe implementation The important point is that there are remains on the horizon. automated systems (encoding, content protection, “billing systems,” trafficking Advertisers, however, require workflow systems, royalty payment and settlement) scaffolding today. They require a known, that support this model so these businesses easy and repeatable method for creating can scale. advertising applications, and for applying quality assurance mechanisms to ensure With respect to interactive applications, those applications behave at their best on all this “workflow” does not currently exist in set-top boxes. They need data collection to any uniform, scalable way. The current fulfill the application’s intent, and to feed ecosystem of extant and desired interactive any primary or third-party billing video applications and services relies on a mechanisms. patchwork of business systems and creative tools, all of which are delivered to a Consider an advanced advertising heterogeneous population of operators with application that allows the viewer to click on no “billable event tracking” except by a widget associated with an ad to receive sneaker-net and swivel chair operations. more information on the product. From a Without the “back-end” tied to the “front- workflow perspective, the following end” via an automated workflow that requirements are critical: generates invoices, tracks payments and respects copyrights, it will be very difficult 1) Creative: What should the widget look like? Who builds creative for

2010 Spring Technical Forum Proceedings - Page 350 the campaign, and to which template, recently, they’ve existed as “thin clients” and using which authoring tool(s)? that lag behind the Moore’s Law trend of 2) Application provisioning: computing devices. Compared to PCs, Operationally, the interactive digital set-tops have long been dismissed as application must be provisioned on devices lacking sufficient processing power to the network. Its widget assets and memory to enable immersive, media- must be transferred for playout, and rich applications. In short, what’s thick its availability parameters must be today is thin tomorrow, and, for digital cable fed into the traffic/billing system. boxes, it’s always tomorrow. 3) Stewardship: All ad campaigns follow general and specific rule sets, However, it is not in the best interest of such as: competing products may not operators to deploy new set-top boxes every be shown within the same ad pod; year. There is a good reason why there is so time parameters to protect children much legacy customer premise equipment in from inappropriate content, etc. the field. It takes a lot of time and money to 4) Data Collection: After playout, data replace a set-top box. All of those “legacy” associated with the spot needs a boxes in fact have value. They save method to flow into the aggregation operators money on truck rolls to deploy engines feeding national and local new equipment, and they save customers the campaigns. time of waiting for those trucks to show up 5) Billing: Any additional revenue with new equipment. As a revenue associated with the interactive spot generating unit for “the bedroom” or other needs a feed into operator billing non-living-room locations in a household, it systems. is very hard to justify replacing them 6) Reporting and Settlement: system-wide with more advanced boxes. Automated mechanisms must be available to operators and advertising Because of today’s accelerated advances constituencies, etc., to create reports in technology, it would be impractical for both for advertising effectiveness operators to roll out new boxes with great and contract fulfillment purposes. frequency. Even the latest and greatest set- top box becomes a “legacy” device within While efforts such as EBIF and Canoe months. Consider that when you roll a new are underway, the author does not know of car off a dealer’s lot, it immediately any available solutions that will connect the becomes a used car. That doesn’t make the traditional day-to-day business of car any less useful. It would be impractical advertising sales to the operators’ broadcast to “upgrade” a car every six months. The and unicast streaming platforms. same holds true for set-top boxes. Individually and combined, workflow gaps prevent the business from scaling and The installed base of digital set-top boxes impede the ability for multichannel video presents a “lowest common denominator” providers to build both local and national problem for application development and advertising revenues. software version control. Building applications only for high-end boxes reduces The Challenge of the Installed Base potential reach; building applications for all Digital cable set-tops, as a category, are set-top variations reduces the application’s beyond their 15th anniversary. Until fairly attractiveness to the lowest common

2010 Spring Technical Forum Proceedings - Page 351 denominator of graphics chips, processing in the newest units is eclipsed by the care- power and memory. and-feeding needs of the oldest units.

These issues of potential reach and the The Challenge for the Application attractiveness of applications are of Developer paramount importance for advertisers, as Advanced advertising application seen in Figure 1. developers face prohibitive time and cost outlays in the cable environment. The problem is not unique to advertising applications; developing any software for cable, such as EPG software, requires a substantial round of testing and compliance to ensure that the software works with all of the set-top boxes in deployment.

EBIF development presents a similar challenge. The result is the likely pruning of platform features to the lowest common denominator.

The greatest expense associated with investment in client software technologies Figure 1 – Functionality Compared to Deployed often is in targeted development, integration Boxes and regression testing across dozens of different CPE platforms—each with its own From the perspective of the advertiser, a performance characteristics, graphics very small footprint of accessible devices is display capabilities and consequent impact very hard to target or monetize. With more on the viewer experience. While tru2way, scale and reach, the advertiser has a greater EBIF and other standard client software likelihood of effectively reaching its target platforms are certainly a great improvement, audience. At the same time, the better the they do not solve the pervasive cross- advertisement looks and functions, the platform compatibility issue. higher the impact the ad will have. Given the deployed base of cable set-top boxes, This is not an issue just for the cable these two options are mutually exclusive; world; even Web browsers have differing the more features and functionality a box capabilities across Macs and PCs, as well as can offer, the fewer of them there are in the across different OS installations on those field. Adding cloud rendering and devices. It is necessary when developing a processing to the equation minimizes the robust Web site to test it against all device-centric resources from the equation. significant browsers in use. This is shown with the dotted line. Put another way, operating interactive In cable, however, a new release of the applications solely upon the limited GuideWorks-based EPG and VOD menu capabilities of the aggregate set-top base, software package can take between one and and without the benefit of network server two years for development, testing and resources, means the wealth of capabilities certification before it is made available to

2010 Spring Technical Forum Proceedings - Page 352 operators for deployment across a family of such as Web-based email, YouTube and set-top boxes. countless others removing the burden from client devices and leveraging the power (and EBIF is a write-once, run-anywhere storage capabilities) of . platform that provides cable operators with an efficient, lightweight, well-managed set- Now that we live in a fully digital top environment. It offers interactive television world, the cloud concept applies applications, graphical overlays and just as much to TV, as we’re essentially instantaneous responses via an immensely dealing with data and nothing more. The deployed base of existing cable set-top cloud TV concept can remove workflow boxes. However, while it opens the door for gaps and bridge the application and media new kinds of interactivity, EBIF by design processing requirements between head-ends was not intended to offer more capabilities and set-tops. A cloud approach also enables than the most basic set-top boxes could developers of advanced advertising handle. It is essentially a generic system that applications to use familiar, Web-based provides some basic capabilities for development tools that are similar to or the interactive TV on legacy set-top boxes. In same as those used to provide interactivity addition, EBIF is not yet ubiquitously within a Web site. deployed. Server-side functionality, such as large- Simply put, it will be prohibitively scale data manipulations (for example, deep expensive and time-consuming to deliver the keyword searches on hundreds of thousands levels of interactivity and functionality that or millions of records), recommendation advertisers require into the wide variety of engines and ad decision engines, already digital set-top boxes currently in the field. exist for Web applications. These While EBIF, tru2way and Canoe are technologies can be applied as-is to the worthwhile endeavors for cable, there is a cable infrastructure. Familiar client need for a server-based, or cloud-based, authoring functionality, such as DHTML, solution to enhance those advanced JavaScript, CSS, Ajax and JSON, can be advertising efforts. The idea is to push as used in existing deployments by moving much programming, application logic and much or all of the “client” processing into processing into the network cloud as the cloud. possible, and communicate with digital set- top boxes through simple MPEG streams, EBIF at the Core of Advanced Advertising for example. EBIF is specifically designed to enhance broadcast video with prompts (“call to THE CLOUD-BASED ADVANCED action” graphics) that entice the user to ADVERTISING SOLUTION engage with what they are watching in new The language of the computing “cloud” ways. This ability to embed interactivity in is typically associated with the Internet, layers is key to the advanced advertising even though the term itself pre-dates the initiative. The base layer is the broadcast Internet by at least two decades, when advertisement itself: If a user does not have computer scientists recognized the need to EBIF capabilities, this is all that is seen. The share processing workload over clustered second layer is the “call-to-action” graphic, computers. Cloud computing has become a which the User Agent blends on top of the staple of the Web world, with applications broadcast video advertisement according to

2010 Spring Technical Forum Proceedings - Page 353 the instructions in the bound application, as subscriber’s physical address. exemplified in Figure 1. Enhancing this basic RFI functionality with cloud-based services can offer tremendous increased impact and opportunities for engagement to the advertiser. Given a simple construct such as cookies, an advertisement can offer different screens or other options if the consumer has already clicked on the RFI in the past, for example. Using simple asynchronous client- server communications (akin to AJAX on the Web), an EBIF application can leverage server-side database repositories to display a tremendous amount of information in small Figure 1 – Call to Action Overlay chunks, without overtaxing the available client memory. Once the user has responded to the call-to- action, there are various possible next steps Adding MPEG to EBIF for the advertiser. A common option at the Existing EBIF User Agents have been core of the Canoe initiative is the RFI designed to support simple telescoping (Request For Information). Leveraging the functionality as seen in Figure 3. An EBIF customer’s personal information on file with application can switch away from a the cable company, a brochure, coupon or broadcast stream to a unicast stream based other information is mailed to the on triggers typically caused by the user. The

2010 Spring Technical Forum Proceedings - Page 354 Figure 4 – Web Browser in the Cloud

EBIF application persists during this stream campaign management suites are already switch, providing a seamless application able to manage, track and report on lifecycle and allowing the EBIF application interactive ad campaigns running on all to send commands and control messages to deployed cable set-top boxes. It has also the server that is generating the unicast been shown that Omniture and similarly stream. In its simplest form, this allows for powerful tracking and reporting solutions an advertisement to play a longer video for are able to be used in advertising campaigns users who express interest via a call to across existing cable deployments. All of action on-screen during a broadcast these examples are using existing Web advertisement. solutions without modification, and with standard commercial agreements in place. Additional Benefits of a Remote Browser Using enhanced streaming servers in the Brand Appearance in EBIF network cloud, this basic telescoping Another immediate benefit to using this functionality allows for advanced graphics specialized streaming server is that it is and video capabilities to be added to any capable of rendering images in the entire EBIF application. As seen in Figure 4, the MPEG-2 color space; more than 16 million enhanced streaming server is running what colors are available at once, with minor is essentially a specialized Web browser in limitations due to chrominance sharing the cloud. between adjacent pixels. Compare this to EBIF graphics allowed in the most widely Once there is a framework that allows supported baseline specification (including basic Web browser functionality across all the Motorola DCT-2000), which allows 16 set-top boxes, the door is open for colors on screen at a given time, and the leveraging tools and expertise that have been Cisco (Scientific-Atlanta) SA-2000, which developed and polished over the last decade allows 256 colors on screen at a time. The or more. Cable companies using client-side immediate benefit to an advertiser that is browsers as well as streaming-server protective of its brand appearance is clear, browsers are already capable of leveraging and because these cloud-based graphics are some very powerful tools. It has been shown not dependent on the client functionality, the that DoubleClick, Atlas and other ad same brand image appears identically on a

2010 Spring Technical Forum Proceedings - Page 355 Motorola DCT-2000, SA-2000 and all other the gateway and flexible servers placed in deployed set-top boxes. the cloud.

The Power of Video in Advertising CONCLUSION Beyond simple brand appearance, there is A cloud-based approach offers cable remarkable power and clear benefit to operators greater flexibility and embedding rich video into an ad. It is implementation of advanced advertising abundantly clear why so much advertising now, the ability to grab market share against money is spent on video when compared to competition as quickly as possible, and a static (newspaper, Web banner ads) and solid foundation for the future. It also audio (radio): The response through brand combines the mass audience of all two-way awareness and feedback is measurable. To cable boxes with the features and an advertiser spending money on television, functionality that advertisers need to meet the expectation is that there will be a large their brand and marketing requirements. video-based component to its advertisement. When a standard advertisement is enhanced The cloud approach leverages EBIF’s with EBIF, some simple graphics and text capabilities and supports migration to EBIF, are available. Adding telescoping allows for while addressing today’s urgent problems a single long-form video to play on demand. head on. It leverages cable’s strengths of an Adding cloud-based streaming suddenly unrivaled subscriber footprint and superior makes a broad range of video and video- video delivery. By using existing Web centric effects available to the advertiser, for standards to support advanced advertising example: multiple video windows playing at delivery, with the ability to transcode Web once; or allowing the original broadcast content to MPEG, it allows cable to lock in video to play in a thumbnail in the corner immediately to the existing pre-roll while the telescoping video plays in a larger ecosystem for advanced advertising, as window. Many more are possible. Because advertisers and agencies are already the rendering of the user interface takes intimately familiar with Web content place in the cloud, any existing set-top box development and management tools. Ideally, can provide this type of interface and a mix of cloud and client-server approaches brandable real-estate, all leveraging EBIF as is optimal.

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