The AdicTV project leaded by ENENSYS ends with validation of two approaches for targeted advertising on DTT

December 12, 2018 – Rennes – The AdicTV consortium has announced the end of the project started on August 1st, 2015 and demonstrated convincing results regarding targeted advertising on Digital Terrestrial Television. Two approaches were developed by the members of the consortium and successfully tested on TDF’s network, the DTT operator in France.

The first approach “in the network” consists of replacing an advertisement in a national TV service by a local advertisement at the different DTT transmission sites. Viewers will see a different advertisement according to their location, even when watching the same national channel. The implemented system enables perfectly synchronous and deterministic ad replacement, which enables a group of transmission sites operating as a Single Frequency Network to maintain SFN operation during the ad replacements. The key benefit of this first implementation approach is that it is compliant with any standard commercial TV receiver, without requiring the installation of an application in the TV set or the Set-Top-Box. It was demonstrated several times with great success in France, where several studies about the future of the DTT platform and the evolution of the regulation of TV advertisement are underway.

The second approach allows a finer personalization of the advertisements, with ads replaced in the TV receiver, taking into account the television viewer’s profile stored in the receiver. This approach downloads advertisements into the receiver, through the DTT channel itself, as a background stream of the main service. Once stored in the receiver, these ads are displayed replacing those in the national services, taking into account the television viewer’s profile. The timing of this replacement is accurately determined by timing markers distributed in the main stream. Again, the ad replacement is seamless for the television viewer. This system works with commercial TV receivers meeting the requirements of the HbbTV 2.0 specification currently in deployment. These receivers can be either TV sets or STBs.

The two approaches have been developed ready for production use and the consortium’s actors now offer commercial solutions available for immediate delivery. ENENSYS Technologies recently announced an important contract for the deployment of its AdsEdge product on a national network in Europe. AdsEdge allows “in the network” ad replacement. This >2M€ contract will give the operator the ability to regionalise advertisements on the national services according to the location of the audience. The benefit for the service providers will be to significantly enlarge their advertiser base on their DTT services. In parallel, Quadrille is deploying their Quadrifast product for non-linear ad insertion in STBs on European markets.

 About AdicTV

AdicTV is a French collaborative Research Project associating five partners and working on advertising personalisation over DTT. Two approaches have been successfully developed and demonstrated: geographical personalisation within the transmission network and targeted personalisation in the receiver.

The five partners are ENENSYS Technologies (leader), Quadrille, TDF, INSA Rennes and Telecom ParisTech.

Started mid 2015 and terminating at the end of 2018, this project is sponsored by the French government (DGE and BPIfrance) and two Regional councils: Brittany and Ile de France.