By Madhuvanth Gopalan, Comcast India Engineering Center; Timothy Wilson, Comcast Technology Solutions; Stuart Kurkowski, PhD, Comcast Technology Solutions
Internet linear delivery has introduced the need for out-of-band schedule and entitlements information (SCTE 224) alongside event signaling (SCTE 35). The popularity and adoption of SCTE 224, Event Scheduling and Notification Interface (ESNI) is opening new use cases for which the protocol is a great fit. SCTE 224 has proven itself as an efficient and effective means for machine-to-machine communication of out-of-band linear rights management. This combination of SCTE 224 and SCTE 35 to trigger the in-band signaling allows precision execution of linear rights for content substitution and addressable advertising management. But the data maintained by the system in the SCTE 224 format is also useful for other entitlement use cases. The main use case we look at in this paper is around sports entitlement and using the SCTE 224 objects to determine whether a user has the rights to see a game or not – before even seeing the video – based on their location.