Agentic AI Is Reshaping Local Planning and Activation
Agentic AI is poised to overhaul local advertising by turning fragmented market data into predictive, real‑time audience models. The technology links planning, activation and optimization, allowing campaigns to scale without sacrificing local nuance. Human strategists define objectives while AI executes and continuously refines delivery across broadcast, streaming and programmatic channels. Over the next few years, advertisers can expect tighter cross‑platform coordination and faster time‑to‑market as AI becomes a core planning engine.
CAPIs Won't Solve CTV's Outcomes Problem Until Another Key Issue Is Fixed
Netflix announced a conversion API for its ad‑supported tier, signaling a push toward performance‑based measurement in CTV. However, the article argues that without reliable placement verification—knowing exactly which shows or genres an ad ran against—conversion data remains shaky. Current CTV...
This World Cup, CTV Becomes the New Stadium
The upcoming World Cup will be watched across televisions, phones, tablets and voice assistants, turning the living room into a multi‑screen arena. Connected TV (CTV) is positioned as the central hub that can capture the household’s collective attention, but only...
Why Signal Quality Is Shaping the Future of Streaming Media Performance
Streaming has become a premier digital‑advertising venue, with Disney reporting a 5% rise in ad revenue in Q2 2026 as budgets shift to video and connected TV. However, the explosion of data signals—metadata, audience segments, and third‑party classifications—often creates overlap and...
Why Content Protection Must Evolve for IP and Cloud-Based Workflows
Broadcast workflows have moved from isolated, hardware‑centric chains to distributed IP and cloud environments, exposing content at every stage from ingest to delivery. This expanded surface has helped piracy grow, with industry losses projected to hit $125 billion by 2028, up...
Winning the World Cup Means Winning the Moments Around It
The 2026 FIFA World Cup will run from June 11 to July 19, featuring 48 teams and 104 matches across multiple U.S. cities. Marketers see this as the largest sustained attention moment in recent American sports history. Rather than focusing solely on...
Women-Centered, Artist-Owned: A Q&A With Chera TV
Chera TV debuted this spring as the first artist‑owned vertical streaming platform, launching its inaugural drama *To Her Beat* for a one‑time price of $14.99. The service forgoes a subscription model, instead offering a gamified points system where 15,000 points...
Sneak Preview: Ultra-Low-Latency Sports Streaming From Stadium to Screen at Streaming Media Connect
On May 14, Elecard’s Victoria Tuzova will moderate a Streaming Media Connect panel titled “Need for Speed: Ultra‑Low‑Latency Sports Streaming From Stadium to Screen.” The discussion brings together senior leaders from Servers.com, Vindral, Stats Perform and Synamedia to dissect the full...
How Streaming Platforms Can Operationalize AI Without Compromising Performance
Streaming platforms are rapidly moving AI from experimental pilots into core workflows, but the added intelligence threatens the millisecond‑level performance that drives viewer satisfaction. A recent 500 % traffic surge showed AI‑driven recommendation engines can saturate compute resources, causing playback latency...
Sneak Preview: Creating Lean-In Engagement With Personalized, Next-Gen Sports Streaming Experiences
On May 13, Chris Pfaff moderated a Streaming Media Connect panel titled “Fans Forward: Creating Lean‑In Engagement With Personalized, Next‑Gen Sports Streaming Experiences.” The discussion featured leaders from Tiledmedia, Team Whistle (DAZN), Bulldog DM and Play Anywhere, who examined AI‑driven commentary, multiview...
Setplex Secures Top Honors with NAB Show Project of the Year Award for UVOtv
Setplex won the NAB Show Project of the Year award in the Distribution category for its deployment of UVOtv, a free, ad‑supported live‑TV platform targeting North America’s 70 million diaspora viewers. The service streams over 700 premium channels from Latin America,...
NAB 2026: AI-Powered Video Creation with Avid and Google
Avid and Google unveiled a multi‑year partnership at NAB 2026, embedding Google Gemini and Vertex AI models into Avid Media Composer and its Content Core platform. The demo showed editors using natural‑language prompts to direct a synthetic actor, generate B‑roll, and perform semantic...
AI and the Vertical Drama Industry
Thom Woodley of Hudson Vertical told Chris Pfaff at Streaming Media Connect 2026 that AI is already being leveraged for testing and piloting microdramas, but its impact on storytelling remains uncertain. He emphasized that the vertical drama business is driven...
NAB 2026: NVIDIA?s Not-So-Secret AI Agents
At NAB 2026 NVIDIA showcased its AI Agent Control Plane, a framework that lets multiple autonomous agents collaborate on media‑creation tasks while staying within enterprise‑grade guardrails. The demo highlighted NemoClaw, an open‑source privacy layer for OpenClaw agents that enforces policy‑based data...
New Study Reveals Power of Contextual in CTV: Content Adjacency Drives 4X Brand Lift for High-Consideration Categories
Video Elephant’s new study, "The Power of Context: Driving Lift Through Video," finds that aligning ads with surrounding content can generate up to four times the typical brand lift. A national survey of 2,000 U.S. adults shows 41% develop a...
NAB Is Full of Big Ideas?Live Sports Need Ideas That Work
The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show continues to showcase cutting‑edge sports‑broadcast technology, but the author argues that the industry now prioritizes production‑ready solutions over flashy demos. Live sports demand integrated, reliable, and scalable workflows that can handle multiple venues,...
How AI Agents Can Sweep Fragmentation, Frustration, and Fraud Out of CTV
Agentic AI could resolve CTV programmatic fragmentation, fraud, and data inconsistency. The article outlines how fragmented inventory definitions and fraudulent reselling waste ad spend. AI agents trained to verify content, audience, and environment can enable direct buyer‑seller transactions, reducing reliance...
Multiviews on Live Sports Streaming at NAB 2026
At NAB 2026 the streaming industry zeroed in on live sports, with multiview solutions emerging as the centerpiece for delivering seamless, low‑latency experiences across devices. Executives highlighted the massive mobile‑first audience—India alone has 650 million streaming smartphones—prompting vendors to prioritize short‑form highlights...
The Economics of Buffering: Why Milliseconds Decide Streaming Growth
Buffering is no longer a mere technical hiccup; it directly threatens streaming revenue. The article notes that 70% of viewers abandon a live stream after just two buffering incidents, linking playback quality to retention and margin. Four infrastructure weaknesses—encoding bottlenecks,...
Best Practices for Seamless Live Streaming Failover
Industry leaders agree that by 2026 seamless CDN failover is the baseline for live‑streaming, especially for high‑stakes sports events. The shift moves from a single standby CDN to multiple actively‑loaded CDNs that keep caches warm. Experts stress side‑by‑side traffic distribution...
License-Layer Security: The Missing Piece in OTT Content Protection
Modern OTT services rely on DRM to protect streamed video, but DRM only secures content in transit. Attackers now target the license layer, extracting keys from legitimate license responses and redistributing decrypted copies at scale. The article argues that license‑layer...
Server-Guided Ad Insertion (SGAI) and the Future of Streaming
Server‑guided ad insertion (SGAI) is a hybrid approach that gives publishers server‑side control over ad break timing while allowing the player to manage the actual ad rendering. It bridges the resource‑heavy client‑side insertion (CSAI) and the less flexible server‑side insertion...
Why the World Cup Exposes Sports Streaming's Biggest Engagement Gap
The World Cup will attract over five billion viewers, but its engagement spikes end with the final whistle. In contrast, gaming platforms sustain daily interaction through persistent systems, social layers, and reward mechanics. The article argues that sports streaming must adopt...
Live Sports Is Powering the Next Wave of Streaming Innovation
Live sports is driving the next wave of streaming innovation as massive, concurrent viewership demands ultra‑low latency and broadcast‑grade quality. Rising U.S. sports media rights, projected to exceed $37 billion by 2030, force providers to seek new monetization models. AI, cloud...
While Adtech Builds the Homescreen Pipes, Advertisers Can Still Tap Into the Opportunity
The CTV homescreen has become the primary gateway for viewers, consolidating fragmented streaming audiences into a premium advertising surface. However, each OEM—Samsung, LG, Roku, Google TV—imposes its own creative specifications, creating operational friction for advertisers. The IAB’s Ad Format Hero...
Overlay Ads and the Streaming Ad Tech State of Play
IAB Tech Lab’s VP of Product Jill Wittkopp outlined the current state of streaming ad‑tech, focusing on overlay formats such as L‑bars, squeezebacks and corner overlays. The lab applied an 80/20 rule to distill eight ad experiences down to six,...
How Brands Should Respond to CTV Ad Fatigue Before Viewers Tune Them Out
Streaming platforms are rapidly expanding ad‑supported inventory, with Prime Video doubling its ad load, Netflix adding ad minutes, and Amazon rebranding its ad‑free tier. The U.S. CTV audience now exceeds 240 million, and projected ad spend is set to surpass $46 billion...
NAB 2026, Via LA, and the Future of NDI|HX
NAB 2026 highlighted the growing tension between NDI|HX’s low‑bandwidth 4K delivery and new licensing costs introduced by the Via Licensing Alliance (Via LA). Via LA replaced its flat $100,000 annual cap with a tiered structure that can reach $4.5 million for the biggest...
What Does Contextual AI Look Like at Scale?
At Streaming Media Connect 2026, Tavant convened leaders from Roku, DAZN, Philo and Intersection to discuss how contextual AI is being woven into core advertising operations. The panel revealed that AI is no longer a peripheral feature but a foundational layer...
How to Monitor Live Streams for Optimal Ad Server Performance
Industry leaders at Streaming Media Connect 2026 highlighted the observability gaps that can cripple live‑stream ad insertion. They stressed that encoding quality, manifest integrity, and SCTE‑35 cue signals are the first line of defense against broken ad breaks. Real‑time “eyes on...
Streaming?s Next Phase Demands a New Kind of Infrastructure
Streaming video has become the default medium, but legacy content delivery networks (CDNs) are straining under the surge of live, high‑resolution events. Traditional CDN architectures rely on a limited number of large points of presence, which cannot efficiently absorb massive,...
Q&A: Paramount Global CTO Phil Wiser Talks AI in Media
Paramount Global’s CTO Phil Wiser outlined how AI is reshaping media operations during a HumanX Q&A. He highlighted AI’s role in speeding up global content localization, automating asset stitching, and ensuring compliance, while stressing a hybrid top‑down and bottom‑up adoption...
The Many Ways CTV Publishers Extend Supply and What It Means For You
CTV publishers use five distinct supply models to monetize inventory beyond their owned‑and‑operated channels. The models—inventory share, backfill, buyback, audience extension, and run‑of‑network—allow publishers to expand impressions from tens of thousands to hundreds of millions while retaining control over pricing...
Broadband?s Growth Playbook Is Broken, Relevance-Led Growth Is Next
Broadband providers have outgrown the traditional scale‑first playbook as market scarcity gives way to abundant choices like fiber, cable, 5G and satellite. Speed and reliability are now baseline expectations, leaving providers to compete on relevance rather than raw performance. The...
Peeling Back Sports' Hidden Layer of Streaming Ops and Tech
The article reveals that modern sports broadcasting relies on a hidden, highly complex layer of technology that produces multiple simultaneous feeds—main broadcast, alternate angles, highlights, social clips, and personalized streams. This invisible infrastructure must capture, transport, process, and orchestrate massive...
Stream of Consciousness: How CTV and Household Targeting Keeps Brands Top of Mind
Streaming television overtook broadcast and cable in May 2025, capturing 44.8% of U.S. TV viewing and climbing to a 47.5% peak in December 2025. The surge has accelerated ad‑supported models, with Netflix’s ad tier rising from 26% to 40% of...
Leveraging SGAI for Longtail Live Sports
FloSports is piloting Server‑Generated Ad Insertion (SGAI) to tackle quality and revenue challenges in long‑tail sports streaming. The platform gains end‑to‑end observability of its video pipeline, allowing it to monitor performance without blind spots. SGAI also enables side‑by‑side programmatic ads...
The Subscriber Retention Funnel: Turning One-Time Viewers Into Loyal Audiences
Streaming services are grappling with rising churn, which has climbed from 2 % in 2019 to 5.5 % in 2025, while retention rates linger between 30 % and 40 %. Traditional mass‑mail and generic push tactics no longer engage users, prompting a shift toward...
Independent Report Compares Codec Royalty Costs Across Two Major Licensing Pools
An independent analysis by Jan Ozer for Streaming Learning Center compares royalty costs between Access Advance’s Video Distribution Patent Pool and Avanci’s Video program across eight typical streaming service models. The study finds Avanci’s royalties can be 1.9‑times higher for...
AI-Enriched Metadata Drives Better CTV Content Discovery
Cineverse’s cineSearch platform uses AI to generate scene‑by‑scene, emotion‑focused metadata, enabling natural‑language queries that match how viewers think about what to watch. By extracting thousands of contextual dimensions—mood, feeling, genre nuances—the system moves beyond traditional descriptive tags. SUMM8’s Jamie Mackinlay stresses...
Why to Invest in Lowering Sports Streaming Latency in 2026
Live‑sports streaming still lags broadcast by 30‑45 seconds, prompting industry leaders to debate the ROI of cutting latency. DAZN, BT Group and TATA Communications cite split‑rights scenarios and real‑time betting as drivers for faster delivery. Technical hurdles include low‑latency protocols,...
The 13% Problem: Why Identity Accuracy Is Advertising?s Blind Spot
The advertising industry’s reliance on identity signals is exposing a costly blind spot: IP‑based targeting on connected TV delivers only 13‑16% accuracy. As media ecosystems fragment across streaming, mobile and linear TV, inconsistent identifiers cause brands to waste up to...
The Story-Centric Shift: Designing the Multi-Platform Newsroom for the Streaming Era
Newsrooms are transitioning from broadcast‑first pipelines to story‑centric, multi‑platform operations to meet the speed and scale demanded by streaming and social channels. By aligning teams around a single story and leveraging AI‑driven automation, organizations can produce distinct versions for digital,...
Case Study: Option Media Builds Trust in Every Transfer
Option Media, a 25‑person post‑production hub in Belgium, switched from FTP to Signiant in 2013, eliminating transfer failures and accelerating workflows. The platform now moves roughly 6.5 TB of media each month across 23 custom‑branded portals, handling multilingual, high‑volume projects for...
Why Microdramas Are a Streaming Media Opportunity
Recent EMARKETER data shows Americans now spend more than five hours daily on mobile video, while TV accounts for under 40% of total viewing time by 2026. Chinese‑origin microdrama apps, delivering 60‑90 second episodes for a $15‑$25 series fee, generated...
How to Achieve Seamless Shoppable CTV
At Streaming Media Connect 2026, leaders from Fuse Media, Disney, Spaceback and LG outlined the next wave of shoppable CTV innovations. They highlighted homepage tile ads as a low‑funnel performance tool, Roku’s phone‑number‑linked click‑to‑buy flow, and LG’s Shop Time platform that leverages...
Shoppable TV Has a QR Code Problem
Shoppable TV has leaned on QR codes to turn viewers into shoppers, but industry data shows click‑through rates hovering around 0.03%, far below expectations. While 62% of consumers discover new brands on television and spend roughly $290 annually on TV‑inspired...
Why Streamers Must Become?Proactive About Piracy?Before It Is Too Late
Piracy has outpaced the streaming industry, evolving into a commercial operation that rivals legitimate platforms. In Japan, illegal distribution cost roughly $38 billion in 2025, and when counterfeit media are included the damage approaches $67 billion. Modern pirates sell turnkey streaming services...
View From the Top: What Google?s 2027 License Service Deadline Means for Streamers
Google will retire its free Widevine Cloud License Service in April 2027, forcing every OTT platform that relies on it to migrate to a new DRM license infrastructure. The shutdown impacts key DRM workflows, including key exchange, entitlement checks, and...
Streamticker: The Biggest Streaming Mergers and Acquisitions of 2025
The 2025 Streamticker roundup chronicles a wave of high‑value mergers reshaping streaming, advertising, and infrastructure. DIRECTV’s acquisition of INVIDI strengthens addressable TV ad solutions, while Outbrain’s $1 billion purchase of Teads creates a $1.7 billion omnichannel ad platform. DAZN’s $2.2 billion buy of...