CTV

YouTube is making a behind-the-scenes effort to allow more advertisers to buy ads on YouTube Shorts – and only on Shorts.

On Thursday, OpenX announced a twofold initiative called TV+, which reserves the CTV label for what the company deems premium inventory while booting resellers from the supply pool.

Transparency is making its way into CTV bid requests, including supply source, content genre and, increasingly, show-level transparency. According to Rob Hazan, senior director of streaming TV product at Index Exchange, the right amount of transparency could make the open exchange a viable place for CTV ad budgets.

Disney+ added nearly 7 million subscribers last quarter, and, of those, about 2 million new sign-ups were for the streamer’s year-old ad-supported tier. Currently, Disney+ with ads has 5.2 million subscribers.

Warner Bros. Discovery continues to lose subscribers to a lack of original content (for which it blames the Hollywood actors’ strike). But streaming advertising revenue, which is up 29% YOY, represents a glimmer of hope.

FreeWheel unveiled a sell-side product called Audience Manager to help CTV programmers tie granular audience segments to their inventory at the speed of programmatic advertising.

Paramount is regaining some footing after a less-than-impressive Q2, thanks to a boost in streaming ad revenue and fresh subscriber growth.

HP is using The Trade Desk’s UID2 product to improve targeting for CTV buys in a way that passes the privacy sniff test.

TVision and Playground XYZ announced a partnership to measure attention on YouTube’s CTV app and fill in some data blanks for advertisers.

Roku is starting to bounce back from a slump in ad sales growth thanks to new ad inventory, more programmatic availability and improving economic conditions.

Amazon is expanding Fire TV home screen inventory to more marketers and launching a new ad unit within search results on Fire TVs.

Netflix revealed that its ad-supported offering now reaches 15 million monthly active users globally, and shared more details about new and upcoming ad formats.

Paramount unveiled a new ad product called Conduit, a direct integration layer between SSPs and EyeQ, Paramount’s CTV ad selling platform that aggregates Paramount+ and Pluto TV inventory.

TV industry vets convened at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in New York City last week to discuss the streaming industry’s maturation.

More advanced targeting on CTV requires exponentially more data than demo-based targeting, but ensuring all that data is accurate – with consistency across linear and streaming – is a big challenge.

Netflix’s ad-supported tier is finally gaining some traction, in part because of anti-account sharing tactics. Now, the streaming giant needs to focus on the features that advertisers are demanding.

When the MRC revoked its seal of approval for Nielsen’s TV ratings in 2021, it spurred a hunt for alternatives. Now, media and tech companies are debating whether MRC accreditation is even necessary.

Innovid added a new machine learning feature to its measurement product that automatically optimizes CTV campaigns based on how they’re performing.

MAGNA and Roku released a joint study to give buyers some advice about how to approach frequency capping in streaming – including when to dial it down and when to turn it up.

On Wednesday, iSpot acquired 605, a TV measurement and attribution company that brings iSpot’s US household footprint to 82.7 million.

CTV advertisers are enamored of programmatic because of its digital-like ad targeting. But programmatic CTV is far from perfect and rife with fragmentation.

State privacy laws could make it a lot harder for advertisers to use IP addresses – a foundational signal for CTV ad targeting and attribution for well over a decade.