Why are Bitmovin Player's playback controls unavailable during a VAST ad?

We have implemented ads with vast. However, the ads are being loaded over the player somehow, there are no controls available. That is a problem, because: if the user click on an ad, a new page is opened with the destination of the ad, but when the user returns, the ad is paused and we have no controls to resume playing. So the user cannot continue to watch the movie.

We need to enable the controls and allow user to resume playback, turn the sound or on off, change the picture to full screen, etc.

How do we do that?

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Hi @andrei.muntean , thanks for your question. There are 2 possible solutions for this.

  • If you are using Google Ad server for to deliver VAST Ads, then you need to use the Google IMA SDK(default Ad module) integrated in Bitmovin Web player. The issue that you are observing is specific to this integration.
    The solution is to ad Play/Pause controls to UI as described at Bitmovin Docs - Player FAQ - How can I show a UI when ads are paused by the IMA SDK?

  • If you are not using Google Ad server, then you can enable the Bitmovin Ad Module(BAM) instead of using default IMA Ad module in which case the playback controls for Pause/Play appear by default in Bitmovin UI. BAM can be enabled by using following steps.

    • Step 1 : Fetch BAM module by adding script tag. Please make sure to fetch same version of BAM as the player version. For example if you are using following code to fetch Bitmovin player JS,

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdn.bitmovin.com/player/web/8.83.0/bitmovinplayer.js"></script>

then you should use following code to fetch matching BAM module.

<script src="https://cdn.bitmovin.com/player/web/8.83.0/modules/bitmovinplayer-advertising-bitmovin.js"></script>

  • Step 2 : Add BAM as the default Ad module using below code after creating Bitmovin player instance.

bitmovin.player.Player.addModule(bitmovin.player["advertising-bitmovin"].default);

Hope above solutions help. Please let us know if you have any further questions regarding above proposed solutions or Ad use cases in general.

Thanks and Regards,
Lucky Goyal

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