NBC Sports Group has tapped Avail-TVN to deliver video-on-demand content and related services for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games -- the largest volume of VOD for an Olympics to date -- to hundreds of North American pay-TV operators, including "TV Everywhere" authentication for certain affiliates.
Separately, Avail-TVN said it has extended its Advanced Advertising Insertion and Marking (AAIM) service to provide mid-roll content marking to allow dynamic ad insertion in the middle of VOD assets.
For NBC Olympics, Avail-TVN will provide a wide array of services, including broadcast signal acquisition and file capture, Nielsen C3 watermark verification, support for various file formats, dynamic asset management and content distribution. Subscribers of certain affiliates will be able to access Olympic highlights and full-event replays on VOD a few hours after they occur live in London. Avail-TVN will also provide authentication services to some operators to enable access to content available on NBCOlympics.com.
The media services company will use the multiplatform Adoniss and AnyView systems to deliver NBC Olympics' pre-Games on-demand content, including athlete profiles and event trials, as well as the best of the 2012 London Olympics, to run July 27 to Aug. 12.
"With marquee content like the Olympics, we will rely on Avail-TVN's digital media network expertise to publish and syndicate the largest volume of Olympic VOD content we have ever made available around the Olympic Games to our participating multichannel video programming distribution partners," NBC Sports Digital vice president and general manager Rick Cordella said in a statement.
On the dynamic ad-insertion front, Avail-TVN now provides mid-roll content marking and stream conditioning services as an enhancement to the encoding and editing workflow, allowing operators to use DAI.
Avail-TVN has added placement opportunity authoring and management capabilities, which allow placement-opportunity business rules to be made available through an SCTE 130-compliant placement opportunity information service (POIS) interface or inserted into the content metadata in accordance with CableLabs specifications.
At the 2012 Cable Show next week in Boston, Avail-TVN will demo the VOD ad-insertion capabilities with ad decision engines from Harris and SeaChange International.
The company last November introduced the Advanced Advertising Insertion and Marking service, which automatically inserts a mark indicating ad-break opportunities in VOD content alongside hard-coded ads measured in the Nielsen C3 window.
"Until now, content providers have not been able to fully realize the promise of dynamic ad insertion," Avail-TVN chief marketing officer Laurie Lawrence said in a statement. "With the only approach that enables mid-roll ad insertion for their content in any environment, Avail-TVN is delivering the industry's only working solution for increased revenue opportunities from VOD content."
