In today’s hyper-competitive streaming landscape, delivering seamless, high-quality viewing experiences while maximizing monetization opportunities is no longer optional, it’s essential. Ateme’s NEA Composer, with its advanced manifest manipulation capabilities, is redefining how content providers approach Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI), especially in the context of live and linear streaming.
Elevating Quality of Experience with Proactive Manifest Generation
At the heart of NEA Composer’s innovation is its proactive linear manifest generation engine. Legacy ad insertion systems generate OTT manifests only when needed. NEA Composer takes a smarter approach—anticipating viewer behavior and preparing manifests ahead of time. This proactive approach significantly enhances the Quality of Experience (QoE) in several key ways:
- Reduced Buffering Likelihood: By delivering manifests faster (<50ms), NEA Composer minimizes the time players spend waiting for segment information. This ensures that video segments are downloaded promptly, reducing the risk of buffer underruns—especially during high-stakes moments like live sports or breaking news.
- Improved Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) Performance: Streaming players frequently re-fetch manifests to stay updated with the latest segment availability and metadata. NEA Composer’s low-latency responses empower players to adapt more swiftly to fluctuating network conditions, enabling smoother transitions between bitrates and maintaining optimal video quality.
- Superior Live Streaming on Any Network: Whether on fixed broadband or mobile networks, live streaming demands low latency. NEA Composer’s rapid manifest updates reduce end-to-end latency, ensuring that viewers stay as close to real-time as possible. This is particularly critical for live sports and events where every second counts.
Unlocking New Monetization Avenues
NEA Composer doesn’t just enhance the viewer experience—it also opens the door to expanded monetization strategies through advanced ad insertion capabilities:
- Seamless Ad Insertion for Low-Latency ABR Streams: With support for low-latency streaming via HLS interstitials, NEA Composer enables broadcasters and OTT providers to insert ads into live sports and event streams without disrupting the viewing experience. This ensures that monetization doesn’t come at the cost of viewer satisfaction.
- Support for Innovative Ad Formats: Beyond traditional mid-roll ads, NEA Composer enables pre-roll ads as well as emerging overlay formats such as L-shaped and side-by-side ads. The non-intrusive overlay formats enhance viewer engagement while maintaining content continuity. Ateme is actively contributing to industry standards in this space, as highlighted in recent HLS Interests presentation by Ateme’s CTO Mickaël Raulet and collaborations with partners like Shaka Player and castLabs.
- Enable Spot Replacement: By enabling ad replacement of specific spots within an overall ad break, monetization can occur even when a full suite of ads to fill the break are not available. In addition, inserting higher value niche ads alongside the ads targeting a broader general audience can boost CPM opportunities.
Driving Profitability Through Efficient Architecture
Ateme understands that profitability hinges not only on revenue generation but also on cost efficiency. NEA Composer is engineered with a backend architecture that reduces compute requirements, translating into tangible savings:
- Reduce Costs with Deployment and Commercial Flexibility: Whether your technical strategy is to deploy in the cloud or on-prem, and your financial approach is OpEx or CapEx, Ateme provides the agility to align with your technical and financial strategies.
- Reduce Infrastructure Cost with Server Guided Ad Insertion (SGAI): The introduction of Server-Guided Ad Insertion (SGAI) further positions it as a future-proof solution for dynamic monetization. While the user experience remains unchanged from traditional SSAI approach, SGAI enables greater optimization of scalability and infrastructure costs.
- Robust End-to-End Solution: With ad prefetch, elastic scaling, ad quality & transcoding workflow solutions, OMID support, and seamless virtual channel creation, Ateme NEA Composer provides a robust solution architecture to drive increases in your financial bottom line.
The Future of Streaming is Here
As the demand for personalized, high-quality, and monetizable streaming experiences continues to grow, NEA Composer stands out as a transformative solution. By combining cutting-edge manifest manipulation with a focus on performance, flexibility, and monetization, Ateme empowers content providers to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving media landscape.
Whether you’re delivering live sports, premium entertainment, or niche content, NEA Composer ensures that every viewer gets the best possible experience—while you unlock new revenue streams and drive operational efficiency.
Streaming success starts with smarter ad insertion. Discover how Ateme NEA Composer can help you deliver exceptional viewer experiences and unlock new revenue streams—today.
About the Author
Dan Patton is Vice President, Product, Origination and Delivery at Ateme, where he defines and oversees implementation of the OTT product vision, bringing over two decades of experience in the realm of IP video. Prior to joining Ateme, Dan was responsible for product management of the streaming product portfolio of Vecima. Before that, he held a variety of sales, business development, and solution architecture roles at Velocix, Nokia, and Alcatel-Lucent. Dan was also an early employee of a 360-degree video Silicon Valley startup and previously worked at Sun Microsystem and Xerox. Dan’s unique blend of technical and business skills enables him to help telcos, broadcasters, and OTT providers as they transition their video services to an OTT approach. He also guides them in leveraging their content-delivery investments for new revenue-generating opportunities.
Dan holds a Computer Science degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an MBA from Santa Clara University. He is based in San Diego, California.