The rise of streaming TV has unlocked extraordinary opportunities for media buyers and streaming TV publishers. Yet live event programming—such as sports games, political debates, or awards shows—introduces distinct challenges that existing programmatic infrastructure struggles to manage. These hurdles stem from the unpredictable nature of live events and the unique technical demands of delivering ads in real time to millions of viewers. Through standardizing a way to communicate some key pieces of information, the foundation can be laid to ease some of the issues.
To address these challenges, IAB Tech Lab, in collaboration with stakeholders across the buy and sell side, is developing the Live Event Ad Playbook (LEAP): a set of proposals designed to standardize and optimize how the industry handles live event ad serving.
Why live event monetization falls short in programmatic
Live events are unparalleled in their ability to capture premium, highly engaged audiences. However, the unique nature of these events also creates significant pain points:
- Buyers struggle to find premium inventory, often missing opportunities to reach their desired audiences.
- Streaming publishers face inefficiencies, with many ad pods going unfilled or falling back to simulcast of the linear ad break.
- Viewers endure suboptimal experiences, such as repeated filler ads or blank screens, when ad delivery fails.
The result? Missed impressions, lost revenue, and a diminished viewer experience especially during moments that brands consider most valuable, like the opening ad break during a major game.
Current challenges with live event ad serving
These issues aren’t isolated. They are rooted in several structural challenges that affect nearly every layer of the ad tech stack during live programming:
1. Low predictability
Live events inherently resist precise forecasting. Unexpected surges in viewership or unplanned ad breaks can occur at any moment, like overtime periods in a sports game or when player injuries occur. This means that streaming media and ad-serving systems must have the ability to adapt to unannounced ad breaks and fluctuating viewer counts.
2. Surges in concurrent traffic
Unlike linear TV, where a single signal is broadcast, live streaming generates individual ad requests for each viewer. This concurrency can overwhelm infrastructure, leading to server timeouts and ad failures. Each stage of the supply chain— from publishers to DSPs — must manage these spikes within milliseconds.
3. Creative readiness
The high stakes of live events demand strict compliance and quality standards. However, not all creatives are being approved in time, and some are outright rejected, leaving brands unable to switch creatives or participate in live events. This exclusion represents a missed opportunity for impactful audience engagement.
4. Lack of industry standards
With no universal best practices, companies independently develop and test small-scale solutions, resulting in inefficiencies and fragmented progress. This lack of coordination increases the complexity of integration and limits the scalability of solutions. Establishing shared standards would streamline efforts and drive industry-wide innovation.
5. Transparency with live event content
Today, bid requests don’t clearly distinguish true live events—like sports games or award shows—from other livestreamed programming. The current livestream field offers only a binary signal and doesn’t differentiate reruns in a live feed from real-time event coverage or time-delayed premium content (for example, an Olympic event in Asia streaming a few hours later in the US). This makes it difficult for buyers to prioritize premium live inventory at the moment it matters most.
At the same time, streaming publishers lack a standardized way to communicate specific events or programs while respecting disclosure policies related to the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA).
Our proposed solutions
Index Exchange views the solutions to these challenges as requiring a a multi-pronged strategy, which has been proposed to the IAB Tech Lab. The framework aims to standardize key components of live ad delivery—visibility into viewership, concurrency scaling, and creative readiness—through new APIs, OpenRTB specification updates, and best practices.
Each component of this overall strategy requires significant cross-industry collaboration, and the order of operations is really important. As a group, we elected to tackle each component of the solution as they appear below, as each component builds on the previous component and creates additional value or efficiency.
Here’s a summary at the four core proposals that make up this strategy:
1. Enhanced data sharing with a near-real-time concurrent streams API
One of the most urgent needs during live events is real-time visibility into active audience size and distribution. Without this data, systems may scale too late—or not at all—resulting in timeouts and missed impressions.
We’ve developed the near-real-time concurrent streams API to address the issue. The API enables streaming publishers to share periodic snapshots of live concurrency data with authorized partners like SSPs, DSPs, and ad servers. This data includes:
- Total count of concurrent live streams
- Geographic breakdowns by SSAI versus client-side ad insertion (CSAI) delivery
- Event-level metadata like (content ID, scheduled time, and streaming region)
By tying this API to event identifiers shared across forecasting and transaction systems, all downstream partners can adjust infrastructure capacity and transaction strategies proactively minimizing queries per second (QPS) overload and maximizing monetization potential.
This API draft is expected to be available for Public Comment by the end of May, 2025.
2. Apply live content signals in the bid stream
To make real-time viewership data actionable, there must be consistent and privacy-conscious content identification within the bid stream, which requires complementary OpenRTB updates.
3. Manage bid request volume proactively
Pre-fetching ads for upcoming ad breaks—without knowing the exact timing—is a common tactic used today for large-scale live events. However, current approaches vary widely across the ecosystem: different logic is implemented depending on the supply path, leading to fragmented execution and limited predictability for downstream systems.
4. Streamline creative compatibility for live events
The fourth area of the framework addresses a recurring roadblock in live event monetization: creatives that are submitted too late or in the wrong format and thus can’t be approved and transcoded in time. When this happens, even high-value bids can be disqualified during a critical moment.
Benefits for streaming publishers
The Live Event Ad Playbook (LEAP) provides a scalable path to unlock the full potential of live inventory. By addressing known issues such as unpredictable audience size, concurrency spikes, and slow creative approvals, streaming publishers can improve fill rates, even in later ad breaks when current systems often falter.
Additionally, the proposal aims to enhance the viewer experience. Poor-quality ads, repeated ad breaks, or blank screens can undermine a broadcaster’s reputation. By ensuring high-quality and relevant ads, streaming publishers can keep audiences engaged and reinforce the value of live programming.
Advantages for DSPs and media buyers
On the buy side, DSPs stand to benefit from a more reliable and efficient system. Reduced traffic surges mean fewer timeouts and more effective access to premium inventory. By implementing bid queuing and time-shifting mechanisms, DSPs can manage the high volume of bid requests more effectively, avoiding massive QPS spikes during live events. This smoother handling of bid requests ensures that DSPs can still access and bid on premium inventory, even during periods of high concurrency.
Another critical advantage lies in pacing and frequency capping. Traditional bidding algorithms struggle to accommodate the fleeting opportunities of live events. The proposed framework’s real-time data sharing and volume management solutions address this challenge, ensuring optimal budget pacing and ad delivery throughout the program.
Industry collaboration is the key to progress
The success of the LEAP framework hinges on industry-wide collaboration. By uniting streaming publishers, DSPs, and technology providers, the digital advertising ecosystem can establish the standards necessary to unlock the full potential of live event advertising.
Are you ready to shape the future of Programmatic Live Events? Explore our first proposal—the near-real-time concurrent streams API—and consider joining the biweekly LEAP working group to help define the rest of the playbook.
Catherine Cho
Lead Product Manager
Index Exchange