21923 - SCTE Broadband Aug2023 COMPLETE v1 (1)

98 Vol. 45 No. 3 - September 2023 Issue Content and service platforms worldwide are new to this data collection and activation topic. Some service platforms, especially in the US and UK, are quite advanced in collecting, storing, and activating first-party data. Some are also leveraging customer data from third-party aggregators or rich data pools, such as Mastercard or Visa, to know more about their audiences and target them with the right ads at the right time. To many other service platforms, the topic is new. They are now looking at different options to collect and store data efficiently. It is worth noting that telcos specifically have a huge opportunity as they can collect many data points about their subscribers from their browsing history on both web and mobile platforms. Privacy Laws and Implications for SSAI Solutions It is important that content and service providers comply with the applicable privacy laws in their country or region of operation. Naturally, no privacy discussion is complete without mentioning the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In the European Union, this law provides a legal framework for keeping everyone’s personal data safe by requiring companies to maintain robust processes for collecting, handling, storing, and activating personal information about their customers. Consensual collection from each viewer becomes mandatory under GDPR. Viewers should also know who their data is being shared with and be able to alter these sharing processes at any time. They should also be given the right to opt in or opt out of targeted advertising. Several regional restrictions also apply. While GDPR is a European law, it also has implications for streaming companies that collect data from European residents, regardless of whether they are based in the US or elsewhere. In California, there is the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which is a federal law granting consumers the right to know what personal information is being collected about them, and to choose to delete it at any time. SSAI solutions, or manifest manipulators, are generally transparent to data collection and transmission. They pass whatever data they receive to ad servers to make decisions for which ads to deliver to each viewer. Therefore, they can be considered as data processors along the data chain. Hence, content and service providers must make sure their manifest manipulators comply with regional privacy laws. A common practice in this subject is that content and service providers obfuscate the viewer data in the player before sending it on to the advertising decision process. Instead of sending personal information about viewers from a player, a pseudo-anonymised code is generated and sent through the advertising chain. If this pseudo-anonymised code is interrupted, it cannot be associated with a particular viewer unless resolved by a specific decoding software that only the operator knows and controls. This way, the operator is not sending personal information in the pipe, which is compliant with GDPR practices. Fight Churn with SSAI Competition between OTT platforms is becoming fierce. With just a few clicks, consumers have the power to cancel their subscriptions and move to another OTT service. OTT service technical Figure 10