SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – The on-demand TV industry has leaned heavily toward streaming and programmatic ad trading.

But the next big area to light-up could be live streaming TV.

Sean Buckley, chief revenue officer at sell-side platform Magnite, explains the evolution of the business so far, and what could be coming next in this interview with Jon Watts, editorial director of Beet.TV Events, at Beet Retreat San Juan.

Live for tomorrow

Asked about the live opportunity by Beet.TV Events editorial director Jon Watts, Buckley said: “There’s a key place for programmatic in that, but it looks a lot different.

“When you’re dealing with high-concurrency live events where everyone’s going to a commercial break at the same time, if you just sort of throw that over to the buy side – (as) I think in many cases we’ve all experienced – that introduces challenges. It doesn’t automatically monetize well.

“So, what are capabilities that we can build to help make it more digestible for the buy side so that media owners can better monetize those environments? Things like spreading out ad requests by milliseconds as we send them out – capabilities like that can make a huge difference.”

Exploding streaming

Buckley is thinking about the next step to live at a time when streaming TV is exploding.

Magnite recentl released a survey of US and Canada TV-viewing adults showing:

  • 81% watch streaming TV, making it the most popular vehicle.
  • That falls to 48% and 30% for paid traditional and broadcast TV, respectively.
  • 87% are looking to add an ad-supported streaming service in 2023.
  • Binge consumption is only marginally less common among viewers of ad-supported services.

TV opportunity

Buckley spotlighted his takeaways from the research.

“Of those who are only watching traditional TV right now, half plan to start streaming at some point this year,” he said.

“Nine out of 10 streamers are watching ad-supported content in some way. And there’s even a growing cohort of streamers who are only watching ad-supported content.

“Consumers are definitely rethinking their subscription bundles. Forty-nine percent did say that they’re likely to either cancel or downgrade some component of their paid subscriptions this year.”

Coming together

Magnite is an advertising technology company that provides a range of solutions to help digital publishers and advertisers buy and sell advertising space.

It recently announced it merged technology from its Magnite CTV and SpotX platforms into a single supply-side platform (SSP), Magnite Streaming, aiming to help media owners maximize video across live, VOD, CTV, OTT and addressable linear.

“It was over a year’s worth of work, bringing together the best of what Magnite and SpotX had in the CTV space,” Buckley says.

“It was really amazing to just bring the teams together, share knowledge. We spent a lot of time with our customers, really understanding what they were looking for, what they liked, what they didn’t like so much to call out.”

How Magnite Streaming unlocks the power, performance and precision of streaming ads

You’re watching coverage of Beet Retreat San Juan 2023, presented by LiveRamp, Madhive, Magnite, Paramount, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions and VideoAmp. For more videos from the Beet Retreat, please visit this page.

By Robert Andrews on @robertandrews