Supporting Targeted Advertising in Integrated Broadcast-Broadband Systems With Automatic Media Content Preparation

Integrated Broadcast-Broadband (IBB) Systems enable a range of new services for viewers, including content personalization, such as targeted advertising. Custom advertising is delivered using the broadband connection synchronized with the broadcast content, demanding high-control synchronization among both communication channels. As the broadband channel is shared among different applications, delays may occur during the transmission of targeted advertisements, which can cause synchronization faults. Aiming at reducing these faults and truly supporting targeted advertising in IBB systems, this work proposes the automatic preparation of media content before its presentation. In order to provide automatic preparation, a preparation plan to orchestrate content loading in advance is also proposed. Our proposal is implemented in the Ginga-NCL middleware, which is a standard for the Brazilian Digital TV System. Our performance evaluation shows that the average switching time from broadcast to broadband is around 40 ms, if automatic content preparation is used, which is an outstanding result.