‘Broadcasters and streaming providers are under growing pressure to bridge the gap between linear and digital operations’

Since the beginning of commercial television, advertising has been a key part of broadcasting. Over the years, the technology for inserting ads into programs has developed to the point where there is now a whole technological subsection dedicated to it. Ad tech encompasses not only scheduling and playing commercials but also directing them to their correct destinations on the wide variety of platforms and devices now in use, increasingly with a high degree of personalization.

The growth of the streaming sector and the corresponding increase in the adoption of connected televisions (CTVs) have added to the reach and complexity of ad tech. Among trends identified by Allan Nicholson, senior director of advertising solutions and strategy at Harmonic, is the move by some broadcasters to enable programmatic buy-in—also known as programmatic advertising, using automated, data-driven techniques for buying and selling ad slots—on linear broadcast platforms.

“Some of them are also the broadcasters that are making the transition to become more streaming-focused and they’re adopting streaming ad tech for personalization,“ he said. “The other trend we're seeing is broadcasters enabling service providers to start monetizing services using DAI [dynamic ad insertion]. The way to think of this is as a linear to programmatic [application] for monetization, as opposed to the programmatic to linear trend, which enables linear broadcast.