BlackArrow Touts First ‘Wide-Scale’ Dynamic-Ad-Insertion User

Canada’s Rogers Communications is deploying the BlackArrow Advanced Advertising System to create a next-gen advertising marketplace for video-on-demand TV services in country.

The operator says it’s using the BlackArrow Advanced Advertising System to dynamically insert pre-, post-, and mid-roll ads into Rogers On Demand programming. The Rogers Dynamic Ad Insertion rollout began earlier this year, and it’s scheduled to be implemented across additional Rogers’ cable markets later in 2012. Rogers and BlackArrow say this deployment “marks the first wide-scale rollout of dynamically inserted mid-roll advertising in North America.”??

“The introduction of dynamically inserted advertising solutions within on-demand TV can significantly change the scope of on-demand television in Canada,” notes BlackArrow President Nick Troiano. ??

For Rogers, the BlackArrow system controls the real-time advanced advertising decisions needed to convey playout instructions to downstream video back office and video server systems. As part of that real-time decisioning process, a number of SCTE 130-compliant BlackArrow components are used, including:  

>> The BlackArrow Placement Opportunity Information Service (POIS) that determines the correct ad playload and inventory owners based on business rules between Rogers and its content-provider partners;
>> The BlackArrow Ad Decision Server (ADS) that determines which ad campaigns to play; and ?
>> The BlackArrow Playlist Engine that assembles the ads and mid-roll information into a playlist that the downstream video playback equipment can understand and execute.  ??

In addition, the BlackArrow Content Information Service (CIS) is used to capture and store break information for mid-roll triggers and metadata information that can be used in campaign targeting.?

In separate but related news, Canadian cable provider Source Cable has deployed Harmonic’s NSG 9000 HectoQAM in its headend, allowing the operator to increase the speed of its Internet/data services and add new video-on-demand (VOD) services.

HectoQAM features a modular design with hot-swappable RF-QAM modules, allowing Source Cable to grow the number of service groups and to more than quadruple the QAM capacity for existing service groups — without any rewiring or disruption to operations. According to Harmonic, “Source Cable can cost-effectively deliver data as well as HD and SD VOD services to its subscribers from a single, unified edgeQAM chassis.”

"Our powerful edgeQAM system gives us a leg up on the competition by meeting our subscribers’ insatiable appetite for video-on-demand and high-speed Internet services," adds Darryl Chandler, vice president/Operations and general manager at Source Cable. "The flexible and efficient design of Harmonic’s HectoQAM solution will allow us to increase our data, video, and video-on-demand offerings in the future while maintaining the highest standards of video quality that our subscribers expect."