Streaming's Future: Guarantee It or I'm Not Buying

At the end of the day, brands want to know their media investments are working. Not just the number of impressions served, but that those impressions drove the outcomes they care about. That requires the ability to plan, buy, optimise, and measure across publishers. When those capabilities exist, the industry can deliver what clients are demanding and guarantee it.

What the FIFA World Cup tells us about reaching sports audiences today

The World Cup will show that scale today is not built in one place: It's built through a 360-degree approach to fan engagement that connects live moments, always-on content, and measurable commercial outcomes.

Advertisers are missing the top World Cup opportunities

Live World Cup inventory commands a premium for good reason. It delivers scale, emotion, and cultural visibility. But cultural relevance does not automatically equal performance. As CPMs climb and frequency compresses inside those high-demand windows, measurement becomes more complex and optimisation more limited.

Trillions of signals and billions of people: how systems score goals

Whoever your target audience is, and whichever signals best predict their conversion likelihood, marketers must seriously consider and account for the 2026 FIFA World Cup in their strategies this summer. FIFA estimated that over six billion people will engage with this year's tournament — the largest live audience in sport history, fragmented across linear, streaming, broadcaster apps, and phones. There's a high likelihood that a significant portion of your audience will be watching. The question is: can you reach them cost effectively? Streaming CPMs could rise sharply as demand concentrates around the tournament.

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.

Tackling Last-Mile Ad Compliance in Streaming

Streaming runs at a scale and speed where errors often appear just as the ad reaches a viewer, making the "last mile" the most vulnerable stage for both compliance and revenue. Understanding and addressing these last-mile challenges is critical for any brand, agency, or platform looking to maximise the value of streaming advertising.

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.