Live Ad Replacement

If you were a restaurant owner who had installed a dozen TV screens to entertain your patrons, and were paying a premium price for content, would you choose to show a competitor's commercials to your customers? Wouldn't you prefer to replace those ads with your own messages promoting featured appetizers or Happy Hour specials? Of course you would... and now you can!

TVPOS has developed a revolutionary line of digital signage products capable of seamlessly replacing, in real time, some or all of the commercials embedded in a normal broadcast feed with alternate ads stored on our Nexus AdServer. Our Live Ad Replacement technology senses the beginning and end of embedded ad spots without the aid of cue tones, and instantly switches to an secondary feed to play alternate ads according to a schedule or playlist.

The Nexus AdServer, using our own patent-pending technology, is different from every other digital signage product on the market in that it can monitor any live TV feed to detect when a standard commercial advertisement begins to play, switching seamlessly to local ads in sync with live network or local commercials, and ensuring a return to programming when the original ad ends. The transition is seamless and natural, with programming flowing into ads and back without clipping content. Your 15- or 30-second ad spots are shown on your displays as if they were aired by your cable company, right along with the national ads. The effect is nothing short of magic!

Legal Considerations

Because of the legal vulnerabilities of network ad replacement, this technology is currently recommended for deployment only where its use is clearly permitted by the content providers, where users own or can obtain rights to replace some or all broadcast ads.

You can read about copyright and Fair Use as they apply to ad replacement here.

Conservative Alternatives:

TVPOS also offers less controversial ad replacement solutions to cable and satellite headend operators as a value-added service for their business tier. We have developed methods for selective replacement of local ad spots originating from the headend:

Tagging - Ads designated as replaceable or fillers are tagged in post-production to trigger remote AdServers when they appear in any broadcast feed, causing local ads to be shown in their place according to a playlist. For example, cable company promotional spots scheduled during unsold ad slots are good candidates for replacement. The tag is benign to headend equipment, and is recognized only by TPOS AdServers. This method requires no additional headend equipment and is easily arranged with the operator's advertising sales department.
Cue Propagation - Local cue tones and SCTE-35 digital cuing messages (see sidebar) are detected at the headend and embedded in the outgoing feed or forwarded via IP in order to trigger ad replacement on Nexus AdServers installed at business-tier venues. This method requires installation of our equipment at the headend.

Pay-per-Play

Meanwhile, Television Point of Sales is committed to working with networks and content providers to define and obtain broadcast ad replacement rights. If networks were to place a reasonable value on each ad spot, and could agree on a method of verification, ad replacement would be reduced to a simple pay-per-play transaction. We believe this is the future of television advertising, and makes sense in a world where consumers have many viewing options.

We see a clear market need for ad targeting on a local level, and it would benefit the networks to think out of the box to facilitate the practice. Targeted advertising creates new revenue streams for networks, providers, and business venues, and TVPOS has a great solution for it today!

Is it Complicated?

Our Nexus digital signage devices connect easily between your satellite or cable set-top box and any standard or HD television receiver, and can act as a source for your A/V distribution system as well. Broadband access can be wired or wireless.

Your ads and ad schedules are downloaded to the Nexus via your existing broadband access - no DVDs or employee involvement are necessary. Ads, schedules, and operating software are maintained remotely, and logs are monitored for maintenance and billing purposes.

The Nexus OSD and Nexus AdServer both include a built-in media player that can store and play back more than 100 hours of HD-quality video, and can also overlay your company logo onscreen if you wish to professionally brand your display devices.

Ad Replacement Demos

The play quality of these demos depends on the speed of your broadband connection. Note that you can adjust the size of these HD demos by zooming out from within your browser using:

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View live Nexus AdServer demo

View live Nexus OSD demo

Insert or Replace?

'Ad Insertion' typically refers to the injection of ad spots between segments of broadcast program content that takes place at an affiliate or cable/ satellite provider's headend.

'Ad Replacement' refers to the replacement, as perceived by a viewer, of existing general-purpose ads in a broadcast stream with different spots, e.g., ads more suitable for the patrons of each business venue and targeted toward their presumed interests.

In our implementation, the replacement actually occurs by instantly switching the input feed to an alternate source, our Nexus AdServer, as if a viewer with really quick reflexes had pressed "input" on his remote control. No alteration or storage of the original feed takes place at all.

Cue Me In

Local ad Insertion at the headend is performed in the analog broadcast world using audio "cue tones" transmitted from a network source during the fixed period allocated for local ads, typically one minute per ad break.

In the digital broadcasting world, that job has been subsumed by SCTE-35 Digital Cuing messages carried in transport stream packet headers.

These signals are decoded at the headend and used to redirect the feed through the headend's local ad server. (In this context, "local" refers to the entire viewing area serviced by that headend.)

In either case, digital or analog, these insertion signals are not transmitted beyond the headend, and so can not be used to trigger targeted ads at remote business venues without translation and propagation.

More Legal Stuff

The practice of replacing network or headend-inserted local ads with micro-targeted ads is a thorny issue in the U.S., and so, to avoid legal entaglements, for now it is best considered only by cable and satellite providers which own the rights to their local spots.

Our technology does not violate any U.S. laws such as DMCA, nor any rules or regulations governed by the FCC. It doesn't modify, store, decrypt, or rebroadcast a network feed, and, in its simplest form, is merely an automated tool used to switch the input source of the display monitor

One perspective on the conflict between copyright and rights of free speech in this situation states that, as long as a venue doesn't profit by selling ad space to third parties and is simply promoting in-house services and products to its own patrons, it is doutbtful that a broadcaster could prove damages.

No one expects to get content for free - Pay-to-Play is best solution to this quandary.