付费观看广告与HBO Max

我最近花了9美元订阅了HBO Max AVOD.99美元一个月，看看广告用户体验是什么样的. HBO Max built most of the technology from the ground up (including the packager), 我很好奇，想看看事情会如何发展. 说实话，我很失望.

失望, because I try to be critical of 信息 that comes my way from vendors or media companies, 但我不得不同意HBO的提议. 我很难发现广告插播时间, 结果和我想象的不一样, 与其他服务相比，广告负载相当轻.

"The feedback we've had since launching is a lot of people are saying they don't really notice the ads that much,尤安·麦克劳德说, HBO Max客户体验工程副总裁. "We're trying as much as possible to not interrupt the playback experience 和 make the ads seem part of the experience."

以下是我与麦克劳德谈话的编辑版, 我们讨论了包装, SVOD的第一帧时间, 并从摄取中优化所有成分, 编码, 包装, 和缝合.

HBO Max如何使用服务器端广告插入(SSAI)?

When a piece of content is requested, we dynamically generate a new manifest with ads stitched in. 我们给广告服务器打个电话, 哪些广告是基于我们提供的可用休息时间.

广告服务器的拼接和响应变得至关重要. We want to give viewers maximum quality in terms of resolution, bitrate, 和 zero fatal errors. We might sacrifice a little bit on time-to-first-frame to get a higher-quality experience.

你提供什么样的个性化或上下文定位?

这是基于不同类别的客户, 我不能详细讲每一类是什么. Depending on some of your demographics, we will insert ads that are relevant to you. [This can] also be based on your viewership profile 和 how much content you've watched in the past.

我们对孩子的资料也有规定. We always bring up an ad bumper in front of all of our ads to make it very clear to the child or the minor that this is an ad break.

广告播放的比特率和内容播放的比特率一样吗?

有时确实如此, 有时他们不会, so we have to re-encode 和 package the ad breaks because if there was even a slight difference between the frame rate of the ad break to the programming content, 这会引发问题.

这是一个绿地项目吗?

它的大部分是由WarnerMedia和HBO Max内部制作的. The reason for that is video delivery is the core to what we do from an engineering perspective. We own as much as possible, so we can adapt quickly if we face any customer feedback or challenges.

AVOD的发展花了多长时间?

It's just over a year ago that we launched HBO Max, 和 this year, we launched AVOD. 广告, you have to announce a date so that the agencies 和 advertisers can pre-purchase or budget. [AVOD]在4个月的时间内交付. The most challenging part was to get advertising to work on the full plethora of platforms 和 devices that we support. They all have their own intricacies 和 technical challenges, format constraints, etc.

那么测量呢??

我们有自己的实时分析测量缓冲率, rebuffering, time-to-first-frame, 视频中有任何中断, 还有回放问题吗?.

我们拥有庞大的SVOD客户群, we can see very quickly if AVOD is having any degradation in service versus SVOD. 我们还没有看到, 顺便说一下, 但我们马上就会注意到, because we would compare a manifest that doesn't have ads in it to a manifest that does.

你在这个测量中寻找什么?

通过观察用户交互, we should be able to optimize so that we know what is valuable 和 relevant to our customers. I would like the ad ecosystem to be able to build more insights into what people actually want to see. [That 信息] is not going to be sold; it's for us to actually have a better underst和ing of our customers.

质量保证(QA)怎么样??

我们使用相同的工具对广告支持和非广告支持的内容进行QA. 我们自己制造了一些工具, but a lot of it is actually manual QA on actual devices because that's the best way to QA everything using human eyes 和 human ears.

如何确定广告插播位置?

Our job is to shine a light on the content that the best creators in the world create for us. There's no point having an ad break somewhere that is really jarring to the narrative of the story. We did have instances where our ad breaks were probably not in the most optimal position, so you have to come back 和 recondition the asset to move the ad break somewhere that's less interrupting.

你是用SCTE标记还是别的什么?

We can put ad breaks or ad markers anywhere we want 和 dynamically choose which ones to use. We optimized our ad conditioning based on lots of criteria that are not the same as broadcast television.

我们重新调整内容的另一个原因是, 假设你暂停了视频播放, 两天后, 你去看那个内容. 如果一分钟后插播广告, we will skip the ad break so you don't get an interruption as soon as you start playback.

We can select dynamically which ad breaks to use 和 which ones not to use based on viewership, 当你停下来的时候, 或者作为奖励，如果你一口气看了10集某个节目. We've got lots of things we can leverage because we went 和 reconditioned everything.

我们结束了面试，然后我去找广告. 在大多数情况下，广告体验与所描述的完全一致. 它不是侵入性的, everything worked (although there was a weird hiccup on the web version where the ad would consistently start twice, 但当我打开一个应用程序, 问题消失了), 和, 偶尔, 广告很短，我真的不介意短暂的休息. 此外，我还可以观看我真正喜欢的流媒体内容，这样可以节省几美元. 然而，我的配偶很沮丧，说他看到了太多的广告. 但他也是HBO Max账户的第二个用户, 因此看到的广告和我看到的不一样. For instance, he got a 1-minute pre-roll before one show, whereas I got 15-second ads on my content. 特性或bug?

虽然在幕后有很多创新在进行, 观众仍在为广告付费, 而这可能最终会成为一个过分的要求, regardless of how many technical solutions are put in place to make the experience great. 这是一条微妙的界线，时间会证明这是否是正确的方法.