Insert SCTE-35 ad cue markers into a live HLS stream and personalize ads with AWS MediaTailor
domain: aws-mediatailor · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Configure your live encoder to inject SCTE-35 splice_insert or time_signal messages at ad break boundaries; confirm they appear as EXT-X-CUE-OUT / EXT-X-CUE-IN markers in the MediaPackage output
Create a MediaTailor configuration supplying the video content source URL (your CDN-fronted MediaPackage endpoint) and an ADS (ad decision server) template URL with [avail.duration] and [session.id] macros
Update your player to use the MediaTailor session initialization endpoint (POST /v1/session/{config_name}) to get a personalized manifest URL and pass any targeting parameters in the request body
MediaTailor rewrites the manifest at each ad break: SPLICE_INSERT cues emit EXT-X-CUE-OUT/IN markers; TIME_SIGNAL cues emit EXT-X-DATERANGE tags with richer SCTE metadata
Enable CloudWatch metrics on the MediaTailor configuration to monitor ad decision latency, fill rate, and timeout rates; set ADS timeouts conservatively to avoid unfilled avails
Known gotchas
MediaTailor requires the origin manifest to be reachable over HTTPS with a public or VPC-routable URL; a private MediaPackage ingest URL is not valid as the content source
Ad creative transcode latency means new creatives may not be ready for the first avail after upload; pre-transcode creatives via the MediaTailor transcoding API before the live event starts
SCTE-35 markers must survive the full ingest-to-packager chain; some encoders strip them by default — verify with a SCTE-35 stream analyzer tool before the live event
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