Future of TV Briefing: Ad tech’s pod bidding push moves CTV toward advancing the live sports ad model in 2026

Mark your calendars for Aug. 31. That’s the target date for streaming ad tech’s next step toward realizing its promise of evolving the traditional TV ad model.

Why Aug. 31? Because that’s when The Trade Desk expects to have transitioned the demand-side platform’s entire publisher supply path to support pod bidding, a newish standard for programmatically selling multi-ad commercial breaks, or ad pods (like pea pods), according to Rob Hazan, gm of product management at The Trade Desk. 

“We’d like to receive all long-form video ad break signals to us via pods,” Hazan said.

I say newish because the pod bidding standard was actually introduced in 2022. Four years later, major players across the programmatic supply chain — including supply-side platform Index Exchange and Comcast-owned publisher ad server FreeWheel — have begun to support it. And now the puzzle pieces on the demand side are being put in place with The Trade Desk and StackAdapt being among the DSPs adding support.

“2026 is going to be a big year for our demand-side partners in rolling out podding. And then we’ll have an end-to-end podded request from the publisher down to the buyer,” said James Wilhite, vp of product at Index Exchange.

“If we’re doing it right, the thing that a buyer should get access to is a more efficient supply path or better chances to compete, and the thing that a seller is going to have access to is more technical efficiency and more demand density,” said David Dworn, head of product at FreeWheel.

Pod bidding’s promise is to let publishers maximize revenue by enabling advertisers to cherry-pick placements. Instead of selling the individual ad slots as generic placements, a publisher would be able to signal its position in a pod and price it accordingly. Then advertisers prizing the awareness boost of being first or last ad in a pod could pay up for the position.

Pod bidding’s prep period

Before that promise can become reality though, pod bidding needs to go through the bridge period it’s currently in. 

See, pod bidding isn’t so simple as earmarking the position of ad slots in a pod. You also have to take into account the composition of a given pod. For example, a 2-minute-long ad pod could consist of four, 30-second ad slots or eight, 15-second ad slots or two, 60-second ad slots or two, 30-second ad slots plus two, 15-second ad slots plus five, 6-second ad slots. You get the gist. There are a lot of ways an ad pod can be broken up, and right now the focus is on getting the infrastructure and systems in place to handle that efficiently.

“It’s a really different model than every bidder was trained on. They were all trained on the slot-by-slot version of it,” said Dworn.

Under the new “dynamic pod” model, a publisher would send out a bid request signaling that it has an ad pod available that contains two minutes’ worth of ads (or whatever pod duration). That bid request makes its way through the publisher ad server like FreeWheel to supply-side platforms like Index Exchange and eventually to DSPs like The Trade Desk. The DSPs then sends back a response containing an advertiser’s bid and the duration of the advertiser’s ad. The SSPs receiving this response can then deduplicate the bids before sending them back to the publisher ad server. And then the publisher ad server compiles the various bids and figures out which to stitch into the 2-minute pod based on factors like the corresponding ad’s duration and the bid’s proposed pricing.

The DSP “would give you back an OpenRTB response with all the details that they would normally send but in a single response. So single call all the way down, single call all the way back up,” said Wilhite.

“It’s the first time in [real-time bidding] we’re going from an atomic opportunity, which is the individual ad, to a form of bundling for efficiency,” said Mike O’Sullivan, vp of product at The Trade Desk.

The publisher indicates the pod’s overall duration as a way to minimize the number of bid requests and, by extension, the risks of bid duplication and a single advertiser securing multiple slots in a pod to the annoyance of audiences. The alternative would be each slot in a pod spawning separate bid requests sent to each SSP, which in turn multiply in separate bid requests sent to each DSP.

“The biggest thing that we’ve seen is, when we move to the pod model, if we do it right, it can radically reduce the volume of bid requests because you don’t have to break it apart into your slot anymore. You can send one request for the full pod or the full opportunity. And so that just becomes much more efficient from a traffic management perspective and that means an advertiser’s metrics are going to go up. They’ll win more often, they’ll compete more effectively because it’s not the scattered bid request environment that it was before,” said Dworn.

Pod bidding’s big potential

That streamlining is important for all the regular reasons that the programmatic supply chain gets criticized for its inefficiencies. But those inefficiencies stand to multiply exponentially as major live sporting events are streamed and their ad inventory gets sold programmatically.

“If you imagine at an ad break 12 bid requests going out for 10 million [concurrent viewers], the multiplication gets crazy. So that’s really how they’re benefitting from the pod is that now we can do things like let them compete in the ad break for 10 million people watching an event because we have an efficient method for expressing it,” said Hazan.

But wait, what about the promise of advertisers being able to cherry-pick specific placements in an ad pod? That “structured pod” model is still coming. But dynamic podding is a necessary intermediary step to account for the potential downsides of structured pods: Advertisers only bidding for the first and last slots, leaving publishers with unfilled inventory.

What the dynamic pod model enables is a safety net for streaming ad sellers to ensure the full pod gets filled. For example, they will be able to send out separate bid requests for the first and last slots in a pod and then bundle the middle slots into a single dynamic pod bid request. And having that safety net in place can be key to getting publishers on board.

“With dynamic pods, it becomes a little bit easier to manage in general. Because with structured pods, you still have a bunch of slots that you need to decide what to do with,” said Wilhite. He added, “the simplicity of it all — both the infrastructure costs and the transparency of what you’re bidding on is huge for CTV. It’s what makes it look a lot more like linear television.”

What we’ve heard

“They need the pipes.”

— Anonymous source on Meta’s potential push into the CTV ad market

Numbers to know

46 million: Number of paid subscribers that Peacock had at the end of the first quarter of 2026.

$432 million: How much money Peacock lost in Q1 2026.

$5: How much brands are paying per 1,000 views for people to edit and post clips from their videos.

1: Number of weeks it took to produce an upcoming 3-episode Amazon Prime Video series that uses generative AI tools.

>$550 million: How much Warner Bros. Discovery David Zaslav will receive in total compensation for securing the sale to Paramount.

What we’ve covered

Meta and Pinterest showcase CTV possibilities at ad tech’s Miami jamboree:

• Across the industry, large platforms are converging on a similar strategy — extending performance advertising capabilities, long honed in mobile and social environments, into CTV.
• The aim is to unlock a new pool of demand by making television inventory more accessible, measurable, and, crucially, usable for the long tail of advertisers that have historically been priced out or operationally excluded.

Read more about Meta’s and Pinterest’s CTV moves here.

How Netflix is rewriting the streaming ad playbook:

• Netflix’s ad business is starting to look less like an experiment and more like a serious contender for ad budgets.
• The streaming giant is striking deals via new upfront structures, expanding its ad tech and rolling out unique content opportunities.

Listen to the latest Digiday Podcast episode here here.

Adobe relies on Firefly to win over creators:

• Adobe wants Firefly to do for AI-native creators what Photoshop did for a generation of ad creatives — become the tool they can’t work without.
• The company launched a campaign featuring YouTubers like Kinigra Deon and Airrack showing off how they use Firefly in their creative processes.

Read more about Adobe’s creator push here.

Meta eyes CTV expansion to fuel its next wave of ad growth:

• Meta has held a series of exploratory meetings since early 2025 with supply-side players as well as TV manufacturers and publishers, to assess how it could access CTV inventory at scale.
• Meta is likely probing a way to extend its advertising demand into third-party CTV inventory.

Read more about Meta’s CTV ambitions here.

Agencies turn creators into test labs for campaigns and product innovation:

• Horizon and clients like SharkNinja are starting to treat creators as an always-on signal layer: interpreting audience behavior, pressure-testing ideas, and informing creative direction before anything goes to market.
• Horizon Media’s Blue Hour Studios is working with advertisers to pressure-test and adapt campaigns on the fly, using creators in the beginning stages — even letting them have a say sometimes in product development as well as campaign development.

Read more about agencies’ creator test labs here.

Pinterest debuts audience extension offering on CTV:

• Pinterest announced that advertisers can purchase the social platform’s audiences on third-party CTV properties, a facility made possible by its $300 billion-plus purchase of tvScientific
• Pinterest executives told Digiday advertisers can target audience segments using both deterministic, i.e., by employing a user ID, and probabilistic means, i.e., by using data modeling.

Read more about Pinterest’s CTV push here.

What we’re reading

FCC’s ABC license review:

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission may trigger an early review of Disney-owned ABC’s broadcast licenses as a means of putting political pressure on the network, according to Semafor.

NFL’s FCC charm offensive:

The league met with the regulator earlier this month to defend the NFL’s TV-and-streaming rights strategy amid an FCC probe of that strategy, according to The Wall Street Journal.

MrBeast’s harassment lawsuit:

A former Beast Industries executive is suing MrBeast’s company over alleged sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination and wrongful termination after she returned from maternity leave, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Netflix’s dynamic ad options:

Netflix’s option to dynamically insert ads in live programming, including next year’s Women’s World Cup, is garnering interest from advertisers, according to Marketing Brew.

Streaming’s upfront takeover:

Upfront ad dollars are continuing to migrate from traditional TV to streaming and programmatic, with money earmarked for traditional TV declining for the past three upfront cycles, according to Variety.