Online video ad insertion provider iStreamPlanet beginning in 2009 partnered with NBC Sports on live sporting events including its Sunday Night Football Extra interactive program, and most recently, Notre Dame College football and the Ryder Cup. iStreamPlanet said their live ad insertion product is now used for all NBC Sports online events. The company’s SVP/Digital Products Randy Levine tells RBR-TVBR the deal involves both the management of ad insertion and streaming. “That’s for the various events we’re doing right now, including Sunday Night Football, and we also did this for the Olympics. We’ve done some great work, also including Wimbledon and The US Open.”
In total, iStreamPlanet has managed and enabled the deployment of more than 1,000 large live events viewed online by millions, including the Presidential Inauguration and the Michael Jackson Memorial. Other television clients include CBS, Cablevision, Fox International, Turner and CTV.
After first delivering NBC Sports’ Sunday Night Football Extra interactive program, iStreamPlanet was brought back to help innovate again on NBC Sports’ SNF Extra coverage with enhancements to the online coverage. This includes designing and developing a new methodology of managing and inserting pre-defined ad pods at the desired times into the live broadcast. iStreamPlanet also designed and developed the management layer for the aggregation and insertion of a game’s key events.
For the 2010 Sunday Night Football Season, iStreamPlanet is acquiring five live video feeds, encoding them in IIS Smooth Streaming and providing cloud-based IIS Origin Services. Additionally, iStream’s content management system (CMS) is being used for live ad insertion, management of the key game events data as well as to cut highlights and publish them within minutes of the play. The CMS also enables NBC to trigger a live-to-video on-demand transition with its video workflow automation platform (VWAP)—the next generation of automation software that enables content digitization into multiple formats for delivery across multiple platforms.
