As HTML5 grows its share of the online video market, web video publishers are beginning to look for ways to monetize videos being played outside of the traditional Flash advertising methods. But when someone watches a video in HTML5 mode, what should that experience be like? What’s possible, given the current state of the tech?
HTML5: Desktop vs. Mobile
Before we begin talking about the challenges that face HTML5 video ads, it’s valuable to acknowledge that video in HTML5 can behave very differently on the desktop compared to the same HTML code running on mobile devices. Here are some of the primary differences:
HTML5 Desktop
HTML5 Smartphone
HTML5 Tablet
Clickable Overlays
Yes
No
Depends*
Clickable Video
Yes
No
Depends*
Companion Ads
Yes
Not visible
Yes
Fullscreen mode
Optional
Always
Optional
Customizable controls
Yes
No
Yes
Available Bandwidth (probable)
LAN/WAN
3G/4G/WAN
3G/4G/WAN
* Platform-specific
As you can see from the table above, some concepts that advertisers take for granted, such as video ads which cause a web page to be displayed when clicked, are not possible on smartphones. For example, on most mobile devices, once an HTML5 video begins playing, whether it’s an ad or not, the phone will enter fullscreen video playback mode. In this mode, the user has full control over the playing video, including the ability to seek to the end of it.
Technical Challenges
As the major ad networks are beginning to offer support for HTML5 video ads, they face several important challenges.
Video Codec Incompatibility (WebM vs. MP4)
One issue which HTML5 video publishers are already familiar with is that to support all platforms, video must be encoded into multiple formats — WebM (or Ogg Theora) for Firefox, and H.264 for everything else. Second, someone (whether the browser, ad network, video player, or publisher) will need to select the appropriate format and display it to the user. This can be difficult to implement in an ad scenario, especially if ad networks don’t account for the user’s browser when generating an ad response.
Crossdomain Issues
An additional technical concern is that loading external assets (a VAST XML response from an ad server, for example) brings with it certain restrictions in JavaScript. These restrictions need to be worked around on the server hosting those assets.
Depending on the implementation, most ad networks require direct access to the player’s
Industry Roundup
Considering the relative newness of HTML5 video (and the challenges listed above), it’s unsurprising that not many video ad networks have implemented full HTML5 support yet. That being said, there are a few ad networks who have made some progress on this front:
- Google recently released HTML5 support in their Interactive Media Ads (IMA) product. This implementation allows publishers to set up VAST ads, with certain limitations based on device compatibility. The JW Player’s Google IMA Plugin includes beta support for HTML5 mode.
- YuMe has been steadily improving their HTML5 support, which is now supported in the JW Player’s HTML5 mode via the YuMe plugin.
- Most other video ad networks (Tremor, SpotXchange, BrightRoll, and others) have either announced, or are currently implementing support for mobile devices, which will mean HTML5-compatible ad media.
Future Considerations
As in Flash, as more publishers attempt to handle more sophisticated scenarios, new techniques must be devised to handle them. Dynamic bitrate switching, for example, allows publishers make on-the-fly optimizations for video ads based on screen resolution and available bandwidth. Apple HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) is on its way to becoming the standard streaming format on mobile devices — with competition coming in the form of MPEG DASH, which was ratified as an ISO standard last week. Both HLS and DASH are based around the idea of a manifest file, which keeps track of smaller chunks of video that can be stitched together into a single seamless video. To insert an ad into this stream can be as simple as adding the ad chunks inside of the manifest file at the appropriate times, a technique known as dynamic ad insertion. A more general optmization we’ll be moving towards is ad delivery which is optimized for variable-bandwidth environments, as many mobile users are viewing content over slower wireless networks.
In short, we’re still a long way from having a turnkey video advertising solution for all HTML5 viewers, but we’re closer than ever before to achieving that goal.