There’s no doubting the appeal of live sports—for fans and advertisers alike. The growing abundance of platforms and channels, however, has fragmented audiences as well as the route to monetization for advertisers.
Even the Super Bowl, the biggest TV event of the year, offers advertisers an assortment of programmatic opportunities. The audience for this year’s game, for example, was spread across an array of traditional and CTV options, with nearly half of viewers opting to stream the action across a number of over-the-top options, according to data from AdMonsters. Tubi, a leading FAST platform, grabbed just under 19% of viewership.
This reflects the future of live sports—not just the Super Bowl. And as live sports continue to grow their TV audiences, they remain a big ticket item for publishers and platforms—as long as they stay tuned in to how to capitalize on them.
NCAA college basketball is no exception, especially heading into the month of March. On the women’s side, ESPN reported an average viewership of 280,000 across ESPN platforms during the 2024-25 season, up 3% from last year and the highest for ESPN since the 2008-09 season. On the men’s side, opening day of March Madness was the most-watched in the history of the tourney.
And just like the Super Bowl, increasing CTV usage1 means that college basketball fans are tuning in to watch their favorite teams play across an array of traditional and digital channels. In addition to CBS, TNT, TBS and truTV, games in this year’s tournament are being shown across an array of vMVPDs2 (e.g., FuboTV, YouTube TV) as well as select streaming video on-demand services.
This distribution of content across channels and platforms gives rightsholders the opportunity to maximize reach, but the ever-growing ecosystem of platforms and channels creates more inventory than traditional direct buy scenarios can accommodate. As a result, programmatic buying and selling is quickly becoming the norm in CTV.
The fragmented distribution notwithstanding, live sports remains confined to a defined schedule—a critical tool for brands and agencies looking to leverage programmatic for their vMVPD and streaming ad buys. That’s because it provides an enhanced level of program information than basic metadata will, including whether a sports program is a live event, a replay or a sports talk program (i.e., “shoulder” programming).
Here’s an example:
Alabama and BYU played against each other in the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA Tournament on March 27. The game aired on CBS, which was carried by an array vMVPDs. It was also streamed on Paramount+. The game aired at the same time as several other live sports events, including an MLB game, a tennis match in the Miami Open, a Big Ten women’s lacrosse game and an ACC college baseball game.
Given the amount of sports programming that aired at the same time as the Alabama-BYU game, including non-live sports programs, maximizing the value of any single program becomes critically dependent on descriptions about the available program inventory. Because individual program titles are not provided in programmatic advertising, the more description about the inventory, the better.
In this example, basic metadata that labels a program as “sports” is not going to differentiate it enough as premium content. Even denoting that a program is “live sports” isn’t enough in this scenario, given the range of other live sports events that also started at 7 pm ET on March 27.
But when buy- and sell-side platforms like Magnite and Pubmatic work with partners like Gracenote to leverage scheduling data to to organize and curate packages that include detailed schedule information, inclusive of signals like “Miami Open” or “March Madness,” much more granular information is available in the programmatic marketplace to heighten the transparency—a top challenge marketers face with CTV advertising—about available inventory. Partnerships like these also create data consistency with respect to the inventory available for special events like March Madness.
TV schedule data including event, program date, start time, genre and sub-type isn’t available in programmatic platforms, but it can be used to curate and pre-package inventory that includes significantly more granular information than would otherwise be available. Additionally, the use of “qualifiers” are particularly helpful in denoting things like live sports, team events, playoffs and women’s sports. This data can also be used to facilitate cross-publisher deals that provide buyers with the ability to scale their buys across channels and platforms providing incremental campaign reach.
TV availability data is particularly valuable with respect to programs featuring live sports or a series premiere for a popular TV drama. In the case of the Alabama-BYU game, program information includes important qualifiers that distinguish it from other programs, including other live sports events.
