IMA SDK

The IMA (Interactive Media Ads) SDK is Google's open client library for video ad playback. It fetches a VAST tag, parses the response, handles wrapper chains, renders the creative, fires impression and quartile event pixels, and surfaces error codes. IMA ships for HTML5 (web), Android, iOS, Roku, Fire TV, tvOS, and most major HbbTV stacks.

IMA is the de facto reference implementation of VAST. When a DSP says "VAST 4.3 compatible," what it usually means in practice is "tested against IMA." Even non-Google SSPs and exchanges effectively test against IMA because so many publishers use it.

On DOOH and CTV, IMA's value is its breadth of error handling — VAST has 50+ error codes covering wrapper-limit-reached, blocked-creative, file-not-found, decode-failure, and so on. IMA exposes every one to the host application, which is what lets a screen detect and skip a failing creative without showing a blank frame.

Trillboards screens use IMA-style VAST handling but with a custom thin parser built into the edge SDK — the full IMA SDK is ~12 MB which is too heavy for budget tablets. The thin parser implements the VAST 4.3 spec plus the IMA-compatible error envelope, sub-2 MB.