It’s that time of year again. You’re finalizing the 2026 roadmap, and you need to make sure you’re up to date with the changes released by the Programmatic Supply Chain Working Group in 2025.
The 2025 releases were aimed right at the friction in CTV—and they delivered in spades.
A Common Language for Content supporting CTV with gTax
CTV monetization through programmatic pipes faced a massive challenge with communicating the genre of the program being watched. The existing free-text genre fields mean every seller uses their own naming conventions. That, in turn, means that DSPs have a hard time programmatically targeting, reporting, and forecasting because “Drama” at one publisher might be “Dramatic Series” at another. So in January 2025, IAB Tech Lab released a taxonomy update targeting genres.
Content Taxonomy 3.1 offers nearly three times as many categories as the deprecated Content Taxonomy 1.0, with specialized support for CTV genres through a curated subset designed specifically for streaming content.
If you’re still using Content Taxonomy 1.0, you’re actively putting revenue at risk. Content Taxonomy 3.1 provides contemporary robustness with more flexibility, granularity, and coverage for describing content. More importantly, it decouples what content is “about” from how it’s presented through the use of vectors—meaning you can describe a social media post about Disney World as both “Family Travel” AND “Social” content type.
Once you have upgraded (and we also provided a complete mapping to make it easier), you should then add gtax and genre to Object:Content in OpenRTB 2.6x for your Bid Requests so that your buyers can evaluate the value of your inventory correctly. If you want to participate in the future of contextual targeting and programmatic CTV, upgrading is mandatory. Your competitors are already there.
Privacy-Safe Content Intelligence with Extended Content Identifiers
Building on the Taxonomy release, Extended Content Identifiers in OpenRTB 2.6x also address the need for more intelligence about the content being viewed that helps grow CTV revenue. ECIDs provide a framework for richer communication about media without requiring publishers to share program names in plain text with DSPs, which many publishers are understandably reluctant to do.
Linear TV’s superpower was letting advertisers choose the exact shows adjacent to their creative, but programmatic streaming has lacked the granular content signals that make premium inventory truly valuable. ECIDs solve this elegantly. Content Data Platforms ingest video content metadata from publishers and assign unique IDs for each piece of content. In the bid request, publishers pass these IDs (not show titles), and DSPs can request classifications from contextual vendors who have arrangements with those Content Data Platforms. And ECIDs work within the existing Content object of OpenRTB 2.6, making integration straightforward.
By extending OpenRTB to support standardized content attributes such as genre, format, and language, buyers gain deeper insights when making programmatic buying decisions. This is especially critical as addressability becomes more challenging—content context becomes your differentiator and a critical component of quality and brand suitability which drives engagement and revenue.
Sidecar APIs that power Live Event Scale
They are not part of the core OpenRTB spec, but 2025 saw the introduction of the concept of “sidecar APIs” that ride alongside the core spec that are specifically designed to handle asynchronous activity that will impact Bid Request and Response, and help manage the QPS during periods of demand. These APIs are primarily targeted to supporting the CTV programmatic ecosystem, where the concurrent requests that occur during high profile live events create challenges for Buyer, Seller, and Ad Tech.
Real-Time API-driven Viewership Intelligence
The first deliverable from the Live Event Ad Playbook (LEAP) initiative, was the Concurrent Streams API. This API provides real-time insights into how many devices are streaming a piece of content, allowing publishers to send powerful signals to ad systems to help them scale up their infrastructure. This is especially important since live events can create a “tsunami of supply” problem.
These events are high value inventory but these spikes in demand, without prior notification leave everyone missing out. Publishers leave revenue on the table, and buyers lose the opportunity to connect with consumers in high engagement moments.
The API enables faster ad decisions and reduces the risk of missed ad breaks by providing the transparency needed to handle high-stakes moments. Publishers (or their SSAI partners) implement an endpoint that ad tech entities can query programmatically. The response includes concurrent viewer counts broken down by stream type, and region.
Plan for the Unpredictable with the Forecasting API
Coming in early 2026, the Forecasting API will provide information about upcoming events which enables more effective longer-term planning for the moments when the Concurrent Streams API will be needed.
Live events are inherently volatile, but they’re not completely unpredictable. Historical data, promotional campaigns, and competitive scheduling all influence expected viewership. The problem is this intelligence lives in silos, and with the shift to streaming, publishers have lost the decades of linear TV historical data that powered network upfronts. The Forecasting API helps rebuild that planning capability for the streaming era.
Pre-event forecasting enables audience planning while terms agreements create deal structures, with real-time concurrent streams providing device counts during events. This leads to the 3rd API you should be implementing – the Deals API.
Ending the Deal ID Tower of Babel
Here’s the painful reality: Two-thirds of deals are configured with the desired supply, yet deliver no or very little revenue. Why? Because deal management today is a mess of spreadsheets, inconsistent interfaces, manual data entry, and incompatible naming conventions.
The Deals API specification, in Public Comment until January 31st, 2026, establishes a standardized framework for transmitting deal metadata between advertising systems, turning a mess of different codes into a consistent process. This eliminates manual entry across the many different systems most buyers and sellers are using, reducing deal setup time from hours to minutes with far fewer errors along the way. Now you can have confidence that the deals will deliver if they were the right deals in the first place.
Not only that, but the API provides transparency into who sold the deal, who packaged it, AND who curated it—critical for understanding inventory quality and economics. Thanks to a new Object: Curation, which provides the foundation for industry-first standardization on how curated deals are described and transacted.
The working group analyzed existing APIs across the industry to ensure backwards compatibility—you’re mapping fields, not rebuilding systems. So, as a handy bonus, if you already have a Deal API, every field in this standardized API either already exists in a way that does not conflict, or are net new.
Better Together
As with so many IAB Tech Lab Standards, the magic they create only happens when you implement them together in a system, not in isolation. 2025’s releases into the programmatic supply chain for CTV are no different.
- Planning Phase: Use Content Taxonomy 3.1 genres and the Forecasting API to plan which live events and content types to prioritize.
- Deal Setup: Use the Deals API to structure and sync curated packages .
- Real-Time Execution: During the event, Concurrent Streams API informs pacing and delivery decisions, while ECIDs ensure brand-suitable content adjacency.
- Reporting & Optimization: Standardized genres enable accurate cross-platform reporting and forecasting for future campaigns.
These 2025 standards aren’t nice-to-haves—they’re the foundation for programmatic CTV’s next phase. As streaming dominates viewership and live events drive premium inventory, the companies that implement these standards will have decisive advantages in monetization and operational efficiency, buyer satisfaction, and improved competitive positioning.
If you have additional ideas for things that will help optimize your usage of OpenRTB, then you need to join the working group and submit a proposal. Your idea could be featured here next year!
Barnaby Edwards
Sr Director, Product Marketing
IAB Tech Lab