YouTube has established itself as a prominent live streaming platform globally, renowned for its versatility and accessibility across a wide range of devices. This makes it an ideal choice for streaming live events on a large scale.
For several years, RTMP has been the standard protocol for streaming content to YouTube live. In 2024, YouTube introduced the capability to get content from encoders through the SRT protocol. While RTMP remains a viable option, there are compelling reasons to consider adopting SRT. Notably, YouTube offers dynamic live ad insertion when SRT is selected as the output format from Videon LiveEdge® devices. This integration enables an easy way to monetize your content through YouTube’s integrated ad platform.
Live ad insertion on YouTube is achieved through the SCTE-35 broadcast standard. Developed by the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE), SCTE-35 defines the insertion of cue tones into digital audio and video streams. These cue tones signal events such as ad insertions, program breaks, and other content changes in digital video streams. In our context, we will utilize these cue tones to trigger the insertion of a commercial break during a live event streamed from your LiveEdge® device.
Please note that this feature has been relatively recently introduced on YouTube, and at the time of writing, not every live channel is enabled for digital ad insertion on SRT streams. To access this feature, you must enable it for your YouTube account.
Assuming you are familiar with setting up audio and video encoding profiles on your LiveEdge® device, a brief refresher can be accessed from our support website, we are taking as a starting point that you have correctly set up an SRT stream to a YouTube live ingest endpoint.
Once your audio and video encoding profiles are prepared, you need to add a data encoding profile. LiveEdge® devices support various metadata insertion types, including KLV SMPTE-336 and SMPTE-2038. In our use case here, for live ad markers, we require SCTE-35 data encoding.
Once your data encoder has been selected, ensure it is associated with the appropriate input source, particularly for the LiveEdge® Max, which has two input options. Why is it necessary to associate a data encoder with an input? Because the Videon LiveEdge® platform can mark the availability of ad breaks in two distinct ways:
Finally, ensure that you have added your SCTE-35 data encoder as a data source for your SRT stream:
Additionally, ensure that you have configured the appropriate business rules and policies for live ad insertion in your YouTube console, and that the liv stream is up and running.
The easiest is to call directly the local REST API for ad insertion with a HTTP POST request in the of:
http://<device_API>:2020/v2/encoders/data_encoders/<data_encoder_id>/action/splice_command
with the following JSON body structure in the POST request, for a splice insert with a pre-roll of 0 second, and a duration of 30 seconds (i.e. 30,000 ms) for the ad break:
{
“splice_command":
{
"value":"splice_insert",
"splice_insert":
{
"preroll_time_msec":0,
"duration_msec":30000
}
}
}
In our publicly available Github repository, you can find other examples on how to connect the SCTE-35 data API to a Web UI, or a physical button to connect to your existing contact-based “big red button”: these are options we’ve deployed in the field with several customers.
For more information about this workflow, as well as our other monetization solutions, please reach out to our team, and talk to one of our experts.
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