Transmit Live Enables PiP Ad Insertion on YES App

Transmit.Live is giving the YES Network’s top-ranked streaming sports app an added layer of interactivity by enabling dynamic, addressable low-latency picture-in-picture (PIP) ad insertion during live games. The new integration, a first for the live streaming industry, delivers a highly personalized fan viewing experience and creates new revenue opportunities for rightsholders and advertisers.

The YES Network launched its app in early 2021 and the platform is already one of the most downloaded free sports apps, outpacing its initial viewership and revenue estimates. The YES team has continually added new features and functionality, but the broadcaster wanted to bring an extra dimension to the offering. Transmit’s live ad insertion platform was the right technology at the right time: a server-side solution built from the ground-up to support live media rights monetization, as the consumer viewing experience continually shifts from traditional linear broadcast to streaming platforms.

The YES Network began integrating the Transmit platform to not only introduce next generation live ad formats, but also to support conventional ad stitching, handle the transcoding and encoding of each stream independently, enable addressable ad insertion, bring more context and relevance to viewers and drive more targeted media rights monetization opportunities.

“We wanted to build new ad experiences that sustained viewer attention without disrupting the viewer experience,” said Matt Duarte, VP, Strategy and Business Development at YES Network. “Our goal is for people to come to our platform, watch our games, and engage with our content meaningfully for longer periods of time. Anything we can do to increase the watch time and deliver personalized experiences is definitely a win for us.”

The Transmit platform ingests live data signals and translates them to add real-time contextual awareness of a live event. By using Transmit’s Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) capability, advertisers are able to customize event-triggered in-stream ad insertions, leveraging signals created during the live event to determine appropriate times to insert PIP ads.

“It’s not blunt-force interruption, rather it’s relevant to what a fan is watching at any given time,” said Rob Friedlander, Head of Marketing at Transmit.Live. “Our goal is to bring context to the programmer and make that available to advertisers. That’s a powerful opportunity in a streaming environment, compared to the traditional method of burning a graphics ad package into a live linear broadcast stream and having the entire audience all see the same thing. We’re creating a premium, compelling ad experience for the end user and the advertiser, and all this happens at scale using industry-standard assets.”

Since integrating the Transmit platform into its app, YES Network has seen spikes in key attitudinal metrics such as brand recall, ad favorability and message association. For viewer retention, the network has seen increases in video completion rates of 6% for NBA content and 5% for MLS content, compared to standard industry ad pod rates. In terms of creating incremental inventory supply, YES has realized a 10% increase in new inventory created for the NBA and an expansion of more than 24% for MLS.

YES Network will continue to explore new potential content and revenue opportunities using the Transmit platform, including customizable dynamic graphics patterns, animation and QR codes.

“We’re looking at anything within the real estate that can be tied to the content and activated on behalf of a brand or advertiser,” said Scott Young, Chief Product Officer at Transmit.Live. “It’s all about merging advertising messaging with context to make ads more relevant to what the viewer is watching on screen and subsequently making the ads more shoppable based on specific and significant moments of time.”