CableLabs Advertising Event Focuses on SCTE 130

CableLabs’ recent multi-faceted Advanced Advertising Interop successfully demonstrated interoperability across a number of advertising interfaces as envisioned by industry standards and specifications. Held in conjunction with the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) DVS/Working Group 5 and Canoe Ventures, the weeklong interop sought to further the capability to deliver new and compelling forms of advertising on cable.

Companies that participated in the interop included Alcatel-Lucent, Alticast, ARRIS, Avail-TVN, BigBand Networks, BlackArrow, FourthWall Media, Nielsen, OpenTV, SeaChange, Sigma Systems, Softel, Strategy and Technology (S&T), Texscan, This Technology, and UniSoft.

Collectively, these companies brought many capabilities to the interop, including ad campaign managers, ad decision servers, ad managers, content information systems, placement opportunity systems, subscriber information service, content marking systems, ad splicers, Enhanced TV (ETV) streamers, EBIF user agents, and ETV applications implementing the CableLabs Stewardship and Fulfillment Interface (SaFI) specification.

The primary focus of this interop was to prove interoperability of the SCTE 130 interfaces. In addition to ad insertion into linear channels, the participants demonstrated inserting addressable advertising into VOD content as well as dynamic ETV application insertion.

Another goal of the interop was to develop profiles for SCTE 130 and the CableLabs Stewardship and Fulfillment Interfaces (SaFI).

“A new feature in this interop was our first use of an SCTE 130 emulator tool,” said Don Dulchinos, SVP of advertising and interactive services with CableLabs, in a statement. “The tool will help us define recommended practices for SCTE 130 equipment, establish a roadmap toward better compliance testing, and ultimately help MSOs assemble scalable solutions for ad insertion.”