Digging into CTV’s 3 Biggest Challenges in 2025

CTV advertising will dominate most brands' media plans in the next 2-3 years, yet major challenges persist. Suvadip Choudhury of Alliant talks about achieving scale, precision targeting, and the lack of overall education holding buyers back, but he also argues that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Out of Home, On the Money: Live Event Streaming is Winning Outside the Living Room

Streamers are facing intense competition over limited household wallet share, engagement time, and the rights deals that keep viewers signed up. Today, folks are looking for creative ways to expand their audience beyond the confines of direct-to-consumer and streaming platforms while slicing and dicing rights agreements in tailored ways. Immersive shared experiences, such as live sports events, that take audiences outside of their living rooms are growing in popularity - and helping engage viewers with hyper-targeted, localized experiences.

Live Sports Is Driving Innovation in Ad-Tech

If 2024 was the year of live-streaming sports, Dave Dembowski of Operative writes that 2025 is the year of live-streaming ad innovation. With massive audiences that continue to steal from traditional TV, advertisers are looking for new opportunities to reach massive live audiences digitally. Media companies are working hard to offer the TV advertising experience of the future. That future will include new forms of targeting, interactivity, creative ad formats, and much more.

Flexibility or Failure: Remaining Agile in Streaming

In direct-to-consumer (D2C) streaming, staying ahead means staying nimble. New technologies, changing customer preferences, and intense competition are driving the streaming industry toward fast-paced growth. In this environment, companies that are unable to adapt, and adapt quickly, fall behind. Flexibility is essential for long-term success. However, flexibility can be difficult to achieve for streaming organizations who often struggle with legacy systems, complex infrastructures, and bureaucratic decision-making processes that slow down the ability to pivot and innovate.

Why FAST is Media Buyers' Next Big Strategic Investment

Angelina Marmorato, Lemma's AVP of Sales and Partnerships, North America, breaks down why FAST is media buyers' next big strategic investment

Challenges of New Encoding Scenarios: Reflections on Measuring Perceived Quality

While VMAF has been a valuable tool for assessing video quality, its limitations highlight the need for complementary metrics or the development of new assessment methods. These new metrics should address VMAF's shortcomings, especially in the context of modern video encoding scenarios that incorporate AI and other advanced techniques. For the best outcomes, a combination of VMAF and other metrics, both full-reference and no-reference, might be necessary to achieve a comprehensive and accurate assessment of video quality in various applications.

The Cloud-Based Security Shift

Security measures have come a long way since the days when security meant simply signing in and out of the facility and keeping valuable content in a locked room. As technology has advanced and the broadcast industry has adopted new ways of working, security systems have naturally become much more sophisticated. Take cloud security tools - they provide a formidable level of security that, contrary to popular belief, is actually difficult to match on-site. Data is only as secure as the systems and procedures around it; and the security systems safeguarding data in the cloud will likely be more advanced and superior to measures you can implement on-site.

Why Streamers Need Rural Sports Fans — and Why Quality is Key for Keeping Them Around

Steve Miller-Jones, Vice President, Product Strategy, Netskrt Systems, discusses why streamers need rural sports fans, the reasons quality is key for reducing churn, and how streaming platforms and ISPs can beat buffering problems associated with delivering live sporting events to remote areas.

Interactive Ads: Reshaping Fan Engagement in Live Sports on CTV

This year's NewFronts signaled a paradigm shift in CTV advertising, focusing on interactive experiences. This holds particular promise for live sports, where viewer engagement is paramount. Gijsbert Pols, Ph.D., director of connected TV and new channels at Adjust, discusses the specific applications of hyper-contextualization in live sports advertising, and he explores potential challenges and solutions to jump into the exciting future of sports fan engagement within the ever-evolving CTV landscape.

What the 2024 "Summer of Sports" Teaches Us About the Future of Streaming

The summer of 2024 has presented sports programming that rivals any other year in history, including the Copa America finals, Tour de France, NBA finals, two golf majors, ICC World T20, Wimbledon, U.S. Open, an array of F1 Grand Prix's, or the recently finished Paris Olympics and Paralympics. Matt Shapiro, Senior Director of Business Development, Qwilt, discusses the challenges of maintaining a superior QoE across video-on-demand and OTT services and the new formats arising to meet them.

Life Beyond YouTube - The Shift to Creator-Owned Platforms and What It Means for the Creator Economy

Jake Nishimura, Marketing Director of Kiswe, discusses how the creator economy is at a crossroads. While traditional platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, and YouTube still provide the best opportunities for aspiring creators, more established creators are finding it increasingly difficult to sustain their careers on social media alone. As a result, many popular creators are starting to invest in their own direct-to-consumer (D2C or DTC) subscription streaming platforms citing frustration with the YouTube algorithm and how difficult it is to sustain the level of success they've achieved on a single platform.

Feeling Woozy? Why Immersive Live Sports Might Be Hard To Stomach, and What Can Be Done About It

Ivo Ivanov of DE-SIX discusses the immersive, multisensory experiences that are changing how people watch sports. However, he discusses studies that have found that 30% - 80% of users have experienced mild to severe short-term side effects of wearing immersive technologies. While immersive streaming might represent the future format for live sports, with an estimated CAGR of 24.64% from 2024 to 2031 to reach $133bn, issues such as poor internet connectivity could derail that growth and stop immersive sports in its tracks.

Real-time Interactivity: the Missing Monetization Piece for Emerging Streaming Businesses

The streaming business is more competitive than ever. Amid a proliferation of content and viewing devices, battling for consumer attention is tough. Keeping it is even harder. In a market where profitability and engagement are key, real-time interactivity has emerged as a streaming powerplay that can turn passive viewers into active participants and revenue game-changers. But here's the issue: the cost barriers associated with delivering high-quality video are preventing many emerging streaming companies from experimenting with interactivity. Hunter Hillman of Livepeer Studio discusses ways providers can sidestep these barriers to unlock real-time interactivity.

The Complexities of Sports Streaming Requires Continuous Testing

Adrian Garcia of Applause writes about how the intersection of streaming, sports, and gambling has created a dynamic and rapidly evolving landscape. As streaming technology improves and sports betting becomes more accessible, testing and integration of these elements is needed to transform how seamlessly fans enjoy sports and gambling.

At NAB, Content Will be at the Mercy of Connectivity

As broadcasters and content providers head to next week's NAB conference in Las Vegas, a quiet transformation is unfolding within the world of content and, more specifically, content delivery. It isn't just content evolving, but how it is consumed and delivered. That's why connectivity is a major theme at this year's event.

Singing in the Digital Subway: How Livestreaming Bridges Our Need for Connection

After human connection hit an all-time low in 2020, people flocked to online platforms like Twitch to fill the sudden void we were suddenly and collectively experiencing. Streaming quickly grew to accommodate passions of all kind, from gaming to cooking to sports and beyond. Lux Narayan, Co-Founder and CEO at StreamAlive, outlines the specific ways that streaming stands to benefit from a conversational atmosphere and offers actionable ways that streamers can implement these interactions to connect with their audience.

Streaming Wars: End-to-End Quality Assurance and Video Analysis Gives Streaming Service Providers the Upper Hand

The battle for audience retention continues to intensify in the highly competitive streaming realm. Anupama Anantharaman of Interra Systems highlights the critical role that end-to-end quality assurance, media QC monitoring, and in-depth video analysis play in meeting the escalating demands of today's video consumers and why the role of these processes is becoming more crucial than ever.

Considerations for Providers Shifting from QAM to IP Video Delivery Networks

Traditional, controlled broadcast environments are being replaced by dynamic, complex ecosystems where multiple applications and services must coexist harmoniously. The challenge is to maintain the quality of a provider's main service, like linear TV with dynamically inserted ads, while accommodating the diverse requirements for and potential interference from third-party applications. Yoann Hinard of Witbe discusses the challenges faced throughout this process, including remote monitoring, dynamic ad insertion, and QC testing across devices.

Beat the Clock: Live Sports Streaming at Scale

To succeed in streaming sports at scale, streamers must commit to delivering the best video quality and reliable and advanced experiences, all while cracking down on piracy. Simon Brydon of Synamedia breaks down exactly how to get all bases covered in sports streaming.

The Rise of the Ad Tier: How Streaming Business Models Determine the Content We Watch

In the pursuit of catalyzing profit, large video streaming companies have been radically altering their approach to growing top-line revenue and curtailing costs for some time now, be it through layoffs, password-sharing crackdowns, licensing of catalog content to rival streamers, and, notably, the introduction of advertising tiers.