RGB Networks has added digital overlay capabilities to its Broadcast Network Processor (BNP). With its ability to directly overlay text, graphics and video onto more than 500 television ads simultaneously, the BNP dramatically reduces the cost for cable operators to deliver localized ads for both national and local advertisers. 

The originating broadcast networks have long had the ability, but it’s been an expensive proposition . RGB Networks is making it “inexpensive enough to push it down from broadcasters to individual systems,” Ramin Farassat, RGB’s vice president product marketing, told CED.

He characterized the cost reduction as going from thousands of dollars per stream to tens of dollars per stream.

By making it cost-effective to implement the capability at the local level, local operators can cater to the interests of both national and local advertisers.

For example, for a nationwide restaurant chain to advertise in its 20 largest cities, its ad must undergo extensive post-production work to include addresses, phone numbers and other text or graphical information that localizes the ad for each city – resulting in 20 separate ads. By overlaying text, graphics and even video directly onto ads in real-time, the BNP eliminates this costly and time-consuming process, enabling, for example, a nationwide ad to be easily localized by the operators serving each city or region.

“A dealership could change the overlay every day,” Farassat said. “They can specify what’s available in inventory every day – change what’s on sale every day.” 

In addition to enabling new ad revenues, the BNP’s digital overlay capabilities can help operators face two significant and growing challenges to their existing ad programs:  ad skipping Digital Video Recorders (DVR) and competition from the Internet. 

Cable operators can overcome the threat of DVR owners skipping ads by using the BNP to overlay ad content directly onto the programs themselves, therefore eliminating the ability to skip the ads.

This overlay of text or video ads onto programming is already proven, RGB Networks said, but the traditional method requires a cumbersome process that involves decoding the ad and programming to analog, performing the overlay and then re-encoding the program with the overlaid ad back to digital. The BNP functions completely within the digital domain, eliminating this decode/re-encode process and the need for additional costly decoders and encoders.