PDX Video Tech 2024 #4 (Paramount)

Pseudo-Interstitials: Playback flexibility for legacy devices.

Speaker: Tony McNamara, Senior Director Software Engineering, Video Technology Group, Paramount Global.

Interstitials allow the insertion of content by reference into a playback stream, and are especially useful when a playlist won't work. But Interstitials are also still relatively new; just a year ago Apple devices didn't support playback of them, despite Apple having accepted them into the HLS Specification years earlier. DASH XLinks suffer the general inconsistency so consistent in DASH. And of course legacy devices tend to be stuck on much earlier protocol versions. We've come up with "Pseudo-Interstitials", which provide much of the same flexibility, to allow very-late decisioning and binding of content, especially ads, into playback of legacy devices. This will include a very brief introduction to interstitials and their value, and the problem statement, and then a deep dive into the multi-disciplinary solution including encoding concerns, manifest manipulation, Edge Computing and even briefly SSAI constraints.