This Future of TV Briefing covers the latest in streaming and TV for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Wednesday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →
This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how the growing availability of streaming live sports for programmatic sales will test the supply chain’s infrastructure and require new standards.
‘Tsunami of supply’
The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting this week has confirmed what Disney’s Tech and Data Showcase during CES signaled: It’s about to be primetime for programmatically selling ads against streaming live sports.
But there’s a but.
As more live sports like the NFL and NBA become available to stream — as well as live events like the Academy Awards, which will stream on Hulu in March — streaming’s ad tech infrastructure needs to get upgraded. Not only are the stakes higher because live sports is the most valuable inventory on the market, but so is the potential pressure on the proverbial programmatic power grid.
Index Exchange CEO Andrew Casale contextualized the challenge facing streaming’s programmatic supply chain — a “tsunami of supply,” in his words — during an on-stage interview at ALM on Sunday. Right now the overall programmatic ad market handles about 500 billion transactions per day. That’s a lot but spread out across 24 hours. “And so as a result, we can all anticipate, from a compute perspective, how best to process that,” he said.
Now consider that Netflix’s Christmas Day NFL games averaged 24 million viewers. That means, for the programmatic supply chain to enable real-time bidding and carve up that inventory as if they were web banners, it would need to support 24 million bid requests and to do so within milliseconds to avoid creating any latency issues.
“It’s actually incredibly challenging technical problems. And so today, right now, we’re living in a market where we have publishers bringing some of the most valuable media on the planet to our market, but a lot of it’s being throttled a bit because it’s too punishing to be able to transact it,” Casale said.
Compounding matters is the fact that programmatic only accounts for a small share of how CTV ads are sold today. During a separate session at ALM, The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green said that 75% of CTV ads are sold via direct deals, and that of the remaining 25% of CTV impressions, “the majority of that is still fixed price, or non-biddable,” he said. “So there’s still lots of room for us to grow to make things biddable, and that will have a huge impact on some of the most expensive content in CTV, which is sports.”
And the streaming ad industry is very clearly focused on this growth opportunity. Within the past week, ad tech firms PubMatic and Nexxen have each announced separate deals to support programmatic sales for streaming live sports inventory. And earlier this month, ESPN parent Disney announced a certification program to authorize which ad tech firms meet its requirements to programmatically access its live sports and entertainment inventory; that list includes Google’s Display & Video 360, The Trade Desk and Yahoo DSP as well as Magnite.
“Being live-certified by Disney means we have the confidence that the technology will scale, the confidence that these platforms can capitalize on the spike in viewership, the increased bid density and scale during live moments and, finally, the ability to preingest creative and have it ready to go,” said Disney’s svp of addressable sales Jamie Power during the company’s Tech & Data Showcase.
Disney can’t be alone in setting standards for the programmatic industry’s live capabilities. And it’s not.
IAB Tech Lab plans to update the OpenRTB protocol to include new objects and signals to support inventory in live programming on streaming. And Amazon Prime Video, NBCUniversal and Netflix will be participating in that process, said IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur in an interview. The organization plans to introduce those updates for a 45-day public comment period in April and plans to have them finalized by summer, he said.
“Some of the heavy hitters are behind this. So that’s encouraging from an adoption perspective, because all it takes is a Prime Video, a Netflix, an NBCUniversal or a Disney – you get two out of those four, and it pulls the whole industry in that direction,” Katsur said.
What we’ve heard
“You need a team of 15 to 20 to grow a YouTube channel.”
— Video lead at a major publisher
Numbers to know
$70: Monthly subscription price for Comcast’s streaming sports bundle.
$20.99: Monthly subscription price for a Max-Starz streaming bundle being sold through Amazon’s Prime Video.
$85: New monthly subscription price for Fubo’s Essential streaming pay-TV tier, which was introduced two months ago at an $80 price point.
-7%: Percentage decline year over year in TV production in 2024 following 2023’s strike-induced work stoppage.
What we’ve covered
Marketers cautiously resume TikTok spending after shutdown, while some continue enacting ban measures:
- Brands that keep spending on TikTok might see a temporary boost in engagement.
- TikTok campaigns have skewed toward quick, reactive content in the immediate aftermath of the shutdown.
Read more about advertisers’ TikTok spending here.
Creators are split on whether to keep using TikTok’s editing app CapCut post-shutdown:
- Many creators use TikTok-owned CapCut, which has a free tier, as their primary editing software.
- While Meta plans to roll out a CapCut clone, creators are not sold on making the switch.
Read more about creators’ CapCut shutdown reactions here.
TikTok’s U.S. shutdown has little impact on publishers’ traffic and video strategies:
- TikTok’s temporary absence did not spur a surge in traffic to publishers’ sites.
- It also didn’t correspond to a proportional increase in YouTube Shorts viewership.
Read more about the TikTok shutdown’s publisher impact here.
The TikTok outage caused TikTok Shop sales to spike, not sink:
- TikTok Shop sales were $500,000 higher on the day the app came back compared to the day before it shut down.
- Creators had seen a surge in TikTok Shop sales in the weeks and days leading up to the shutdown.
Read more about TikTok Shop here.
What we’re reading
The U.S. president is playing dealmaker-in-chief by holding discussions with suitors interested in purchasing TikTok, and he expects a resolution within 30 days, according to Reuters. NPR had earlier reported that Trump was looking to negotiating a deal for Oracle to take over TikTok.
The Warner Bros. Discovery-owned TV new networks apparently would prefer to be known as a digital news organization, as it plans to cut 200 employees particularly from the traditional TV side of its organization while hiring an equal amount to boost its digital operation, which will eventually include a new subscription-based streaming service that probably won’t be called CNN+ but might as well, according to The New York Times.
Amazon Prime Video’s CBS ambitions:
The e-commerce giant’s streaming service, following Netflix’s lead, has set CBS as its role model instead of HBO, as it spends more money on live sports rights and adds programming from third parties to broaden its library, according to The Information.
The TV ad industry’s primary measurement provider has helped to protect its position by securing Media Rating Council accreditation for its big data + panel measurement system, according to Axios, and followed up the accreditation news by announcing plans to effectively sunset its panel-only measurement system.
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