CableLabs Publishes Interactive and Advanced Advertising Specs

CableLabs published new set of specifications to further the development of cable advertising and other interactive products.


CableLabs' Stewardship and Fulfillment Interfaces (or SaFI) comprise a set of component specifications that will allow cable companies to provide more innovative types of advanced ads, such as interactive advertising, advertising within existing video on demand platforms, and advanced forms of addressable advertising.


CableLabs said its new SaFI interfaces will allow multi-system operators (MSOs) to offer such ad products with consistent technologies, metrics and interfaces across a national footprint. Consistent metrics will and interfaces will help MSOs deliver timely and usable measurements to their advertising customers. The SaFI specs were developed and will be maintained by a CableLabs Working Group composed of MSO, Canoe and CableLabs technical leads, with selective input from the vendor community.


The SaFI specification includes the following component pieces:


1. Service Measurement Summary Interface (SMSI)--enables MSOs to export information about the execution of a campaign.


2. Interactive Fulfillment Summary Interface (IAF)--provides a means for messaging generated by an interactive application to be exposed to an external entity.


3. Interactive Application Messaging Platform (IAM)--provides a critical interface between interoperable applications (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.


4. Campaign Information Package Interface (CIP)--provides information to the MSOs on the configuration of application messaging processing, such as identifiers relevant to the messages.
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