Pause to Progress: Sports Innovation Five Years After COVID

The COVID-19 pandemic marked a turning point in how sports are produced, distributed, and experienced. From remote production to virtual competitions and direct-to-consumer (D2C) streaming, many of the solutions quickly put in place during lockdowns have become core components of a new, more interactive and fan-focused era of sports.

Why CTV Is a Bright Spot for Sports Advertising

If the past six months have shown us anything, it's that streaming isn't just a major player in sports—it's rewriting the playbook. Netflix broadcast NFL Christmas games for the first time, Amazon retained Thursday Night Football, and the NBA inked an unprecedented 11-year media rights agreement with streaming giants Disney and ESPN+, NBC and Peacock, and Amazon Prime Video, leaving behind its long-standing linear partner TNT. The message is clear: Connected TV (CTV) is no longer just an alternative for sports viewing—it's becoming the primary stage.

Powering the New Streaming Superstore in the Age of Subscriber Choice

The age of unprecedented subscriber growth in streaming is morphing into a new phase. Today, the video subscription market is more mature, complex, and nuanced than it ever has been, with providers increasingly focusing on strategic partnerships alongside pure direct-to-consumer growth. While content exclusivity remains the most compelling hook for any premium service, Vijay Sajja, CEO and Founder of Evergent, writes that a flurry of aggregation and bundling activity means that the biggest services will live and die by their ability to offer superior experiences and value-added personalization.

Three CDN Strategies To Lower Live Streaming Latency

Akhil Ramachandran addresses some key challenges he faced when he added low latency streaming support for MediaStore, leveraging the state-of-the-art Chunked Transfer Encoding, and the strategies adopted to solve them.

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.

Sailing the Seven “Cs” of CTV 2.0

Eric Hoffert, Chief Technology Officer of Kargo, lays out seven elements of CTV 2.0, which is coming up fast - but many brands and media companies aren't prepared. While CTV 1.0 was about targeting audiences using linear creative, CTV 2.0 is about leaning into the varied capabilities of a digital screen within the context of a multichannel campaign. Hoffert has "Seven C's" that brands and media companies must consider for CTV 2.0 to take off.

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.

Personalization, Social, and Interactivity Define the New Role of TV

Casey Saran, CEO of Spaceback, challenges advertisers to think about the next wave of TV advertising innovation coming their way in 2025. Especially as GenZ moves into adulthood, they'll bring their social habits with them, and their expectations for personalized, interactive experiences.

OLI: Your AI-Powered Guide to the 2024 Paris Olympics

Hello, sports fans! I'm OLI, your AI-powered guide to the 2024 Paris Olympics & Paralympics coverage. With thousands of hours of programming across various channels, it could be overwhelming to keep track of everything. That's where I came in, OLI, an AI agent, stepping in to change the way we experienced the Games.

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.

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.

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.

Why the 2024 Olympics Are a Bigger Opportunity for Advertisers Than Ever

The Olympic Games represent the absolute pinnacle of advertising events. Exciting, triumphant, and inspiring, there's simply no other shared TV experience quite like it. Adam Shapiro of New York Interconnect explains why, in 2024, particularly for U.S. advertisers, the opportunities have never been richer.

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.

Navigating the Streaming Seas: Paramount's Bold Moves and Future Challenges

In the ever-evolving landscape of streaming media, Paramount's Q1 earnings call revealed a complex picture with a myriad of opportunities and challenges. Amidst shifts in leadership and speculation around strategic mergers, Paramount stands at a crucial juncture. Dan Goman, Founder and CEO of Ateliere, writes discusses how their recent maneuvers will undoubtedly have major repercussions for the global streaming industry.

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.