Why the World Cup Exposes Sports Streaming's Biggest Engagement Gap

Gaming is built as an always-on system designed to maximize session frequency, retention, and lifetime engagement. Live sports, on the other hand, are still optimized for scheduled viewing windows where engagement peaks during the match and drops off immediately once it's over. For streaming product leaders and sports media executives responsible for retention and average revenue per user (ARPU), the opportunity isn't to change the live event. It's to capture the audience before and after it.

Live Sports Is Powering the Next Wave of Streaming Innovation

Live sports viewers expect a flawless streaming experience with ultra-low latency and immersive features that bring them closer to the action. At the same time, the rising cost of sports rights is forcing service providers to rethink how they maximize return on investment. The result is a perfect storm of innovation, where advances in AI, cloud infrastructure, and ecosystem partnerships are reshaping the future of streaming.

Streaming’s Next Phase Demands a New Kind of Infrastructure

The economics and the architecture of conventional delivery networks are increasingly misaligned with the realities of modern streaming. Architectures that can dynamically match capacity to demand are far more efficient.

Stream of Consciousness: How CTV and Household Targeting Keeps Brands Top of Mind

This complexity and fragmentation of streaming content is not unfamiliar to those with experience planning digital marketing campaigns. Since the internet itself experienced a similar tidal wave of growth during the 2000's, thousands of websites have proliferated, offering advertisers myriad options to engage with audiences. The same is now true with streaming apps and platforms, which has led to half of TV content viewers reporting they think there are now too many options to stream content.

Incrementality is About to Become the New Baseline for CTV Outcomes

In CTV, where exposure is often view-through, and actions happen on other screens, "last-click" measurement distortion can turn "good ROAS" into a mirage. That's why incrementality is becoming a necessary baseline. In practice, it means fewer arguments about attribution models and more routine experimentation baked into media plans.

California’s Streaming Loudness Law: Time for Ad Tech to Rethink Audio Control

A familiar broadcast rule is now entering the streaming world with California's new loudness regulation SB 576, mandating that advertisements must match the perceived volume of the primary content surrounding them. The goal is to eliminate the sudden volume spikes viewers experience during ad breaks. On paper, it's a win-win: audiences get a better viewing experience, and advertisers know their message is landing without jarring. But implementing that rule in streaming is far less simple than it sounds.

Why the Gap Between the Game and Your Screen Is a Business Problem

That gap between reality and your screen is latency, and it has become one of the most commercially consequential technical problems in the live sports industry. With American sports betting exploding in scale and prediction markets rewriting the rules of fan engagement, the stakes around streaming delay have jumped from a quality-of-experience nuisance to a structural business problem that touches broadcasters, technology companies, regulators, and sportsbooks alike.

Volumetric video takes gold in live events - could major film awards be next?

By recording Olympic athletes from multiple viewpoints simultaneously, volumetric video preserves the spatial performance itself rather than a single chosen angle. Producers can then reposition a virtual camera in post-production, even if the final output remains conventional 2D. Perspective becomes adjustable after the event, not fixed at the moment of capture.

Grounded thinking: Why AI-powered CTV experiences rise or fall on data

Over time, LLMs will enable transformational TV experiences for viewers. Consumer expectations for how they interact with technology continue to rise, and CTV platforms have an opportunity to get ahead of the curve. LLMs can deliver on that promise-but only when anchored in trusted, up-to-date data. With TV viewers constantly reevaluating where they spend their time and money, the cost of unvetted or unreliable information becomes impossible to ignore. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.