A Tipping Point for Live Sports: Personalized Multiview and L-bar Ad Tech
A new collaboration was unveiled at Streaming Media Connect 2025 where Ring Digital’s #FutureOfTV.Live produced a special, data-driven panel on Multiview, Mosaics, and L-bars in the context of live sports and CTV ad tech.
The panel was sponsored by CommScope Video Systems and featured senior execs from across our ecosystem:
We set the stage with cautious optimism, outlining several new data points suggesting that, after many years of cord-cutting, pay TV’s decline may have hit a floor. That includes several research notes from Moffett Nathanson, including their most recent, published on December 8 on Deadline. It said, “The rate of decline for traditional distributors improved for the fifth straight quarter. While the rate of decline is still scary-high, it is unmistakably moderating.”
If that’s true, it has big implications for all participants in the media ecosystem. First, the fight to both acquire and retain viewers will intensify.
In the session, I retold my bewildering experience shopping for a replacement to YouTube TV during their carriage battle with ESPN. My gripes included the presentation of the above table how six providers ranked on six criteria that drove my decision-making.
After nine years as a YouTube TV subscriber, I had really begun to enjoy their Personalized Multiview feature. Little did I know that I would have to abandon that feature--and others too--to satisfy my basic channel coverage needs.
But in the process, I’ve become convinced that it’s only a matter of time before all virtual pay TV providers have rolled out Multiview.
Delivering Improved Viewer Value
The anecdote is meant to underscore a broader trifurcation in the market between free services, premium ad-free services, and premium-with-ads services.
YouTube, Tubi, The Roku Channel, and Pluto TV continue to dominate the ad-only landscape, and so paid services must justify their fees through better viewing experiences. The market has moved beyond delivering video; it is now about delivering a superior watching experience.
Second, while we improve the viewer value delivered, we must also squeeze more ad "juice" out of live feeds. Today, top live programs are sold out of ad inventory and for many broadcasts – college football being the one that I’m most familiar with - it is already loaded up with too many breaks. Placing ad-supported L-bars with a content squeezeback adds inventory without breaks, a key value proposition for the future of TV.
Those are the top line highlights from my special collaboration with Streaming Media Connect last week during our panel titled, "Innovating with Ad Tech and Multi-View in Live Sports." To dive into more of the data presented, download special report here.
Here is an in-depth look at some of the top quotes from discussion, outlining the path forward for the next generation of TV features for viewers and advertisers.
Live Sports, Betting, Prediction Markets, and Multiview
One of our featured speakers was Mike Chioditti, SVP of New Business at PFL, Professional Fighters League. We set him up with a clip I’d seen on CNBC where TKO Group leadership described turning UFC’s sponsorships - including one in the fast-emerging Prediction Market—into larger and more impactful partnerships integrated into the content experience.
Mike reacted, “What really excites me about prediction markets—yes, the revenue is great, but it’s more about the fan engagement. We’ve seen this proliferation of betting where, first, it was just pre-match, pre-event, and then as data became more real-time, now there’s all these different player props and in-game movements you can bet on.”
He expanded on how the category is enhancing the social conversation around PFL. “Prediction markets have made so many other moments in the live event, even shoulder programming, into engagement opportunities. All of a sudden there are new ways for fans to engage. And ultimately it helps us frame our season, pick matchups based on trending markets. One example: We have an awesome female fighter, Dakota Ditcheva, and she wears different fight kits. So it’s, ‘What color might she wear?’ It’s forcing the whole industry to think more creatively about all the different moments we might activate.”
Whether it’s covered by one legal framework or another, the dramatic rise in sports betting culture has another obvious outcome that benefits all Multiview especially: Betters are going to care about more games. The more users are betting or predicting, the more they’ll want each relevant feed in their Personalized Multiview.
That will add to the existing demand for Multiview which is most intense when sports-heavy seasons have overlapping games. For example, that includes a month or two in the Fall, when baseball, football and basketball are all going--and a similar time frame in the Spring, when March Madness gets going, the NBA heats up, baseball starts and let’s not forget hockey.
What did my #FutureOfTV.Live survey data have to say on the topic?
First, it showed that while 23% were familiar with Multiview and used it, 14% of respondents were aware of Multiview and did not use it. Can we move that 14% down to 4% by catalyzing an expanding set of use cases for the feature as it rolls out more widely? Perhaps Multiview has a broader, more impactful role to play in not only deepening sports fans habits for their favorite sport, but also in broadening viewing behaviors across sports as well. This is an insight that came to mind while writing this piece, after reviewing a thoughtful exchange between Jim Owens and Mike Chioditti.
Owens asked, “We talk to distributors about Multiview and they see the value right away. But I was wondering from your perspective, as a content owner, how do you see Multiview? Do you see it as possibly taking away from what might otherwise be a one-on-one experience with that viewer? Or, does it open up new real estate for you, say, alongside the NBA or NFL?”
“It’s the latter,” Chioditti said. “Especially for our sport, the fights are pretty quick. Five-minute rounds where you're going to want to tune in. And then we have some space between the fights. Multiview is perfect for a kind of passive viewing experience with moments where you're going to want to be all-in with audio, while making sure you're also tuning in to say, the NFL. A lot of our fights are alongside other premium rights holders when they're live as well. Providing that optionality to fans to passively consume PFL during those breaks and then make sure they're focusing on the fight when the action is live, we think it's incredibly additive to the experience.”
FAST Channels and Programmatic L-Bars
Another goal for this session was to flesh out the state-of-the-art not only on the technical side of L-bars, but also on the business end. Is programmatic L-bar advertising taking off? We asked Chioditti about this since PFL are pioneering not only L-bars but FAST itself.
“We have two different channels on most of the tier one, tier two platforms. We want to monetize it in a way that's not disruptive to the experience, ideally additive, and make sure we're doing right by sponsors and brands who want to be associated with creating sports content. So we do both traditional, fifteen-, thirty-second ads, but also L-bar, squeezeback, picture-and-picture. And we're seeing about two to three-X uplift in CPMs with these formats. As Brian said, it's the best experience. It's not disruptive. I don't think the viewer minds it. They're still able to consume the content. And the advertiser gets the benefit of that integration alongside premium sports content, which drives those higher CPMs. And I think drives a higher connection with the fan and the brand.”
Leaning into Personalization: Two Paths Forward
In the second half of our panel, we dove deeper into the technology and engineering side of personalization where CommScope’s video technology portfolio shines.
As background, we had to lay out an alternate framework for understanding TV personalization. For decades, personalization has largely meant “recommendation algorithms."
However, for today’s live-sports-heavy pay TV universe, the personalization that will likely have a more disruptive impact on a viewer’s experience is technology that can alter the video stream itself for each specific user.
To explain how operators can deliver these advanced experiences at scale, Jim and I spoke through some slides outlining CommScope’s two distinct, complementary paths to personalization..
The first path is described as Compositing, powered by CommScope’s Video Stitching Engine (VSE). This creates a "virtual set-top box in the cloud”—a concept whereby each user essentially has what can be thought of as a personalization playout or production server in the cloud that can assemble anything from a four screen Multiview to a ten-screen mosaic TV guide to an L-bar squeezeback with local dealer offers onscreen.
"This is a stitching that’s different than ad-stitching," Owens explained. "We're actually taking video content—media, which could be ads, could be HTML graphics, even a custom application—and melding them together into a single video stream to send to a subscriber."
This approach solves a massive logistical problem in client-side workflows: bandwidth. In a client-side Multiview approach, a device is forced to pull down four (or more!) separate high-definition streams, taxing both the home network and the device's processor.
With VSE, the heavy lifting happens in the network. "If you want to send ten games – or tiles, as I call them – to a client, with our system, we send that across the network as a single feed," Owens noted. This makes the experience network friendly and device agnostic, critical in our era of device fragmentation. This allows operators to deliver complex Personalized Multiview and Mosaic TV Guide experiences—where users visually surf live motion thumbnails of multiple feeds—to any device, from high-end Smart TVs to legacy set-top boxes, without buffering. Furthermore, because the compositing is handled in the network, latency is negligible—"well under a second," according to Jim—keeping the experience viable for live sports.
The second path, Manifest Manipulation, will be familiar to readers of Streaming Media. This is a critical technology involved in adaptive bitrate workflows including Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI), SCTE 224 blackout, and alt content workflows, and even Emergency Alert Services.
What’s likely to be news to readers is that CommScope’s Manifest Delivery Controller (MDC) today handles more than 4 billion ad impressions monthly across tens of millions of subscriber households.
Where VSE alters pixels, MDC alters instructions.
Manifest manipulation works by intercepting the text-based "manifest" file that tells a video player which segments to play next. The SSAI market today is filled with competitors with widely varying capabilities. Most can handle standard, simple VOD workflows. A narrow few are broadcast-grade, handle live sports ad flows, can scale to millions of personalized streams and billions of impressions monthly.
A final note: Personalization overlaps with localization. As I noted during our session, my #FutureOfTV.Live surveys have consistently featured LocalNow as one of the strongest DTC Free TV Apps measured. In it, you’ll find a special channel that is customized to your zip code. From my view, the App’s strong performance is easily explained by a clear brand promise aligned perfectly to the product value delivered. This is as true for sports as it is for news and weather. The potential for this type of stream personalization across other domains is immense.
Scaling the Vision: Standardization and Rights
While the technology exists to create these new creative video experiences, scaling them presents a business cooperation challenge. Ray Holton, formerly of the IAB Tech Lab, discussed the "Ad Format Hero" initiative, which analyzed over 100 submissions to identify the ad formats that will define the future of TV. L-bars were one of seven formats to be approved.
Holton went deep on how critical it is for the industry to engage in continuous standardization to “lower the cost for ad creations for the advertiser to make it more universally deployed."
Ray went on to explain that in-content L-bars would be slow to move along programmatic pipes for top tier events. “At least with major sports streams, they are very specific on what ads can and can’t air during those key events," he said. "So instead, what I believe we may see is more dynamic ad creatives, where you'll have a template ad and then dynamically modify part of the creative. For example, a tourism ad for Florida, where it then gives you the real time weather of Key West. We’ll see dynamic creatives before we see programmatic.”
But Holton did see hope for programmatic L-bar growth in non-tentpole events. “Like Twitch, like video podcasts, where you don’t have a traditional ad break, but rather non-linear squeeze back ads can be thrown in without interrupting the content. That’s where we’re first going to see the full scope of programmatic for squeezeback L-bar type ads.”
Mark Lee of LG Electronics echoed this, highlighting the complexity of rights management. While LG’s hardware can technically execute these overlays, navigating the legal landscape of who “owns” the screen—the manufacturer, the app, or the content owner—requires careful partnership.
“From LG’s perspective, we’re supporting these in different manners. A lot of virtual MVPD partners have pioneered these ways of inserting ads, especially dynamic ad insertion into linear programming. So multi-player switching, multi-period DASH. There are a lot of these new technologies that are enabling these experiences. As monetization goes, we need more customized, personalized, dynamic inserted ads.”
It was also interesting to hear Lee speak about other use cases for these formats. “Our subsidiary LG ads started enabling these programmatic L-bars to elevate advertising opportunities for clients. But we’re also now engaged in a lot of client-side activations of L-bars for T-commerce. We have an application called ShopTime that we enabled with shopping networks like QVC and HSN just to elevate how viewers can purchase right on the TV.”
The User Experience: Retention and Reality Checks
Despite the technical capability of solutions like CommScope’s VSE to layer data, betting odds, and multiple screens onto the viewer, Ben Grad of Riverloft Advisors, and a former SVP at Fubo TV, offered a critical reality check. The "lean-back" nature of TV must be respected.
"You need to be careful about pushing that in their face," Grad warned, noting that the majority of TV viewers like don’t want a data-heavy experience. “All interactive elements, whether multiview or betting, must be accretive to the viewing experience and not dilute it.” For him, that’s where personalized multiview really shines.
“One of the great things about multiview is that typically it’s either user-initiated or created by the network as an alternate channel. It provides consumer choice and flexibility for those that want to go deeper, but doesn’t negatively impact the average consumer."
Grad also commented on my top-of-the-webinar analysis of the business case for Multiview, given that it wasn’t a make-or-break criteria for me. "While it may not be the primary driver of acquisition, it is a powerful tool for retention. Things like Multiview for sure are important from a sports fan perspective, and will help drive engagement once customers are on the platform," he observed.
My Conclusion: Multiview, Mosaics & L-bars will Conquer TV
Two big takeaways? The #FutureOfTV.Live panel at Streaming Media Connect 2025 confirmed for me these things:
- Personalized Multiview is a must-have feature for the increasingly live-sports-heavy pay TV bundle, especially in an era of growth in categories like Prediction Markets.
- L-bars and lower-third ads are widely validated as exceptionally valuable in all viewing environments. However, executing that value in a programmatic CTV ad supply chain is challenging, and without more standardization, is still years away from becoming an at-scale success story for FAST.
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