VAST Video Ad Server Templates

[flashdaddy]

Hi All,

Has anyone here used VAST on their custom players? I'm trying to find a discussion on it but I'm not able to find anything. I did read some info on the http://www.openvideoads.org website but they don't explain much about integrating with custom players. I'd love to talk to more people about it if possible.

[wvxvw]

Hi, we did, to an extent... If you have any questions regarding implementation, you can ask, but I don't guarantee to answer everything correctly, we didn't got it to the stage of receiving a certificate or anything of that kind. If you need an opinion - VAST is conceptually a nice try, but it is half-baked. Has lots of redundancies and obscure parts. Well, you see, you cannot really implement it on any platform it is supposed to be accepted, like, for instance, the format specs say that the videos allowed may be of wmv type - no way to play that in Flash, same is true for flv - no way to play that in SL... Besides, it's to wordy, difficult to validate (especially, because sometimes it is difficult to understand what would make a valid VAST XML and what would not).
It looks like the people standing behind it had in mind some particular player / ad serving model, which, apart from all other things, would not be what would you like to do, when making your own ad serving engine.
Yet to add, the people who wrote the part of the standard that covers AS side of things didn't take care to educate themselves at what would be considered a good practices in the language. So, their design looks unprofessional at best...
As the story goes, it was our manager idea. And our manager is not a technician by no means. He heard that "VAST" word at some conference and wanted us to have that just to say "we are compliant", but, if you will search for what are you compliant with, then, you'll find out that the biggest ad serving companies never bothered to support this format. Google ads or AdJuggler don't support it, other sites, which allow video ads, be it inline or standalone have their own requirements / formats. So, well, I wouldn't really pay attention to that thing. Maybe, unless some of the big corporations accepts it, which, again, isn't likely to happen.