Comcast is charting a new course with its recent announcement that it’s dynamically inserting ads into video-on-demand, but even bigger dynamic ad insertion plans for VOD are afloat. After tweaking the network architecture, Canoe Ventures started testing DAI with vendors last year in its lab. A CableLabs interop earlier this year brought the company together with more vendors in the ecosystem to make sure the physical requirements and feature set would be the same in a field setting. Project Canoe first tested the waters on coordinating a national platform during the elections of 2008. Orduña said the successful video-on-demand-based project was designed to see if the cable operators could coordinate, report and publish in unison on a national level.

Canoe Ventures purposely didn’t reinvent the wheel to enable DAI on its iTV architecture, but it did need to make some changes. By design, Canoe Ventures ended up with the same workflow, the same data flow and the same overall high-level components that were already in place for iTV. At a high level, there are the advertisers and programmers on one end, Canoe Ventures’ centralized platform in the middle and the cable operators below Canoe Ventures that execute the VOD DAI campaigns. From the iTV architecture, Canoe Ventures had to make enhancements to the following: order management, data management and the content/delivery management that’s tied to an asset for VOD DAI.

Canoe Ventures will no doubt benefit from Comcast’s DAI deployment with BlackArrow since Comcast is among Canoe Ventures’ financial backers.
With Comcast out of the starting blocks with its VOD DAI, Canoe Ventures’ architecture in place, and an appetite to monetize VOD by programmers and cable operators alike, ad-supported video-on-demand appears to be poised for liftoff.

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