Concurrent Streams API is IAB Tech Lab’s tech specification, aimed at standardizing the process of requesting and passing viewership data during live streaming events.
The Story Behind
Until recently, the programmatic video ad infrastructure hasn’t enabled passing data regarding the actual number of viewers (i.e. devices) of a live stream at a particular point in time at scale, leading to potentially inefficient ad decisioning and missed revenue opportunities for all players, both on the sell and the buy side.
In view of this, IAB Tech Lab has introduced a so-called Concurrent Streams API, which allows requesting the viewership info by API subscribers, whether it’s a publisher, a publisher network, an SSP or a DSP, whenever they need to, and passing the requested info to their systems in almost real time.
In such a way, the Concurrent Streams API aims to:
- enable companies on the supply side to better understand actual viewership dynamics and adjust their monetization strategy, accordingly;
- allow demand-side businesses to handle QPS (queries per second) spikes, as well as adjust their bidding strategies in the most effective way;
- ensure that the viewership information is passed smoothly, without causing latency problems on any end.
Implementation Specs
According to the Concurrent Streams API documentation, various attributes of live events in question can be passed in the Mediastream object, with specific parameters of the Content object being passed for each specific mediastream, if needed, including content ID, title, series and channel, just to name a few.
Note! Passing both eventstart & eventend attributes is required for each mediastream.
To align with the roll-out of Concurrent Streams API, IAB Tech Lab has also released updates to OpenRTB, introducing additional new attributes for the Content object, aimed at enabling publishers to better outline content specifics in the bid stream – recording & airdate. Namely, a so-to-speak liveliness of the event can be described using one of the following parameters: livestream, recorded, capturedlive and firstbroadcast.
Tip! For more information about the new attributes, please refer to the OpenRTB technical documentation.