Operational Discipline in Streaming is Now Non-Negotiable

Cost control is a major priority for streaming services today. Video providers need smarter architectures that enable resources to be optimized, unnecessary costs prevented, alongside better use of data, and effective financial practices that enable cloud spend to be kept under control. Ultimately, video providers need to implement the strictest operational discipline across every aspect of their service.

Planning Beyond the C-band Auction: How IP Distribution Is Shaping What Comes Next

Under new legislation, the FCC is required to auction at least 100 MHz of additional Upper C-band spectrum beyond the reallocation that took place in 2021. To tackle this challenge, forward-looking broadcasters, networks, and rights holders are turning to managed IP solutions with performance and reliability Service Level Agreement (SLA) guarantees as the primary path forward. These regulatory shifts aren't introducing a new direction but are accelerating decisions that are already reshaping the industry. Broadcasters are moving away from fixed satellite capacity and adopting scalable, IP-based networks that offer full reach, strong guarantees, greater flexibility, better performance, and long-term value.

Designing the Shift to Software-Based Media Production

The broadcast industry is undergoing one of its most profound transitions in decades as media production moves away from hardware-dependent infrastructure toward software-based environments that are more flexible by design. While this evolution has been building for some time, it is now being addressed at an architectural level, with the industry recognizing that incremental change is no longer sufficient to support modern production requirements.

From Probabilistic to Proven: The Deterministic Turn in Audience Data Strategy

As an industry, we must make 2026 the year we shift away from probabilistic signals of audience identity, like IP addresses, to more deterministic and higher-fidelity signals that can reliably connect impressions to households, and ultimately, to the business outcomes that CMOs are on the hook to deliver.

When Sports Piracy Goes Industrial: Building a Coordinated Defense

For organizations such as LaLiga, the NFL, and the Premier League, the growing sophistication of sports streaming piracy at scale changes how piracy must be addressed. What was once treated as a reactive enforcement issue now requires a coordinated, technology-driven strategy that protects content without degrading the fan experience. Connecting protection, detection, attribution, and enforcement creates a more resilient defense model that can respond at the same speed and scale as modern piracy operations.

Pause Before You Chase the Next CTV Ad Format

CTV has always been driven by novelty, but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. We haven't come close to exhausting the performance potential of pause ads.

How Advertisers Can Approach an Epic Sports Year

The Super Bowl has evolved so that viewers can now tune in to NBC's linear channel, as well as stream it via Peacock, Fubo, Hulu+Live TV, YouTube TV, and NFL+. One channel that is conspicuously absent from there is traditional YouTube, but that doesn't mean that it will be without Super Bowl content. Rather the opposite - YouTube will be at the center of the Super Bowl viewership, regardless of broadcast rights. What's more, this will be a precursor to an epic sports year for advertisers - one where YouTube will be more central than they may understand.

Three CTV Ad Innovations That Will Stick Around After The Olympics

Media companies on CTV and beyond will be upping their own game to compete at the Winter Olympics and Super Bowl this month and also in the future. We are experiencing high profile testing of new ad types and we all need to pay attention. This article describes what I think will stick.

The Bowl Afterglow: Maintaining Momentum Once the “Big Game” Is in the Rearview

For brands lucky enough to afford a Super Bowl spot, the opportunity of re-engaging viewers and attendees ensures your investment won't fade away as soon as its over. And for those brands who choose an alternate route to engage with fans outside of the game itself, it serves as an opportunity to leverage the afterglow of the "Big Game" as a springboard for engagement.

Streaming, Hybrid Delivery, and the Reinvention of Broadcast Infrastructure

Today's audiences expect flexibility, immediate access, and personalized experiences. They move fluidly between devices and platforms, and they are less concerned with how content reaches them than with how easily it fits into their daily routines. For broadcasters and content providers, this creates both an opportunity and a significant challenge. The industry must transition from rigid, tower-based workflows to agile, IP-native systems that accommodate evolving behaviors without compromising reliability or quality.

The Identity Problem Isn’t Loss, It’s Fragmentation

The real issue facing marketers today is not the disappearance of identity, but its fragmentation. Signals are multiplying across browsers, devices, apps, platforms, and environments, each behaving differently and governed by different rules. Rather than a single, predictable decline, marketers are navigating a patchwork of inconsistent identity signals that vary widely depending on where and how consumers are reached.

The Super Bowl Paradox: How Challenger Brands Are Winning Without the $7 Million Ad

While the industry obsesses over the broadcast buy, the real opportunity lies in the data. Streaming has surged to capture nearly half of total TV viewing time, yet it still commands only around 30% of total ad budgets. This disconnect, highlighted by recent Nielsen and eMarketer data, creates a "Super Bowl Paradox" where the most engaged inventory is also the most undervalued. The efficiency gap is real, and it's wide open.

The Local Broadcast Advantage: Trust, Scale, and Real Results

For performance-driven marketers, local broadcast is indispensable, as it offers rare consistency in a chaotic media ecosystem, with the power to build brand, influence behavior, and drive conversions.

Beyond the Ad Pod: Where CTV Advertising Will Go in 2026

As CTV changes how people consume content beyond the big screen, AI is simultaneously changing the way advertisers design, plan, activate and measure campaigns. Together, these two changes mean advertisers should be thinking about 2026 as a time to reinvent the way they reach audiences.

Scoring Big: Winning Over a Distracted and Fragmented Fandom

Today, fandom isn't found exclusively in front of a television. It's a moving target that flows from the broadcast to creator highlights, and from betting apps to the stadium. The days of securing reach through a single broadcast buy are gone. Capturing modern fandom now requires a strategy built for fragmentation, velocity, and constant switching.

Why Immediate Action Is the Wrong Metric for Measuring Super Bowl Ads

The Super Bowl is a one-of-a-kind live TV event that requires a context-aware approach to measurement — and one that doesn't prize immediate action as the gold standard. It reveals something important for performance marketers: performance is defined not by speed but by outcomes.

Agentic AI: A New Path to Efficiency and ROI

By this time next year, agentic AI will sit inside everyday operations no longer as an experiment, but as part of the connected backbone that powers how content is created, managed, and delivered. The question has shifted from if to how, and specifically, how to make it usable across the whole business.

Marketing Is Becoming Video-First. Who Actually Wins?

Video is becoming a primary interface between companies and customers, not an optional layer on top of written content.

What Counts as CTV? Why Defining the Channel Matters for Performance

CTV should mean ads that run where viewers expect TV commercials. That means full-episode, professionally produced, long-form content streamed through connected devices. It excludes user-generated clips, background ads, and placements that may technically run "on the big screen" but don't align with consumer perception of television.

The Post-Holiday Subscription Reset—Are Streaming Services Built for Retention?

For streaming services, bundling is increasingly a retention tool designed to carry subscribers through the post-holiday rethink, when perceived value matters more than promotional hype.