AWS Elemental MediaTailor Supports Bring Your Own Ads via VAST

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a new feature for its AWS Elemental MediaTailor service, enabling customers to bring their own, pre-transcoded advertisements directly into the platform via Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) responses. This new "Bring Your Own Ads" (BYOA) functionality removes the need for dynamic ad transcoding at the time of insertion.

The update allows ad decision servers to embed manifest URLs for pre-transcoded HLS and DASH ad streams directly within VAST XML creative file attributes. MediaTailor will then stitch these pre-rendered ad creatives into the content stream without performing dynamic transcoding. Previously, the service could only transcode ads dynamically.

This capability to utilize pre-transcoded ads enables new use cases, such as faster implementation of server-side overlay ads and instantly inserting new ad creatives. The feature supports both HLS and DASH streaming protocols and is now available in all regions where MediaTailor is offered.

AWS Elemental MediaTailor is a service used for server-side ad targeting for video content. This update is expected to streamline the ad management process and improve the efficiency of ad delivery to viewers.