Targeted Content Prefetching With Callback URLs for Lower Latency
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
The latency-intensive process of fetching, resolving, and rendering targeted content, such as preroll advertisements, during video streaming negatively impacts user experience by prolonging the wait time for intended content.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a prefetch server that parallelizes content delivery requests, offloading the resolution of multiple content URLs to the prefetch server, and using a callback URL mechanism to asynchronously fetch and store targeted content for immediate delivery upon request.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of time
If targeted content is fetched and resolved synchronously during content delivery, then content delivery is straightforward, but latency increases significantly impacting user experience
Solution Approach 1:
The prefetch server performs preliminary actions by fetching and resolving targeted content configurations and media URLs before the actual content playback begins. The system proactively resolves content URLs, authenticates them, and prepares playback parameters in advance, so that when the user requests content, the preparation is already complete or nearly complete, significantly reducing perceived latency.
Solution Approach 2:
A prefetch server is introduced as an intermediary component between the content delivery system and the targeted content sources. This intermediary handles the complex tasks of parallel content fetching, URL resolution, authentication, and parameter preparation, shielding the main content delivery process from these complexities while reducing overall latency.
2Productivity
If multiple content URLs are resolved sequentially, then the resolution process is simple, but the total resolution time increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary resolution of multiple content URLs in parallel before the main content delivery is needed. The prefetch server initiates multiple URL resolution requests simultaneously, authenticates them concurrently, and prepares all necessary playback parameters in advance, so that when content delivery is required, the resolution is already complete.
Solution Approach 2:
The system transitions from sequential URL resolution (one-dimensional time progression) to parallel resolution across multiple dimensions. By simultaneously resolving multiple URLs, authenticating them in parallel, and preparing different playback parameters concurrently, the system exploits temporal and computational dimensions to dramatically reduce total resolution time.
Data Source
AI summary
In the embodiments, a novel prefetch service implemented on a prefetch server is provided to execute content (either targeted or selected) fetch requests in parallel with other requests thereby reducing the overall latency of a content delivery system. In some aspects, a method is provided to receive a prefetch request to prefetch a targeted content item to be presented prior to presenting a primary content item on a user device, the prefetch request including prefetch request parameters; generate, a callback URL associated with the prefetch request; transmit, to a primary content server, the callback URL; obtain a targeted content configuration corresponding to the prefetch request parameters; obtain the targeted content item based on the targeted content configuration; receive, a request to provide the targeted content item, the request including the callback URL; and transmit the targeted content item.