Ateme has partnered with Korean ad tech specialist Digitalrich, integrating its ad insertion server into the Ateme Titan Live and Titan Mux cloud offerings. Ateme is proving to be increasingly interested in ad tech, and this brings ad scheduling capabilities to all Titan customers.
Digitalrich’s internet presence is scant, so Faultline headed to the catch-up sessions of Ateme’s 24-hour webinar marathon a few weeks back to get some details from the company. The platform UI looked about 20 years old, but the speaker, YJ Lee, seemed keen to assure the audience that this was soon to be upgraded.
Confusingly, the press release made it out as though this is the first time that Ateme will be offering a flexible and customizable integration for ad insertion. This is puzzling because the acquisition of Anevia brought a host of new technologies to the party, including just-in-time packaging, distributed storage, cloud DVR, manifest manipulation, on-demand analytics, and most notably, dynamic ad-insertion (DAI).
Anevia’s CTO Damien Lucas told Faultline at the time of the acquisition that the company was aiming for a world first in marketing integrated edge splicing at the edge for DAI. Our chats with Lucas in the months since have also indicated that Ateme has always kept one eye on advertising when scaling up its CDN capabilities, talking of the knock-on benefits this has for DAI and server-side ad insertion (SSAI) as key motivations for clients updating their CDN.
The partnership with Digitalrich further cements Ateme’s 15-year long tenure in Korea, in which time a roster of tier 1 content providers and operators have standardized on the French firm’s products, including CJ Powercast, Korea Telecom, and Medialog.
Ateme is calling the new integrated offering an “all-in-one ad splicing solution”. Titan already offered ad splicing – as well as DAI via Anevia’s Genova encoding product line – so presumably the “all” is the scheduling and reporting software that DAIS2000 offers. Now Titan clients can use the DAIS2000 integration to perform all the preparatory aspects of ad insertion, not just the splicing.
DAIS2000 can manage both analog (DTMF) and digital (SCTE-35) cue tones, as well as ad campaigns for any channel that is processed by Ateme.
If you were wondering whether Anevia’s Genova is included, we should remind you that the expected convergence of Ateme and Anevia’s technologies got underway in February, to the extent that Anevia’s name was no longer to be addressed in certain news pieces. Titan now includes Genova, although the independence of Anevia’s NEA-CDN delivery brand seems to have withstood the merger so far.
As with any advancement in ad tech, the integration with Digitalrich offers all Ateme’s Titan customers the opportunity to create new revenue streams and offer audiences a more personalized viewing experience. So, what exactly is Digitalrich? The name was certainly new to us.
Founded in 2002, Digitalrich provides marketing services to program providers across IPTV and cable and has offered its DAIS2000 ad-insertion system since 2005. It serves over 4,000 channels across 30 clients in Korea and is currently trying to spread its wings to Asia, Europe and America.
With this integration, Digitalrich has massively increased its international footprint. Its ad insertion technology can now be offered to all Ateme’s new and existing customers.
Its DAIS2000 server is made up of four hardware units which cover the registration, organization, transmission and recording of ads. An Ad Management System (AMS) registers ad clips for scheduling by detecting cue tones, before the Ad Streamer (ADS) server streams ads to an ad splicer – in this case, Ateme’s Titan Live. There is also a Stream Capture (CAP) server to record the program provider’s stream alongside the ads, and a Capture Archive (TMS) to store these clips.
The ADS and Titan Live remain in constant communication with each other, with Digitalrich’s CAP and TMS reporting back data on campaign progress in real time.
On the software side, clients can preview ad clips and register metadata with the Clip Manager, before using the Scheduler to manage itineraries. The Clip Publisher is then used to transmit from the AMS to the ADS, a process which is verified by the Cue-tone Control Manager (CCM) checking for the necessary cue-tone identifiers. DAIS2000 then provides various dashboard features to monitor the progress of ad insertion in real-time.
This new integration seems in step with Ateme’s broader two-year plan, which we first heard of towards the end of 2019. The compression vendor wanted to dominate the video headend market while expanding existing service providers to OTT delivery, which requires engaging customers in multiyear contracts rather than its typical opex model (per title/minute/month).
When Ateme acquired Anevia back in August 2020, the real dealbreaker was Anevia’s expertise in delivery architecture, while its encoding business was more of a welcome bonus. Anevia’s NEA-CDN reduced the need for capacity planning and allowed operators to add their own CDN to existing network infrastructure.