Sometimes, your ad breaks in live DJ mode might be longer than the ad triggers you are using in your automation program. There is a feature in our streaming software called Nice Fit which makes adjustments to the ad break length if needed.
What is Nice Fit?
Nice Fit can be thought of as a "time bank". We have the live DJ session running in real time, and we need to build up and maintain a buffer on the back end of our servers so that tracks are received, trans-coded, cached, load balanced and distributed to the listeners at the right time. This buffer helps us to ensure smoother song transitions. The buffer also enables us to do more with the listener end of things such as smoother ad transitions.
For example, it helps to ensure that ads are inserted correctly for the length of the given break without cutting off any of the elements before or after the ad break. As the ad breaks are extended, Nice Fit is borrowing time from the listener. Eventually, it will need to pay it back
In other words, it is an automated way to extend the length of the ad break, in a controlled manner, to ensure it sounds correct to the listener. There is a pool of available ads for each geographic market and the ad servers need to make decisions on how to insert which ads as soon as they receive the trigger data from your automation software. By having this buffer in place, Nice Fit is able to assist the ad server in inserting the best ads for each listener.
We just had a training about this aspect of the ad provider's software and we are going to make a Knowledge Base article about this. This situation has made it obvious to us that we do not discuss the ad insertion process enough and we should be making these things a bit more clear in our documentation.
