--Interfaces Are Key Component of US Cable Industry's Plans for Unified Advanced Advertising Platform
US cable-industry research, development and standardization organization, CableLabs, announced Wednesday the release of a new set of specifications, called the Stewardship and Fulfillment Interfaces (SaFI), which it says were created to further the development of advanced cable advertising and other interactive products, and which will be a key part of Project Canoe, the US cable-industry's initiative to create a national, cross-operator, unified platform for interactive and addressable advertising. According to the organization, the SaFI interfaces are comprised of a set of component specifications that will enable cable operators to provide more innovative types of advanced advertising, such as interactive TV advertising, advertising within existing video-on-demand platforms, and advanced forms of addressable advertising. Collectively, CableLabs says, the new interfaces will allow operators to offer these advanced advertising products with consistent technologies, interfaces and metrics across a national footprint. Consistent metrics and interfaces will allow operators to deliver timely and usable measurements to their advertisers, the organization promises.
The SaFI specs, which are part of CableLabs' Advanced Advertising 1.0 architecture (note: for more on the latter, see the article published on itvt.com, April 2nd), were developed, and will be maintained by, a CableLabs Working Group composed of technical leads from CableLabs itself, cable MSO's, and Canoe Ventures, the cable-backed company tasked with implementing the unified advanced advertising platform envisaged by Project Canoe. The development and maintenance of the specs also involves "selective input" from the vendor community, CableLabs says. "These specs represent some fairly fast-track work put together by specialists from our member MSO's, Canoe Ventures and vendor companies," Don Dulchinos, CableLabs' SVP of advanced platforms, said in a prepared statement. "Their long experience makes it possible for new capabilities around standardized reporting and fulfillment to be plugged right into technologies that support a range of advanced advertising products." Added Canoe Ventures CTO, Arthur Orduna: "We are very pleased to see the SaFI specifications released on a timely basis, as was promised earlier this year. Their publication is the critical next step in the development of the cable industry's Advanced Advertising 1.0 architecture specification." And added Terri Swartz, director of advertising technology at Cox Communications and a member of the MSO executive team overseeing CableLabs' advanced advertising work: "We will look for compliance with SaFI specs as a key requirement for our advanced advertising vendors."
According to CableLabs, the new SaFI specs are comprised of four components:
- Service Measurement Summary Interface (SMSI), which enables MSO's to export information about the execution of a campaign.
- Interactive Fulfillment Summary Interface (IAF), which provides a means for messaging generated by an interactive application to be exposed to an external entity.
- Interactive Application Messaging Platform (IAM), which provides a critical interface between interoperable applications (i.e. apps distributed to more than one MSO) and MSO systems, defining the common form of messages instantiated by interoperable apps and how MSO systems decode them.
- Campaign Information Package Interface (CIP), which provides information to the MSO's on the configuration of application messaging processing, such as identifiers relevant to the messages.
CableLabs says that there is strong vendor community support for the new SaFI interfaces, which was evidenced by the success of an interoperability event that it held early last month. According to the organization, 14 companies--Arris, BIAP, BlackArrow, Cisco Systems, Concurrent, Ensequence, Motorola, OpenTV, RGB Networks, Sigma Systems, Tandberg Television (Ericsson), This Technology, TVN Entertainment, and UniSoft--demonstrated interoperability among their products based on the SaFI standards (note: the companies were working off an early draft version, CableLabs says), and integrated with the SCTE-130 standards for advanced digital advertising. According to CableLabs, the sample ad product demonstrated as part of that interop was dynamic insertion of ads into VOD avails, based on addressability; however, the organization stresses, the SaFI specs are designed to work across all types of advertising and interactive products. More information on CableLabs' Advanced Advertising 1.0 initiative can be found at a dedicated Web site the organization has set up: advancedadvertising.tv.
