• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

Live sports have become a primary driver for connected TV (CTV) advertising, and one focus for unified ad platforms (UAPs).

Nielsen's ad-supported Gauge reported that streaming captured a record-high 46.6% share of ad-supported TV viewing during the first quarter of 2026, driven by live sports events like the Super Bowl and Winter Olympics.

Live sports programming is difficult to support. When a brand buys media for a live broadcast like a boxing match and the event ends early -- for example, in a first-round knockout of a wrestling match -- the brand does not lose its money, but instead loses the premium contextual audience it paid for.

On linear TV, an early knockout could trigger a back-end administrative issue for the network and the brand.

On CTV, the entire process is handled through software, depending on how the advertiser pays for the media and how the ad is delivered to the screen, and this is where artificial intelligence (AI) and agents can come in.

C15 Studio, part of C15 Media Networks, which holds the rights to manage and operate channels including the Formula 1 Channel and Yahoo Sports Network, has formed a partnership with unified ad platform Adte, a private, venture-backed enterprise founded in 2020 that has been expanding its premium sports packages through distribution partnerships with major networks.

The partnership allows Adte's brand and agency clients to expand advertising through a variety of packages -- especially live sports, which draws hundreds of millions of viewers.

“Live sports is an unforgiving medium,” Ori Nadler, co-founder of Adte, told MediaPost. “A live game starts and you have millions and millions of viewers. It's a good opportunity, but it can hit your service all at once.”

Adte's platform combines the features of a demand-side platform (DSP) and supply-side platform (SSP), collapsing both into one system built specifically for CTV. This is in contrast to traditional DSPs and SSPs, which act as separate sides of a divided transactional bridge, but all have a focus on performance.

Nadler said seller and buyer agents are coming to the company's platform based on the IAB Tech Lab Agentic Advertising Management Protocols (AAMP) to adapt existing programmatic frameworks, and AdCP, an open standard that provides an agent-native protocol specifically for large language model communications (LLM).

The creative product has also become a focus. Adte is working to develop an AI creative production division, an in-house service called AI Creative Lab run by creative directors.

Nadler said the technology -- expected sometime next year -- will allow brands to change TV creative weekly when AI is the production platform, and the AI engine will produce an ad in an hour rather than weeks or months. 

Adte’s partnership with C15 Studio comes on the heels of partnerships earlier this year with Paramount+ and Major League Baseball’s MLB TV streaming service. 

Developers at the company are also working on an agentic capability based on AI that would allow brands to use open-web signals living outside of the normal channels to better optimization and target ads. Nadler said these would be “signals outside of normal ad-tech.”

Adte’s business has grown 30% in the past year, Nadler said, while publishers and added channels have grown by about 50%. He attributes this to its advertisers and partners, but acknowledges that growth has come more from existing rather than new advertisers.