Join us at the Digiday Media Buying Summit from March 12-14 in Nashville

This article is a WTF explainer, in which we break down media and marketing’s most confusing terms. More from the series →
Streaming advertisers got an early Christmas gift this year when IAB Tech Lab released OpenRTB 2.6. The updated protocol for programmatic advertising included support for “pod bidding.”
Pod bidding allows advertisers to bid on specific ad slots within a multi-ad break, or pod — an option that has been available to traditional TV advertisers for, well, ever. OpenRTB 2.6 also added support for dynamic pods, which allow streaming services to recalculate the number of ads in a pod on the fly in order to accommodate more advertisers without extending the length of an ad break.
For a fuller breakdown of pod bidding, check out the video below.
More in Future of TV

Future of TV Briefing: A Q&A with Roku’s Sarah Harms about streaming ad measurement
This week’s Future of TV Briefing features an interview with Roku’s vp of ad marketing and measurement Sarah Harms about the streaming ad measurement landscape.

Future of TV Briefing: A Super Bowl streaming post-mortem with Tubi’s Nicole Parlapiano
This week’s Future of TV Briefing features an interview with Tubi CMO Nicole Parlapiano about the Fox-owned free, ad-supported streamer’s Super Bowl broadcast.

Future of TV Briefing: Separating signal from noise when it comes to CTV advertising’s content signal complaints
This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how noisy content signals are confounding CTV’s contextual advertising opportunity and what makes the situation even more confounding.