Weighing the Societal Risks of AI in Digital Advertising

As AI continues to disrupt the industry, it's critical that we confront the issues it creates for digital advertising with honesty and integrity.

Beyond the Top 300: CTV’s Next Phase Calls for Discoverability

The next phase of CTV is not just about adding more demand. It's also about enabling that demand to find and transact on supply without friction.

Strategizing XR for Video

Now that technology giants Google, Samsung, Meta, Apple and Qualcomm have all thrown their hats in the XR ring, media companies are starting to consider how and when they should leverage XR. This means it's time for video providers to look much more seriously at developing an XR strategy.

Why Signal Quality Is Shaping the Future of Streaming Media Performance

Advertisers now work with a wide mix of signals, including contextual cues, viewing behaviour, and various forms of audience modelling layered across different systems. While this should, in theory, create a clearer picture, it often introduces the opposite. Signals begin to overlap, and in some cases contradict one another, which makes it harder to understand what is actually shaping performance.

Why Content Protection Must Evolve for IP and Cloud-Based Workflows

There are now more actors attempting to steal content than there are protecting it, shifting the balance of power. Content protection can no longer be confined to a single point in the chain; it must extend across the entire workflow, from ingest through to playback.

Agentic AI Is Reshaping Local Planning and Activation

The impact of agentic AI is a shift from managing campaigns to defining how they should operate. It is an opportunity to refine how local campaigns are planned and executed, and to unlock new levels of precision, efficiency, and performance in the years ahead.

Winning the World Cup Means Winning the Moments Around It

The World Cup's return to the U.S. will be defined by moments, whether it's a last-minute goal, a watch party with friends, or a casual fan tuning in for the first time. While the event brings global scale, its impact is deeply personal and local. For marketers, the opportunity isn't just to be part of the event, but to connect with how those moments unfold in people's lives.

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

Gaming is built as an always-on system designed to maximise session frequency, retention, and lifetime engagement. Live sport, on the other hand, is still optimised for scheduled viewing windows where engagement peaks during the match and drops off immediately once it's over. For streaming product leaders and sport 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.

Licence-Layer Security: The Missing Piece in OTT Content Protection

DRM has long been the foundation of OTT content protection — but it was never designed to defend against the way modern piracy actually works. Organized operations have shifted their focus to the licence layer, using compromised Content Decryption Modules and automated key extraction tools to decrypt and redistribute content at scale, all while DRM servers process the requests as legitimate. For Tier-1 platforms operating under strict studio licensing agreements and competing for high-value exclusive content, this gap carries real business consequences — from contractual penalties to weakened positioning in rights negotiations — and closing it requires a layer of protection that standard DRM simply doesn't provide.

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.

What does contextual AI look like at scale?

At Streaming Media Connect 2026, Tavant brought together a group of media and advertising leaders for an honest, wide-ranging conversation about what AI is actually doing for the industry today. What emerged was a clear pattern: the companies gaining the most from AI are not treating it as a feature layered onto existing systems—they are building core advertising operations around it.

The Subscriber Retention Funnel: Turning One-Time Viewers into Loyal Audiences

The streaming market has entered a new phase that comes with new challenges. The average US household now holds 3.8 subscriptions and is actively looking to simplify. Platforms that will win the next decade are not those with the largest catalogues, but those that focus on subscribers to make their platform feel indispensable.

How AI Agents Can Sweep Fragmentation, Frustration, and Fraud Out of CTV

By learning to recognise viewing behaviours that mirror a genuine television experience, agentic systems can distinguish between professionally produced, big-screen content and video that only fits the category with the most loose and generous definitions.

The 13% Problem: Why Identity Accuracy Is Advertising’s Blind Spot

Recent reporting from an independent third party found that using an IP address as the signal to target in a household-based environment like CTV is only 13-16% accurate. In other words, for every $1 of media investment aimed at a specific audience, about 85 cents is wasted right out of the gate… so is it really worth the premium?

Why Microdramas Are a Streaming Media Opportunity

Just because microdramas are being viewed on mobile devices doesn't mean that they're not a streaming media opportunity.

The Story-Centric Shift: Designing the Multi-Platform Newsroom for the Streaming Era

Linear broadcast still represents a significant source of revenue for many major media organisations. It can't simply be replaced. The challenge is to support both the real-time digital and scheduled linear TV models at once - delivering fast, platform-specific content for streaming and social platforms while continuing to serve traditional broadcast audiences.

Case Study: Option Media Builds Trust in Every Transfer

With Signiant, Option Media moves high volumes of media quickly and consistently, reducing transfer failures and eliminating the need to restart interrupted uploads. Signiant's alignment with TPN Gold Shield assessments and advanced access controls help Option Media meet studio-grade security requirements without slowing production. Branded, client-friendly portals make it easy for non-technical users to send and receive content, improving client experience.

The future of shoppable TV requires restraint

If the next chapter of CTV is going to deliver on both engagement and outcomes, it starts with a simple constraint: Respect the viewer first, then innovate inside that reality. 

The hidden cost of over-engineering broadcast stacks

Efforts to build a powerful broadcast stack often quietly evolve into something far less efficient due to over-engineering. The hidden cost of this complexity rarely shows up on a purchase order. It appears in integration timelines, operational friction, and long-term maintainability.

Finding the Viewer in a Fragmented TV World

With more streaming choices than ever, structural fragmentation has become the norm. The centre of gravity has shifted, and audience strategy carries more weight than inventory access alone. The brands that are winning precisely define who they need to reach and understand how those audiences engage across TV environments.