Understanding AWS Elemental MediaTailor server-guided ad insertion

Server-guided ad insertion (HLS interstitials) is an alternative to server-side ad insertion. Rather than stitching ads directly into media playlists, ads are referenced as a separate primary playlist. This allows for faster video start times and reduced manifest latencies.

For information about how to use server-guided ad insertion with MediaTailor, select the applicable topic.

Enable in the playback configuration

In order to allow players to use server-guided ad insertion, you must set Insertion Mode to PLAYER_SELECT in the MediaTailor playback configuration. This allows players to select either stitched or guided ad insertion at session-initialization time.

Create a server-guided session

When creating playback sessions, choose guided mode. The way to do this depends on whether your players use implicit or explicit sessions.

Implicitly created server-guided sessions

Append aws.insertionMode=GUIDED to the HLS parent manifest request. Example:

playback-endpoint/v1/master/hashed-account-id/origin-id/index.m3u8?aws.insertionMode=GUIDED

Where:

• playback-endpoint is the unique playback endpoint that AWS Elemental MediaTailor generated when the configuration was created.

  Example

  https://777788889999.mediatailor.us-east-1.amazonaws.com

• hashed-account-id is your AWS account ID.

  Example

  AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE

• origin-id is the name that you gave when creating the configuration.

  Example

  myOrigin

• index.m3u8 or is the name of the manifest from the test stream plus its file extension. Define this so that you get a fully identified manifest when you append this to the video content source that you configured in Step 4: Create a configuration.

Using the values from the preceding examples, the full URLs are the following.

• Example:

  https://777788889999.mediatailor.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/v1/master/AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE/myOrigin/index.m3u8?aws.insertionMode=GUIDED

Explicitly created server-guided sessions

Add insertionMode=GUIDED to JSON metadata the player sends in the HTTP POST to the MediaTailor configuration's session-initialization prefix endpoint.

The following example shows the structure of the JSON metadata:

{
  # other keys, e.g. "adsParams"
  "insertionMode": "GUIDED"       # this can be either GUIDED or STITCHED
}

With this initialization metadata, the playback session will use serer-guided ad insertion.