Fragmentation: The Tax on Innovation
The session began by acknowledging the elephant in the room: fragmentation is expensive. Each integration with Netflix, Disney, or Amazon comes with its own requirements, and every deviation multiplies engineering costs.
It sounds simple, but it’s not. Standardization isn’t just publishing a spec—it’s about getting apps, players, operating systems, ad servers, and delivery networks to all adopt it consistently. Without adoption, specs are just PDFs, and fragmentation continues to slow the rollout of new ideas.
Live vs. On-Demand: two worlds, one challenge
The conversation quickly shifted to the divide between live streaming and on-demand video. At first glance, they both involve inserting ads into video. But in reality, they operate on two very different logics.
Live streaming, think sports or big events, means millions of viewers hitting the same ad break at the same second. Synchronization, stability, and low latency are non-negotiable. On-demand is the opposite: it’s highly personal, where viewers might pause, skip, or interact with an ad individually.
“In CTV… inventory is not in the same DSPs, because it’s different signals. We have to work with DSPs and players to make it available where buyers look for it.” Katie Stroud
🔍 DSPs (Demand Side Platforms) are tools advertisers use to buy digital inventory automatically. If live and on-demand ads run on different signals, they can’t be bought in the same way forcing advertisers and publishers to handle them separately.
The bottom line: any standard worth adopting must respect both realities. One-size-fits-all won’t work here.
Creative Ambition vs. Predictable Rendering
If fragmentation and workflow complexity weren’t enough, there’s another tug-of-war: creative freedom vs. predictable execution. Advertisers want bold formats overlays, interactive takeovers, branded moments that go beyond pre-rolls. Engineers, on the other hand, are tasked with ensuring those ads actually render correctly across Roku, Fire TV, smart TVs, desktops, and mobile devices.
This tension is where standardization earns its keep. The emerging consensus is toward templates with limited customization not enough to stifle creativity, but structured enough to ensure reliable rendering, with graceful fallbacks when devices can’t keep up.
Interactive Ads and SIMID: The Promise and the Gap
The group also discussed the rise of interactive and non-linear ads, with SIMID (Secure Interactive Media Interface Definition) playing a central role. Several participants praised SIMID for enabling richer ad experiences, but the discussion highlighted a critical shortfall: validation.
🔍 SIMID is a standard that allows interactive ads to run within video players. The challenge is that many creatives are powered by JavaScript, which makes it hard to “test” or predict how they’ll behave across devices before they actually run.
Without a proper framework for validation and certification, SIMID risks becoming too unpredictable to scale.
SSAI vs. Client-Side: no silver bullet
No conversation about ad delivery is complete without the classic debate: Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) vs client-side rendering. Each path comes with benefits and compromises.
🔍 SSAI stitches ads into the video stream on the server before sending it to viewers. It’s stable but makes personalized and interactive ads harder. Client-side inserts ads on the device itself, which enables personalization but is technically riskier.
The reality? Neither option solves everything. Standards must allow room for both approaches, depending on the use case.
A roadmap toward “Good”
If we want to stop reinventing this problem every quarter, the discussion pointed to three building blocks:
- Templates and Guardrails Standardized templates for formats like overlays or squeezebacks, with clear specs, limits, and fallback options.
- Player Capability Signaling Apps and players should expose what they can support—second decoder, supported resolution, max area—so ad servers can adapt creatives before they fail.
- Validation and Measurement Industry-wide test frameworks to certify creatives for compliance, viewability, safety, and performance across devices.
Collaboration is the real Standard
Specs alone won’t solve this. What came through most strongly in the final minutes was that collaboration across the ecosystem is non-negotiable. Advertisers, streamers, ad-tech vendors, and device makers all need to move together.
JP closed with words that perfectly captured the spirit of the meetup: “We can shape this industry together with collaboration… This is the way.” And that’s the truth: standards only matter if the industry stands behind them.
Closing thoughts
What this Mate Talk made clear is that standardizing video ad formats is not just about technology; it’s about alignment. The specs will matter, the signaling protocols, the templates, but none of them will succeed in isolation. Progress will come when platforms, advertisers, and technology providers stop treating standards as optional and start treating them as the foundation for scale.
There was an honesty in the room that felt different: people acknowledged the pain points openly, from fragmentation to interactivity to the gaps in validation. But there was also optimism. The sense that if we lean into collaboration, not just competition, we can finally move from experiments to something sustainable.
Maybe that’s the real story here: standardization isn’t a finish line we’ll cross one day, it’s the ongoing work of an industry learning to grow up together. And if this Mate Talk showed anything, it’s that the conversations we’re having now are the ones that will define how video advertising looks for the next decade.
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