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Client Side Ad Insertion Crash Course

This guide acts as a quick overview of concepts relevant to CSAI, it is not meant to act as a complete tutorial.

What is CSAI?

Client Side Ad Insertion means that the app on the user's device is responsible for fetching and displays advertisement as part of the streaming experience. This is in contrast to Server Side Ad Insertion, where the ads are stitched into the video on the server.

VMAP

The VMAP is fetched or polled by the client, it is parsed to check when an ad break should occur.

VAST

The VAST document is fetched and parsed by the client, it represents the content of an ad break.

The VAST document can contain several types of ads. For example: video, images, and companion links.

The VAST specifies how an ad should be tracked. It says which events need to be sent to a tracking server in order to verify if and how much of the ad was watched and/or interacted with.

Displaying the Ads

When it is time to show the ad to the user, it is usually handled by pausing the content stream, creating a new video element, overlaying it on the content stream, and playing the ad(s). When the ad break is finished, remove the ad specific video element and resume the content stream.

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