A specific cross domain policy may be required to serve video ads from Revive Adserver.

By default, Revive Adserver may not be configured in a way to allow external Flash-based video players to request pre-roll, mid-roll or post-roll video ads from Revive Adserver, due to the web server configuration. As a result, you may need to update your web server's configuration to ensure that the correct crossdomain.xml file is used for the delivery of banners (including video ads) from Revive Adserver.

Understanding the Cross Domain Requirements

To deliver pre-roll, mid-roll or post-roll advertising (via Inline Video banners) to a Flash-based video players, the following process is followed:

1. The user's client (i.e. the Flash-based video player) requests the video that the user wants to watch, from the site hosting the video.
2. The site hosting the video starts to deliver the video content to the user's client.
3. At some point (i.e. pre-, mid- or post-roll), the site hosting the video that user wants to watch instructs the user's client to now request a video ad from Revive Adserver.
4. The user's client requests the the video ad from Revive Adserver, which is then played. 
5. The user's client is then directed back to their original video (if required).

At step #3, when the site hosting the video content directs the user's client to the video ad content, this normally results in the user's client being asked to load content from a domain name that is different from the original content. (That is, unless you are hosting the video content, Revive Adserver and the video ads yourself, all on the same domain name.)

For this to work, this requires that the Revive Adserver server's crossdomain.xml file be configured to allow the user's web client to do this.

Revive Adserver's crossdomain.xml Files

Revive Adserver has two crossdomain.xml files:

• The crossdomain.xml file that is included in the root directory of Revive Adserver; and
• The crossdomain.xml file that is included in the www/delivery directory of Revive Adserver.

These two crossdomain.xml files serve different purposes.

Root crossdomain.xml File

The crossdomain.xml file that is included in the root directory of Revive Adserver attempts to set the cross domain permitted-cross-domain-policies setting to "all". This is to allow the Delivery crossdomain.xml file located in the www/delivery directory to be referenced and used by Revive Adserver. 

Delivery crossdomain.xml File

The crossdomain.xml file that is included in the www/delivery directory of Revive Adserver attempts to set the necessary cross domain settings required for video ad delivery.

Configuration Required

In the event that Revive Adserver has been installed so that it is available at the root of the URL path (i.e. Revive Adserver is installed at, for example, http://subdomain.domain.com/, and not at http://subdomain.domain.com/revive-adserver/), then no configuration will be required. Revive Adserver's root crossdomain.xml file will be able to be loaded (e.g. via http://subdomain.domain.com/crossdomain.xml) by Flash-based video players, which should set the required cross domain permitted-cross-domain-policies setting to "all", and therefore allow the delivery crossdomain.xml file to be loaded when video ad delivery is performed by Flash-based video players.

However, if Revive Adserver has not been installed in this way, you may find that Flash-based video players are not able to load video ads. If this is the case, copy Revive Adserver's root crossdomain.xml file to the root of your web server's home directory, so that Revive Adserver's root crossdomain.xml file will be able to be loaded (e.g. via http://subdomain.domain.com/crossdomain.xml).

This should resolve the issue of Flash-based video ads being unable to be loaded.