Context Script

Owned by Zachary Stockton
Last updated: May 12, 2020
2 min read

Overview: Below is information pertaining to how publishers can integrate with the IRIS.TV Context Script. The Context Script gives you the ability to retrieve contextual information for a given video asset. If you are a publisher and oversee your ad operations and tech stack, this is meant to be used as a part of your existing ad workflow to send contextual data through your ad server. This documentation will walk through how to add the Context Script and workflows for adding contextual targeting data to your ad tags.

See example implementation page here: https://ovp.iris.tv/demos/context/iris-context-api.html

Prerequisites

Before adding the Context Script the following needs to be completed:

  • A feed with video URLs needs to be provided for IRIS.TV to import and add contextual data to assets. Video asset URLs need to link to either MP4 or m3u8 files.

  • An ad tag that can be appended with iris_context custom key-value pair.

  • Ad targeting on the iris_context key-value pair needs to be set up through the ad server.

Please speak to your IRIS.TV representative for details on these requirements.

 

This workflow requires two values:

  • client_token: Authentication string associated with each client. This will be provided by IRIS.TV once the content feed is imported.

  • platform_id: The reference ID for the asset from the publisher’s CMS.

Building the Integration

The order of operations for retrieving the contextual data is as follows:

  1. IRIS.TV Context Script is loaded with the page.

  2. The Context Script is initialized.

  3. Call the Context Script with the platform_id for the asset that is about to play to receive the asset’s contextual segments.

  4. Add the contextual segments to the pre-roll ad tag.

This process should be repeated as you iterate through the playlist.

Installing the Script

NOTE: The script should be loaded as a high priority to ensure you can receive context information for the pre-roll of the initial asset.

An example of adding the script to your page HTML:

<script src=”https://ovp.iris.tv/libs/context/iris-context.min.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

 

If you do not want to load the script as a high-priority, there is an event that you can listen to at the global changes to ensure that the context methods are available. An example of setting up that event listener:

window.addEventListener(‘IrisContextAPI’, function() { // window.IrisContextAPI is ready to be used });

Initializing the Script

  • To initialize the script, provide your client token to the IrisContextAPI Object

var IrisContext = window.IrisContextAPI({ client_token: '<your client token here>' });

 

Using the Script

Once the script is initialized, you can send in an asset ID to receive the context segment:

  • getContext – requests the context information for the asset ID.

 

Parameter for get_context methods:

  • platform_id: the CMS reference ID of the video. Required.

To retrieve the context use the following method:

 

Here’s an example of the response from the Context Script for getContext:

After the Integration is Complete

Once the integration is complete and you’re receiving contextual segments, move on to https://iristv.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/API/pages/731742621 in order to add the data into your existing ad workflow.

IRIS.TV