VAST vs. VPAID: AS Simple as VHS vs. DVD
VAST and VPAID sound complicated, but we can make it easier to understand using a similar situation from the past. It was watching a movie at home. I’m going to date myself here, but I actually remember when VHS first arrived, and we started to watch movies at home. You might not remember, but when the technology first came out, there were two competing formats: VHS and Beta. A Beta cassette didn’t look anything like a VHS cassette. It was smaller, and one of the holes was completely covered up.
In order to reach the entire audience, movie studios actually had to manufacture and distribute two sets of cassettes for the same film. As you can imagine, it was expensive, not scalable, and fragmented the entire industry. So movie companies made a decision to just pick one format and that was VHS. That decision brought an end to Beta cassettes. How is this related to VAST and VPAID? The situation is very similar to what happened when we were first able to watch videos online.
There were multiple video player types, and advertisers had to custom-code each ad to interact correctly with the different players. It was time consuming and expensive, and adoption among advertisers was low. Eventually, the IAB stepped in and created a standard for video players, simplifying the ad serving process. This template is called Video Ad Serving Template, or VAST. It is a standardized set of instructions for advertisers to code their ads so that their videos will play on any VAST-compliant video player.
VAST and VHS videos actually have a lot in common. Like a VHS tape, you can play the video, fast forward through it, rewind, pause—but that’s about it. VAST is very similar in that you are limited to those same functionalities for your video ads.
But technology started getting more and more advanced, and soon the at-home movie experience took a huge leap: the DVD. With the DVD, you could interact with the movie in a variety of new ways. You could skip into different chapters of the film, view bonus features, turn on subtitles, or change the language, while you were viewing the movie. And that’s similar to VPAID, or Video Player Ad Interface Definition. With VPAID, advertisers are able to program interactive features directly into ads. They can add buttons for the viewers to share the ad through their social media channels, or a link that brings up a sign-up sheet within the video, a survey pop up at the end of an ad… the possibilities are limitless.
So there you have it. Simply put, VAST is like your VHS, while VPAID is like your DVD.
