Problem with a lot of ads after seeking

[Beeke´]

Hi,

We have an issue with the Google IMA SDK on iOS (Version 3.13.0). If the user has already watched half of a video and now seeks to the original location, he will be shown all the ads that would have run in the meantime. This is not our expected behavior, as the user might get annoyed when seeing dozens of ads. Is there a way to disable this feature?

Thanks,

Beeke

[IMA SDK]

Hi Beeke,

Thank you for bringing up to us your desire to not play ads on content that was already monetized. I just now used our VMAP Test ad tag in our Advanced Example and when seeking backwards the ad didn't show again. Do you have a way of replicating this behavior in our Advanced Example? 

Regards,

Aryeh Baker IMA SDK Team

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[Beeke´]

Hey Aryeh,

thank you for the quick reply. I think I have expressed myself a little wrong. It's not about what happens when the user rewinds. I am working on an app with which the user can watch movies (longer than 90 minutes). If he has seen half of the movie one day and wants to continue watching the next day, he has to seek the movie to his old position. For example, if he has to seek to minute 45, he has to watch every commercial that would have played up to minute 45 if he had not seeked. That would be a whole lot of advertising and would annoy users.

I made a sample video: https://www.dropbox.com/s/pva0tgq6vg35d0h/GoogleIMA.mov?dl=0 With the IMA sample tag (https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ads?sz=640x480&iu=/124319096/external/ad_rule_samples&ciu_szs=300x250&ad_rule=1&impl=s&gdfp_req=1&env=vp&output=vmap&unviewed_position_start=1&cust_params=deployment%3Ddevsite%26sample_ar%3Dpremidpostpod&cmsid=496&vid=short_onecue&correlator=), the mid-roll ad should play after 10 seconds. However, when I seek behind 10 seconds the ad is shown immediately. I am looking for a solution to play the ad only at the time when the user has actually watched 10 seconds and not only when the player time is over 10 seconds.

Thank you

Beeke

[IMA SDK]

Hi Beeke,

I’m with Aryeh’s team. It seems you are looking for an HTML5 SDK feature the same as this. Kindly confirm so we can proceed on our investigation.

 

Regards,

Sherwin Diesta IMA SDK Team

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[Beeke´]

Hey Sherwin,

that's correct.

Thank you

Beeke

[IMA SDK]

Hi Beeke,

Thanks for your confirmation. We've shared your concern with the rest of the team to confirm and here’s what I’ve got: The problem described in the "trouble with seeking" guide is actually specific to situations where they drag the seek bar manually, not situations where the user is programmatically returned to a bookmarked position. At most, the user should be seeing a single ad break before the content.

If you want to disable that ad break, the best way to do it would be to disable autoPlayAdBreaks, and then add logic to the event handler for AdBreakReady that would prevent starting the adManager if the user had just returned to a bookmark position.

Let me know if the above workaround works for you.


Regards,

[Beeke´]

Hey Sherwin,

thanks for your feedback. This solution is very nice for a programmatically return to the bookmarked position. Unfortunately, we do not have a "Continue watching" feature. So the user has to scroll to his position by himself. The solution from the "trouble with seeking" guide would be perfect. Unfortunately we can't implement this in iOS, because the SDK gets the time directly from the player and we can't overwrite it. On Android this is possible and we have solved it that way. Do you see a way to implement this on iOS as well?

I tried to build a workaround myself with autoPlayAdBreaks. This way, when the user is seeking, no ads are shown to him, which is good. However, the ads seem to be "consumed" if the "AD_BREAK_READY" event was called once and the AdManager was not started. So the ad will not be played if the position is reached again. So the users would have to scroll through the movie only once and start from the beginning to not have to see ads over the whole movie. Is there a way to skip the AdManager without disabling the ads forever?

Thank you really much for your help

Beeke

[IMA SDK]

Hi Beeke,

Thanks for the detailed response. I’ll relay this to my teammates and will get back to you once we have the information.


Regards,

[Beeke´]

Hi Sherwin,

is there any new information regarding this problem? We really wanna implement the IMA-SDK into our App.

Thank you

Beeke

[IMA SDK]

Hi Beeke,

Thank you for reaching back out to us. I have looked more into this with my team. At the moment they have no feedback yet regarding your previous comments. Once we have something we will be certain to pass it along to you.

Regards

William Pescherine IMA SDK Team

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[IMA SDK]

Hi there,

I hope you're doing well.

I just want to circle back on this. Could you please confirm if you still encounter the reported issue here?

Regards,

Teejay Wennie Pimentel IMA SDK Team

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