• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 3, 2016

In a material development that could significantly improve the video advertising experience, AppNexus this morning unveiled new technology that reduces the latency of video advertising by a factor of as much as 1,000. AppNexus -- which is a leading programmatic media technology company, partly owned by WPP Group -- said the technology can reduce the load time of video ad serving from a current average of about five seconds to "as little as five milliseconds."

"Today's announcement is a transformative event for digital advertising," said Eric Hoffert, SVP of video technology, AppNexus.

"Latency is one of the greatest challenges facing the video advertising industry,” Hoffert said in a statement explaining the breakthrough, adding: “On average, every incremental one-second buffering delay for video playback results in a six percent increase in abandonment rate. When a video fails to load immediately, end viewers don't know whether there's an issue with the publisher's content or an issue with the ad. Both possibilities trigger user flight, a problem that is especially vexing for independent publishers who provide a diversity of rich, alternative content to the walled video gardens of Facebook and YouTube."

The company said the technology works by running “client-side mediation in advance of video playback, introducing video ad caching, unwrapping VAST to confirm valid video creative, and configuring time-out settings that put video publishers in full control of the creatives running on their pages.”

AppNexus said its internal tests indicate that the technology retrieves video ads from cache 100 times or faster -- approximately 50 milliseconds or less -- compared to an average video mediation process of five seconds. And in select use cases, it can be up to 1000 times faster, depending on page load characteristics, user interaction with the browser, network bandwidth, and other factors.