During an "AI Meets Adtech" panel at Streaming Media 2025 in Santa Monica in October, I did my best to stir things up with a group of industry thought leaders that included Google's Inderpreet Sandhu, Tavant's Filiz Bahmanpour, FOX's Amit Shetty, IAB Tech Lab's Shailley Singh, and former Disney tech ops expert Sarge Sargent.
31 Oct 2025
One of the overarching themes of Streaming Media 2025, which took place October 6-8 in Santa Monica, Calif., was the rise of the creator economy. Discussions centered around the changing economics of content creation, delivery, distribution, and curation (with AI playing an ever-larger role in leveling the playing field to varying degrees at all stages); evolving business models for creators looking to leverage and grow their brands and survive and thrive; and the ongoing, unignorable convergence of creator channels and "traditional" streaming platforms. The last topic seems like a particularly noteworthy sign of the times—how many conversations carried on just down the 405 in Huntington Beach in the heyday of Streaming Media West concerned the convergence (or divergence) of streaming upstarts and traditional linear broadcast?
15 Dec 2025
IAB Tech Lab has recently released some new standards for CTV advertising, known as the Ad Format Hero Initiative. The organization asked and received more than 100 CTV ad format descriptions/concepts from the industry on classifying new formats. Next up, they ran an industry survey (completed 16 April 2025) to determine what should be prioritized. The Ad Format Hero Task Force selected eight formats based on the survey results. The idea is to create standards so that sensibly, engineering and operations teams don't have to reinvent the wheel every time they want to insert the right creative.
15 Jul 2025
At NAB 2025 I set out in search of one irrefutable, real-world example of true sports streaming personalization, an innovative and unique experience that might present a mass-media live sporting event on my screen as it appears on no one else's. I found a contender at the Qvest Engage booth.
15 Apr 2025