Cloud-based ad insertion: The Rose Parade streams to FAST & OTT using Grabyo

**The Tournament of Roses Parade delivers cloud-based ad insertion** using Grabyo

The Tournament of Roses Parade is an annual parade that takes place on New Year’s Day in the USA. It is a longstanding tradition with a rich 134 year history. It is hosted in the City of Pasadena, California, and serves as a precursor to the Rose Bowl, a major college football game played at the Rose Bowl stadium.

For the 2024 celebrations, production company Streaming Media Live along with its partner Squadron, was tasked with producing and distributing a live broadcast of the parade to multiple broadcast, OTT and FAST platforms.

A requirement of the production was the ability to seamlessly insert and replace adverts within the broadcast for individual endpoints.

Streaming Media Live deployed an OB truck on site in Pasadena to handle the majority of the production and distribute directly to the various national TV networks.

Cloud-based ad-insertion: The workflow

The Rose Parade's ad insertion workflow using SCTE-35 insertion using Grabyo Producer

However, this workflow was not equipped to service the FAST and OTT platforms with tailored ad insertion, and would require much more infrastructure and equipment to achieve it.

Streaming Media Live engaged with us a few days before the parade, to understand if they could augment the live broadcast with our cloud video platform.

We were able to spin up a control room, test and get the workflow up and running the next day. Grabyo Producer, our live production platform, supports SCTE-35 insertion, detection (for ad replacement), and passthrough.

The production team was then able to dedicate one singular operator to ingest the Tournament of Roses Parade broadcast feed into Grabyo in SRT format, from its Haivision Makito encoder, with SCTE-35 ad markers included in the streams.

The operator inserted and replaced ads within the designated ad breaks and re-distributed the stream to OTT and FAST platforms PlutoTV, FuboTV, OTT Media and Allen Media directly from Grabyo.

For more information on monetizing live video using Grabyo Producer with SCTE-35 ad breaks, plus RTMP ad marker insertion for distributing live streams to YouTube, head here.