Change the 15 Seconds Timeout

[Tom Bleek]

Hi, my question is how to change the 15 sec Timout for the ads (loading) to another value?

I am using the native android SDK(v3) but i totally don't find the place for changing that.

So i want to triggre the VAST_MEDIA_LOAD_TIMEOUT earlier.

thanks for help

Tom

[Vu Chau (IMA SDK Team)]

Hi Tom,

Currently this timeout value (and others) are final and cannot be customized in Android.  In the AdsRenderingSettings' available methods, we currently also do not provide a method to set a custom timeout value.

If you could describe your use case, perhaps we could find a workaround.

Cheers,

Vu Chau

IMA SDK Team

[Tom Bleek]

Hi

I want to use it for displaying video ads in a game.

When i start the ad loading Activity i show a black screen and a loading animation.

but waiting 15 second is a lot of time and a lot of users will simply leave the application.

So i hoped i could set it to 5 seconds and than play a fallback solution.

Better would be preload the ad and display the video player activity after the ad was loaded in background.

but i am just not smart enough with these android things to achieve that.

[Darren]

I second this.

Also the documentation for VAST_MEDIA_LOAD_TIMEOUT says "The default timeout for media loading is 15 seconds."  Saying it's a defualt value implies that it can be changed.  Plus the HTML5 version of google.ima.AdRenderingSettings (https://developers.google.com/interactive-media-ads/docs/sdks/html5/v3/apis#ima.AdsRenderingSettings.loadVideoTimeout) looks as if the loadValueTimeout value can be changed so it seems odd that we wouldn't be able to do the same on Android.


Cheers,
Darren

[Vu Chau (IMA SDK Team)]

Hello,

Darren, it is correct that the VAST_MEDIA_LOAD_TIMEOUT can be changed in the HTML5 SDK.  However, that is not supported in Android for now.

Tom, regarding your use case, it is theoretically possible to preload the entire SDK in the background, thus reducing timeout possibilities:

• On mobile, the default logic is to load the SDK (i.e. creating an AdsLoader and an AdsManager) once a user action (e.g. a tap) has been detected.  For what you are doing, you might not want to wait for the user action, and call .initialize() as soon as your activity has finished loading.  
• This in turn will set up your AdsLoader and AdsManager for this session.  
• Next, you can begin loading and parsing the ad tag (just not playing it yet), until at some later point in your app's lifecycle where you feel it is good to begin ad playback.  

This approach is not officially supported, but it could allow you to "pre-fetch" your ads in the background before the user wants to begin interacting with the player.

Another approach that works in the opposite direction is to implement manual ad break playback.  It allows you to have control over when to play an ad (by default the SDK plays it when it detects that it's ready).  In this use case, you might want to delay ad playback until later on in your app, where for example there's not much network activity, to reduce timeout possibilities.

Vu Chau

IMA SDK Team