BUSINESS CONTEXT

A vast user base is a natural market for advertising campaigns. The users are important for the company, so the customer didn’t want to show intrusive ad banners or non-selective information. The key characteristic for the future solution was natural ad placement and overall non-intrusiveness

The customer clearly saw a solution for this case: they wanted to deliver high-quality video ads from selected elite vendors. These videos didn’t consume much traffic, fitted the existing application or page design, and followed certain business rules selected as most appropriate for one specific placement slot

Unfortunately, the limitations of video playback in mobile browsers make none of this possible. These are fundamental constraints, which cannot be worked out by conventional methods. What’s more, the company’s audience used a rich family of mobile devices. It means end limitations and implementation quirks were different for each target platform multiplied by a range of possible browsers installed

CHALLENGE

The company partnered with Aterise to created a new flexible advertising channel for mobile and web applications. It also outlined the challenges our team had to address while creating the solution:

• Ad materials were selected and delivered via a VAST-compliant server, where VAST 3.0 is a modern standard for describing and delivering video advertisements and companion information. The standard itself is complex and a big part of it is left for a sole discretion of an implementation
• Unprecedented control over video and audio playback. Everything is controlled by pluggable business rules, which must be applied equally on each platform, disregarding its specifics
• The Player component should have a clear API to be easily pluggable into different contexts by the company’s developers
• The Player had to support modification by a selected designer to choose the best view for a specific application
• The Player should work on a rich family of various mobile and desktop devices, delivering the same high-quality UX

SOLUTION

In order to develop a solution that meets all the requirements, we used Core Javascript, without helping frameworks or libraries like jQuery, since every bit of traffic had to be saved for a user

After a technical research phase, a working solution was designed and then successfully implemented, passing a long round of user acceptance testing. We achieved it by applying advanced video and audio decoding techniques and managing a mechanism of feature and device performance detection to confirm optimal performance in different environments