Pre-roll prevention is a Triton Digital live streaming feature that helps prevent pre-rolls from playing when a listener re-connects shortly after a disconnection. It can also be used to prevent pre-rolls from playing when the listener switches from one station on your broadcast network to another.
The goal is to avoid degrading the listener experience; for example, a network glitch can sometimes cause a barely noticeable re-connection that would otherwise trigger a new pre-roll. From the listener’s point of view, the song or interview they were listening to would be suddenly interrupted by an ad, which can be irritating.
Pre-roll Prevention can also help avoid “ad fatigue” among loyal listeners who connect to your stations several times a day. By default, the “pre-roll grace period” is five minutes, but it can be configured for up to 24 hours.
Below are a few scenarios in which a listener might be annoyed to hear a pre-roll soon after hearing the initial connection pre-roll.
A listener connects to your station. A network glitch or other technical issue causes a disconnect after a few minutes, then the listener re-connects.
A listener connects to your station. After a minute or two they disconnect to attend to something else, then reconnect soon after.
A listener connects to “Station A” of your network. After a few minutes they switch to “Station B,” which is also part of your broadcast network.
Pre-roll Prevention Options
There are four settings for the Pre-roll Prevention feature. Pre-roll Prevention options are set by Triton Digital as part of your publisher and station configurations. You need to contact Customer Support to initiate or change these configurations. (See details below.)
Feature | Configuration | Description |
Pre-roll Prevention | Enable or Disable | This feature is enabled by default. |
Pre-roll Grace Period | 5 minutes to 24 hours (in one-minute increments) | This is the period between connections for which pre-rolls are prevented when the feature is enabled. Default (when the feature is enabled) is five minutes. |
Cross-station Pre-roll Prevention | Enable or Disable | When enabled, it prevents pre-rolls when the listener moves from one station in your broadcast network to another (within the pre-roll grace period). For example if the pre-roll grace period is five minutes, and a listener disconnects from Station A and connects to Station B four minutes later, they will not hear a pre-roll. But if they wait six minutes before connecting to Station B they will hear a pre-roll. By default, this is disabled. |
On-Fail Behavior | Prevent or Insert | Pre-roll Prevention and Listener IDs are managed regionally, across multiple streaming servers. If the streaming server can’t get the information from the regional service fast enough, it must decide whether or not to call for a pre-roll. The default behavior is to prevent a pre-roll from playing. However, you can choose to have the system insert a pre-roll when it isn’t known if the listener is a new connection or a re-connect. |
Pre-roll Prevention Limitations
Pre-roll preventions works under the assumption that Triton Digital can recognize listeners from one session to another, which is made possible by Listener IDs and the Regional Session database. Limitations of these mechanisms are described below.
Listener IDs
The current methodology for listener IDs creates a new listener ID on devices or players that do not retain cookies, or do not provide mobile ad IDs or App IDs, such as Smart Speakers. As a result, each time such a device connects, we have to generate a new ID, and therefore Pre-roll Prevention does not apply and a pre-roll is inserted if one is returned by the ad server.
Regional Session Database
To speed the Pre-roll Prevention decision process, we use a Regional Session Database, which is perfect for most situations except one: if a large publisher or station is served across different regions, the listeners could potentially re-connect on a different region when they switch stations, such as when they switch from an east coast station to a west coast one. In such a case, Pre-roll Prevention wouldn’t work across both sessions.
Contacting Support to Make Changes
Contact Triton Digital Customer Support to enable the Pre-roll Prevention feature and to make any changes once the feature is enabled.
The feature is set at the publisher level, so it applies to all stations in your broadcast network. However, each option can be customized at the station level. So, for example, you can enable the feature for all stations, but set different Pre-roll Grace Periods for individual stations. Or you can disable the feature on some stations, or only allow Cross-station Pre-roll Prevention on some stations and not others.
Before you contact Customer Support, decide what options you want enabled, and whether you want the settings to be the same across all stations or different for some. Having this information ready in advance will make it easier for the support team to quickly configure the feature to your liking with minimal risk of error.