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Random Fillers

How did fillers work?

When creating advertising campaigns, there were gaps not occupied by ads. To fill these gaps, the server selected the most suitable fillers from recently uploaded ones. For example, we have an advertising block (playlist) lasting 70 seconds.

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So, we have 3 gaps: 10, 20, and 20 seconds.

For example, the system has 6 fillers uploaded.

When calculating the playlist, the server most likely does not use all available fillers but chooses a few of the most suitable from the freshest ones (which exactly it chooses is hard to predict — it's a kind of magic). It might happen that F5 and F6 are not used.

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You can see how the server placed fillers in the playlist in the "Analytics" section (click on the density loading table by player-date intersection). In the timeline, ads are marked with a red frame, and fillers with a blue frame. Only fillers present in the timeline are sent to the player.

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Thus, there are two problems:

  • Old fillers are not used.
  • Fillers repeat in the playlist.

To solve these problems, we developed the "random fillers" option. Attention! This option works only for Windows applications (starting from version 4.3.13), Android (starting from version 2.0.32), Linux, and our hardware players. For SSSP, Tizen, WebOS platforms, this option is ignored (i.e., the old mechanism works).

How does the "Random Fillers" option work?

If this option is enabled, all possible fillers (both fillers without tags and fillers with tags matching the player) will be sent to the player. Then the fillers are cached in the player's memory.

If the "Random Fillers" option is enabled and the player supports it, the player itself selects which fillers to play. Example:

Back to the beginning. Suppose we have several gaps in the playlist that need to be filled with fillers.

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The player starts playing the playlist. It understands that it now needs to play "gap 1" which lasts 10 seconds. The player starts searching for the most suitable fillers in its cache. Once fillers are found, it starts playing them.

After fillers, it plays two ads, and then it's time to play "gap 2". The player again searches for the most suitable fillers to fill the gap. Important! To avoid random repetition of the same fillers, the player tries to find fillers that were used a long time ago. If no such fillers are found, it looks for fillers that were used less long ago.