Hi and welcome back to the next part of our tutorial series. By now, you should have a RapidStream account and at least one access token. In this next step, we will create a ad server configuration and a ad rule. Let’s get started.

Welcome back to the RapidStream panel. As a first step, we want to create a new ad server. You can do that by clicking on the menu. In order to integrate ads into our stream, we need to call the ad server to get those ads, so you need an ad server URL. We’ve prepared some demo URLs, which you can find in the article on our website. You can use these URLs and other information to experiment, and later replace them with real URLs of your system.

Let’s go ahead and create a new ad server. We need a name for it. I will simply name it “Demo Ad Server.” Now we need the base URL. If you need more information on ad server configuration — what you can do in detail and what configuration types you can add — you can switch to our ad server configuration video, where I go into that topic in more detail. Let’s start by entering a base URL. Simply type in the URL and it’s automatically saved. You could now go ahead and add configurations to retrieve the ads you want. Because I’m using a sample URL here, I won’t do that for our example. I will simply go ahead and enable our ad server. Here we are. What I’m going to do next is set this ad server as the default ad server.

What this means is you can define one of your ad servers as the default ad server. We’re going to create some ad rules in the next step. With these ad rules, you can specify under which conditions which ad server should be called. But when no conditions match, you still want to play out ads, and this is where the default ad server comes in. Whenever no ad rule is matching, the default ad server will be called instead. This way, you can ensure that you always play out ads, even if no ad rules are matching. we’re going to do this with our ad server here, setting it as default. Whenever you add more ad servers, you can be sure that at least this ad server will deliver ads.

Let’s switch over and create some ad rules.

Just like with ad servers, we already have a video that goes into detail about all the ad rule possibilities. You may switch over and look at that to get detailed information. For now, we will create one simple ad rule so that we get to the point where we see ads in our stream. Let’s create a new ad rule and be really creative and call it “First Rule.”

As mentioned, we have a detailed video on what inventory shares are, how they work, and how you can create ad rule matches. I won’t go into details here, I’ll make it pretty simple so that we get things done. Let’s start by creating an inventory share. We only have one ad server, so it makes no sense to split anything up. This ad server will get 100% of all the shares.

Now we have to create ad rule matches. Let’s create something like “App Name“ and it should match „Demo“. Let’s save that and create another match because we want that to only match when the country is Germany. We’re done with that configuration part, so we can enable our ad rule, and we’re good to go.

That’s it for this part of the series.In the next video, I will show you how to ingest EPG data into our system. After that, we will switch over to AWS MediaTailor, and then we will get closer to our stream with integrated ads. I hope to see you in the next video. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. We’re here to help. See you then. Bye-bye.