# Serving VAST Video Ads Across Flipboard Platforms

DevFeed: [Serving VAST Video Ads Across Flipboard Platforms](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/vast-video-ad-service-31896.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<http://engineering.flipboard.com//2017/05/vast-video-ad>)

Author: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guangle-fan-13496731/ (Guangle Fan)

Published: 2017-05-30T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Flipboard](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/flipboard.md>)

Topics: [XML](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/xml.md>), [Back end](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/backend.md>), [Website](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/website.md>), [Android](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/android.md>), [iOS](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ios.md>), [samsung](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/samsung.md>)

Tags: [android](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/android.md>), [backend](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/backend.md>), [ios](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ios.md>), [samsung](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/samsung.md>), [video](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/video.md>), [web](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/web.md>), [xml](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/xml.md>)

## AI overview

This article explains VAST, an IAB-published XML schema for serving and tracking video advertisements, and describes Flipboard's backend-centric approach for handling VAST ads across multiple platforms.

## Source excerpt

Videos are more ubiquitous than ever before: there are virtually no boundaries on how, when and where people can interact with video content. Flipboard as a curation platform brings multi-format content to peoples around their personal interests and passions. There has been tremendous opportunity for video ads to perform efficiently on our platform. At Flipboard, we have been building video inventory since 2013 in the form of transcoding, storing, and serving proprietary format video ads on an in-house platform. As we see high-quality beautiful video ads satisfy advertisers, we also face the challenge of scaling the platform to meet the increasing demands of our video ad inventory. To bring Flipboard's video ad inventory to a larger group of advertisers, we need a programmatic selling channel that supports standard video ad formats, provides easy performance measurement and flexible video behavior control. This is where VAST can help. What is VAST ? VAST is the Video Ad Serving Template published by IAB. It is a universal XML schema that gives video players information about which ad to play, how the ad should show up, how long it should last, and whether peoples are able to skip it. It's important because it lets video players and ad servers speak the same language. Before VAST, advertisers had very little information about the publisher's player implementation. It also allows ad platforms to easily exchange ads with each other. For example, a physical video media file can be hosted at Service A, and passed through a chain of Services B, C, D, and served to consumers on publisher platform E. Each service will be able to wrap the ad with its own event trackers for performance measurement. VAST has been the most adopted video ad standard by advertisers and publishers, and the prevailing version is VAST 2.0. How do we serve VAST ads ? At Flipboard, we have ad inventory across our iOS, Android, Samsung Briefing, and Web products. The way some publishers implement a VAS