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This is the second in a series of articles on video advertising. I'll be writing about what VAST is, why this standard is so important, and what's happening with VAST 2.

VAST is the standardized way to deliver an ad response to a video player. This is done with XML which contains information about the type of ad, where the ad creative (also known as the ad video file or other asset) is located, events to fire when certain things happen, and much more. The specification explains in detail what all can be done.

Having this standard ad response allows for ad servers to work very differently. Instead of spending a lot of time worrying about the differences between different video players and the types and formats of responses they are expecting, the ad server can ideally return the same ad XML to all places. More importantly, ad servers often talk to each other, grabbing ads from different places as needed and requested. This is the real power of VAST, which is that it allows 3rd-party ad serving to happen easily, allowing ad servers to talk to each other. This makes things like the real-time bartering of video ads possible.

I'm personally excited by VAST because I've seen the changes that a standard can bring. About ten years ago, I helped implement the J2EE specification in JRun at Allaire. J2EE, now referred to as Java EE, consolidated a lot of different ideas going on in the Java world at the time and allowed people to choose the application server that was the best for them. I see similar parallels in VAST and VPAID (another important standard which I'll talk about in a future article). The consolidation of ideas can be seen by looking at the Brightcove ad XML formats which can now all be described in VAST.

My experience with standards gives me one thing to worry about in this time period, when VAST is still being adopted, which is this: standards must be completely implemented and widely used for them to be successful. J2EE solved this with a Compatibility Test Suite and a market that insisted on products that were J2EE. There's different ways to get to completely implemented and widely used standards, and I hope in short time we will see VAST become this type of standard.

VAST was created by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (the IAB). The IAB put together this specification by talking with a lot of ad server companies, video platforms, ad agencies, and other people interested in getting a standard format. Brightcove was one of the companies who helped with this specification, and we used our knowledge from the Brightcove ad XML that I previously mentioned to suggest changes to the specification. The VAST specification, XSD and some samples can all be found on the IAB website.

You'll notice on the IAB website that the current version is 2. VAST 1 had some support in the industry, but VAST 2 has completely overtaken it. Many ad servers, like DoubleClick's platform have announced supported for VAST 2. And a growing number of video players, including Brightcove's player, allow its use. Besides the wider support, VAST 2 also has a lot more of the elements and attributes that are needed for ad responses. There are a numbers of limitations in the VAST 1 specification, which does not allow ad creatives in certain places, misses some events that people wanted to know about, and has elements that need to be clarified. If you'd like to read more, Eyeblaster's blog has an excellent article on the advantages of VAST 2.

While VAST 2 is now recommended, Brightcove implements both VAST 1 and VAST 2 specifications. We are also continuously adding new features to the player to allow for more of the VAST 2 elements to be used.

This is the first in a series of articles on video advertising. To start this series off, I wanted to give a general overview of how video advertising works from the point-of-view of a Brightcove player. The slides below are adapted from a presentation I gave at 360Flex a few months ago.

This presentation would more accurately be called The Life of an Ad From the Video Player's Perspective, but that didn't sound as catchy. It's not discussing the technical side of creating an ad or using an ad server, both of which are immense topics by themselves.

Over the next month or two, I'll be writing a series of technical articles on video advertising. You'll learn more about how the ad lifecycle, the standards that have emerged for video ads, and what's in the video ad future. If you're a developer who doesn't know much about advertising, this is a great time to learn! So, before you install Adblock on this series, here's a few reasons to read more:

• As a web developer, you've certainly already worked on a website that uses advertising. Why not understand what's really going on underneath it all? It helps to know about the HTTP protocol, even if you aren't writing a webserver, and I think that a similar case can be made for advertising. The Law of Leaky Abstraction makes us all dig deeper from time to time, and an understanding of what's under the covers with ads will come in handy someday.
• Even if you don't deal with video ads, this series will be useful to you. There's a lot of banner ads and rich media ads that are needed as part of a video player experience as well, and much of the articles are applicable to the rich media ad market and some to display ads. Google's blog has an excellent description of both rich media ads and display ads.
• Although I'll be writing a lot about Brightcove, almost all of the items I will cover are not specific to Brightcove. The IAB standards and advertising approaches are industry-wide; and we'll just happen to be using a Brightcove player when talking about them.
• Video advertising is an area that's expanding rapidly, growing more than 40% last year and projected to do the same this year.
• This is being written by someone who has an inside look at how video advertising is coming together. I've been dealing with advertising at Brightcove for more than two years now, and I've written many of the pieces in the ad SDK. And, if I can persuade them, you may also see a post or two from others on the advertising team here at Brightcove in the future.

Have I convinced you? I hope so, but if you need any more persuasion or just want to ask a question, write a comment here or send me a message on twitter.

Here are links to the published articles:

• The Life of An Ad
• Why VAST Is Important

Below is the presentation that I gave along with Melissa Gregory at 360Flex a few hours ago. It's about the life of an ad and a little bit about Brightcove.

To anybody reading this who wasn't at the conference- I talked a lot about each slide and don't have any of those notes in the presentation. I'd be happy to explain anything more in the comments.

How RIA Advertising Works And a Little Bit About Brightcove

I'm excited to announce that I'll be giving a talk, How RIA Advertising Works, at 360Flex. You can hear me at lunch on Monday, March 8th.

I've been building advertising SDKs for more than a year at Brightcove, and I want to share the things that I've learned about how advertising works- we'll go over the basics of advertising (CPMs, Mad Men, ad networks), the life of an ad (ad policies, ad delivery, impressions), and the emerging standards (VAST, VPAID). It will be a very technical dive into an area that many of us make our living off but which not a lot of people understand. A coworker of mine, Melissa Gregory, will also be giving a ten-minute introduction to Brightcove at the beginning of the talk.

The presentation I'll be giving is a sponsored presentation for Brightcove. I don't want this to dissuade those who just want to hear about RIA advertising, as my goal is to make this a talk that's the same as the non-sponsored talks at the conference. Being a former speaker at 360Flex in Seattle, I know I can make this happen, no matter if you use a different video platform or none at all.

I'm happy that Brightcove is a Bronze sponsor at the event. We'll have a booth there, which I'll be manning at points and where you can learn more about what we do (and pick up some schwag).

Not signed up for 360Flex? If you can get to San Jose in two weeks, you should sign up now. This is the original Flex conference, and the people who attend make it a one-of-a-kind event. I went to the first 360Flex in San Jose as well as 360Flex in Seattle three years ago. I met so many incredible people at both events, and I'm sure it will be the same at this one.

I'm very excited to see all of the news about Flash today, but I'm most excited to be able to talk about the work that Brightcove has been doing with Flash 10.1. As you can see in the video below, we've been working hard here to have different versions of the Brightcove player on mobile devices as well as making sure the current ones work as expected in the beta of Flash Player 10.1. The Brightcove player does a surprising amount, in my biased opinion- runtime layout with BEML, hundreds of API methods to call, segmented SWFs for optimizing size, handling large number of CDNs, support for every major ad server, and a lot more. And all of this is happening on the Android device below.

Brightcove News is my collection of developer-focused links about Brightcove. I post about once a month, and you can see old posts here.

This post is long overdue, but I've been a little sleep-deprived and focused elsewhere lately. So here's a supersized set of links.

Meetup with Us: The London Brightcove Developer Group has taken off, and the Boston Brightcove Developer Group is close behind. I put together the Boston group, so I hope you'll go to the meetup page to join!

David Mendels: I'm very excited that Brightcove has brought David Mendels on board as President/COO. I knew him from his time jumpstarting the Flex team, and I can see him having the same kind of influence at Brightcove.

Lots of stuff: I can't think of a concise way to describe the many features that have been released so here's a rundown of a lot of stuff: chromeless player templates, built-in player sharing to Twitter and Facebook, player performance enchancements, cue point editing with video preview, additional VAST support, and a lot more that you can find in the links above.

BEML editing: Todd Yard of the Brightcove player team has created an awesome application for the visual design of players. The code complete is also very helpful.

Creating Brightcove plugins: I enjoyed this article on creating Brightcove plugins. Don't get thrown off by the message at the top of the page- it reads just fine in English.

Blogs you can find: The many blogs on brightcove.com have been rearranged so that you can see them in one place. Lots of excellent reading there that you can now grab in one RSS feed or follow on twitter.

Media SDKs: Two new media SDKs have been created, one for for .NET and one for ColdFusion. I've lost track of the number, but I'd guess there's a media SDK for about 10 languages now.

More devices every day: Brightcove can now be found on Yahoo Connected TV Widgets.

I was handed very odd timing for a brown-bag presentation last week. The talk was scheduled months ago for an overview on new Flex and Flash tools, but as the time approached the iPad and HTML5 "discussions" in the blog world kept getting louder. I wanted to give a Flash developer's perspective on things, and so I created the presentation below.

As a hopefully-obvious cavaet, these are just my reasons and have nothing to do with Brightcove. We have plenty of excellent people focused on the JavaScript side as well here, and I'd read Jeremy Allaire's post on TechCrunch if you're looking for a more Brightcove-centric response.

This is my largest Brightcove News post so far, as I've been a little busy lately. Now that life is return to a new sleep-deprived normal, I'll share the news I've been gathering.

Brightcove 4: The launch of Brightcove 4 should have its own blog post, but I'll write what I can here. Some of these features I've written about on this blog before, like live video, VAST support, and Facebook integration. Here's a list of features I haven't mentioned, some of which I'll talk about more below: a new Express edition, iPhone SDK, new analytics module, transcoding movies with more renditions and higher quality, ability to switch between progressive and streaming for any video in your account, live streaming with full ad support, and more ad integrations (including OpenX and Freewheel).

$99-A-Month Edition: The Brightcove Express version can now be bought online for $99 a month (with some other plans costing more). I remember talking to someone awhile ago (ahem, on a podcast) and being told Brightcove was much too expensive for them to use. This is a price that many more people can afford, and I'm very excited to see more people try out Brightcove. If you've read this blog for awhile and are just curious to try things out (and/or you want to see the nice-looking Flex apps that are used for video management) you can also use the link above to quickly create a trial account.

iPhone SDK: The iPhone SDK is a pretty big project at Brightcove, and it's grabbed a lot of attention in the launch. I've only seen the demos of it, and it does looks snazzy. The switching between progressive and streaming videos in an account makes the retrieval of videos from Brightcove a lot easier for this project and for all other mobile devices. Often companies want to have their videos streamed on the Web, for bandwidth savings and making it harder to steal, but mobile devices require progressive videos. We now have a simple switch in the media APIs (one parameter that needs to be added to calls) to force the retrieval of progressive videos.

The Mad Men Keep Going: The OpenX ad integration is interesting as a free solution for advertising. OpenX is an open source ad server you can install yourself. Also interesting on the ad front is the release of the ad rules SDK. This SDK, when used with the ad translation and ad display SWF SDKs, allows for complete control of the ad system in the player. Companies like Freewheel need this in order to allow their own complex ad rules to behave in the player, and the ad SDKs are allowing very involved integrations to be done without Brightcove's direct help.

Palm OS Example: The non-iPhone world, we haven't completely forgotten about you. There's a new article on developing for Palm.

Brightcove 3.4: This release didn't have as much in it previous dot releases, as we were gearing up for Brightcove 4, but it did include media sharing in the media module and ad support in the media controls.

New Media SDKs: Two new media SDKs are being worked on: one from Al Manning for ActionScript and one for Java.

Remembering ColdFusion: I worked on the ColdFusion team for six months, so I won't forget about it (and the CFers can thank me for the super keyword for CFCs in 6.1 as well as many of the performance improvements). But to bring it back for those who haven't thought about it for awhile, here's an example of posting videos to Brightcove in CF and a creator's interview with Jeremy Allaire

Elise Marie Deitte was born on November 14th at 5 lbs 3 oz. Mother and baby are doing fine, and dad is very happy.