Sending metadata to VAST ad servers
Metadata can be sent to ad servers in order to target ads more specifically to the currently played media. Screen9 currently supports sending category name and tags by using format specifiers in URLs for Smartclip VAST 2.0 and VAST 3.0 advertising formats.
Once Screen9 media player is about to request ads from an advertising server, the following specifiers in the URL are automatically replaced with the metadata of the currently playing (or to be played after the ad) media:
| %category | Replaced with the category name of the current media. Any space in the category name will be replaced with an underscore "_". |
| %categoriesmapping | Replaced with a property on the category of the media, if any. Can be used for sending a specific string to the ad server if the media is in a category but one does not want to send the actual category name. |
| %devicetype | Type of the device that plays the video, one of "desktop", "tablet", "mobile". |
| %tags | Replaced with a comma separated tag list of the current media. |
| %qtags | Same as %tags but separating commas are URL-quoted (to become %2C instead). |
| %adtags | Similar to %tags but the tag list is expanded using numbered URL parameters, for instance if media had tags "interesting" and "people", %adtags would be replaced with adtag1=interesting&adtag2=people. In case video has no tags, the parameter is replaced with an empty adtag1=. |
| %domain | Replaced with the domain (with subdomains) that the player is embeded on. Will strip "http://" and "www." |
| %udomain | Same as %domain but with dots replaced with underscores. |
| %url_referer | Replaced with the URL to the page that the player is embedded on, URL encoded. |
| %random | Ad URLs usually have other random specifiers which are understood by the relevant ad plugin and/or ad server, but if desired, Screen9 server can be used to generate and insert random numbers into URLs. Each %random specifier is replaced with an integer random number ranging from 1 to 999999999. |
| %r | A shorthand notation for %random for compatibility purposes. Deprecated for new configurations, please use %random instead. |
Please note that only ASCII alphanumerical characters are allowed for both category names and tags. Alphabetical and letter-like characters from other encodings are transliterated to their closest ASCII representation (i.e. Göteborg becomes Goteborg) whereas everything else is replaced with an underscore before sending metadata to the ad server.