By Amit Shetty
As my IAB counterpart Eric John blogged about a few weeks ago, the Over-The-Top (OTT) video streaming revolution is already taking place. With it comes a number of business and technical opportunities as well as challenges for the advertising industry. While OTT brings the possibility of building more dynamic, interactive, target-able, and measurable advertisements, it comes with the challenges that are inherent to any nascent space. I believe the market has reached a level of maturity that allows for a level of standardization. We certainly do not want to push standards too early – especially not at the cost of innovation, but we believe that there are some areas that all the platforms, publishers, tech vendors and advertisers can agree on. To that end, we are formally kicking off the OTT Technical Working Group.
This working group will first work on defining an OTT Identifier For Advertising (IFA), which is a key building block that a number of other capabilities depend on. The group will also work in conjunction with the Digital Video Technical Working Group to ensure that OTT considerations are factored into the work they do around VPAID, VAST, verification and other standards.
Participants have to be IAB Tech Lab members, and should have a significant OTT business – e.g., OTT device platforms, OTT tech vendors, publishers with a strong OTT presence, etc. We are looking for people with product, engineering and other technical backgrounds to participate in the conversations as they will be highly technical.
Please register here or email amit@iabtechlab.com to sign up or get more information.