You’ve created high-quality content. Now, how can you generate ad revenue?
As a content creator, one of the ultimate goals is to monetize your video content. If you have a loyal following, there are numerous ways to leverage your online presence and turn it into revenue. A new service from Amazon, AWS Elemental MediaTailor, offers a unique way for content creators to begin to systematically and intuitively insert ad content into videos on the fly.
How AWS Elemental MediaTailor can help monetize your content
MediaTailor is not only a monetization service; it also allows you to personalize ads based on each individual user’s preferences. All of this happens on the server side on the fly, which means you’re able to serve highly targeted ads to viewers while maintaining the highest video quality possible.
Key benefits of the platform
Below are just a few of the key benefits available to you when choosing MediaTailor to serve ad content to your viewers.
Personalized content
Personalized marketing, also sometimes referred to as one-to-one marketing, is a completely new way of looking at monetizing your content. Studies have shown that companies that use personalized marketing increase their sales by roughly 19 percent.
MediaTailor uses either VAST or VMAP to pass viewer information to the ad decision server, which then provides targeted ads that are relevant. This offers a much more interactive experience for the advertiser as well as the customer, which differentiates MediaTailor from typical mass-market advertising.
Robust monitoring capabilities
As is the case with many AWS tools, MediaTailor tightly integrates with the entire Amazon Web Services platform. MediaTailor interfaces with Amazon CloudWatch—the platform that allows users to monitor all of their AWS resources—to create detailed reports. It enables users to track key metrics, create dashboards and set certain alarms that are triggered when you reach a specific metric. The following MediaTailor metrics are available with AWS CloudWatch.
- Ads – The number of ads that were served during the time specified.
- Errors – The count of non-HTTP 200 responses, timeout responses and empty responses received from the ad decision server based on the time period specified.
- Duration – The total length of all ads that MediaTailor received during a set time period.
- Timeouts – The number of timeout requests to the ad decision server during the time period.
- FillRate – The average rate that the responses from the ad decision server filled the available ad breaks.
- AdNotReady – The number of times the ad decision server pointed to an ad that had yet to be transcoded by the internal transcoder service.
- FillRate – The average rate that MediaTailor was able to fill ad breaks.
- FilledDuration – The total duration of all ad breaks filled by MediaTailor during a specified time period.
- Duration – The total duration of all ad breaks encountered by MediaTailor during the time specified.
- Errors – The number of errors that were received when MediaTailor was generating manifests.
- Errors – The number of non-HTTP 200 status code errors and timeout responses received by MediaTailor from the origin server during a specified time period.
- Timeouts – The number of timeout requests to the origin server during a specified time period.
Ad continuity
One of the challenges when dynamically inserting ads into your video content is handling bitrate and resolution. Thanks to a built-in transcoding service, AWS Elemental MediaTailor ensures your ads and content will have the same bitrate and resolution, so all transitions are smooth during playback.
Automatic scaling
AWS Elemental MediaTailor allows for automatic scaling based on the number of concurrent viewers. This helps to ensure performance is consistent as viewership goes up or down.
Support for live and on-demand workflows
For live content, MediaTailor offers support for Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) as well as MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH). For the video on demand, support is available for HLS.
What streaming requirements are necessary to work with AWS Elemental MediaTailor?
A video stream must meet the following criteria to function with AWS Elemental MediaTailor:
- Clients must be streaming live or video on demand (VOD).
- The stream must use Apple HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) or MPEG DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP).
- It must be accessible from a public IP address.
Tips for preparing an HLS stream
HLS streams must have a manifest file with ad slots marked with one of the following:
- #EXT-X-CUE-OUT / XEXT-X-CUE-IN (more common) with durations
- #EXT-X-DATERANGE (less common) with durations
Tips for preparing a DASH stream
DASH manifests must be live and have periods as ad breaks with either splice-insert markers or time-signal markers. Use clear XML or base64-encoded binary to provide the ad markers.
Interested in learning more about AWS Elemental MediaTailor?
If you’re looking for a way to dynamically insert advertisements into your video content, look no further than AWS Elemental MediaTailor. To learn more about this new technology and how it can help generate revenue, reach out to CloudHesive today at 800-860-2040 or through our online contact form.
