How To Make Money with Live Sports on Streaming with Scott Young, Co-Founder of Transmit

Tim Rowe 0:00

Welcome back to the State of Streaming podcast. I'm your host, Tim Rowe, and today we're catching up with Scott Young, co-founder and chief product officer at Transmit, a company that is truly reshaping the way we watch TV, especially live sports. And today's conversation we'll be learning about how streaming publishers are adding 20 to 30% incremental revenue without compromising the viewer experience, actually driving up to 4x ROAS for brands. We're going to talk about why the opportunity could be even bigger in subscription video on-demand environments at SPOD and how to do it without compromising the promise to add free viewing for those platforms. And we'll tie it all together in a pretty little bow with what 2026 has in store for live sports and streaming. We'll talk about the World Cup, we'll talk about the Olympics taking center stage. So if those are things that you're thinking about or want to learn more about, this is the episode for you. Enjoy. We'd love to learn a little bit more about the problem that transmit solves.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Yeah, where the problem starts is that the media industry is suffering. The entire economic model is uh changing faster than they could devise solutions for. And by they, I mean media owners, rights holders, streaming operators, broadcasters. And that's really because of a couple things. First and foremost, it's because it used to be really easy. We would sign up for cable, we would have a regional cable provider, and then they would share in that subscription revenue to each media operator or rights owner that had a channel with the cable operator. And that's very easy economics for the networks to kind of like look at when they're considering their media rights acquisition strategies, because they can just be like, all right, I know I'm getting, I can rely on this revenue month over month. It's very stable. And I know how I could even encourage more, more subscribers, more to sign up equals more revenue to my channel and network. Well, that's deteriorating. That reliable revenue stream is completely deteriorating. So they have to look towards other options. We feel that one of those options and the best options is how do we do better at advertising? So advertising can contribute to an enhanced and accelerated revenue stream for media rights holders and streaming operators. And I think that's absolutely necessary, especially when you look at what we are doing right now. And we're still just doing the same exact thing we've done in TV, which is long duration ad pod breaks. So they don't really have something they can fall back on for an incremental lift. We solve for that incremental lift.

Tim Rowe 2:54

That's interesting. I just started watching, I don't know if you've seen the show on Netflix about the Spotify origin story. And so many of the themes actually feel similar to the problems that transmit and others are working on solving, which is this monetization problem. Hey, the way that it was is not working. It's not making us money the way that it used to. We have to kind of reimagine this playbook a little bit. It's gonna look a little different, it might feel a little bit uncomfortable. So, what does that start to look like beyond the standard ad pod? How does transmit help publishers monetize content in other ways?

SPEAKER_00 3:32

Yeah. Well, I think when you look at the standard ad pod, you also begin to realize that it's not even working for advertisers as well. I mean, I think that it's also not going away. Like there's effective ways to utilize it, but it's finite. Like it's not going to grow, it's just going to be what it is. And advertisers are really starve for attention. And viewers really hate disruption. So you really need, so from a media rights holder perspective, you need to really need to balance your viewer experience with your monetization needs. So, yeah, what that looks like is we've developed the infrastructure that supports a really scalable way of aligning new ad opportunities into the content stream without disrupting the viewer experience. But the most important thing is allowing this to happen at scale with massive concurrency and also personalization. Because if ads aren't personalized, then viewers are even maybe they're not disrupted, they're able to watch ads alongside their content. It's still not resonating with them. So it's not as valuable to an advertiser. So that's what our technology solves, is able to integrate new premium ad experiences without disrupting the content and to align the ad experiences with context. So that looks like in the form of dynamic graphics like L bar creative squeeze back ads that run within the programming itself in the actual content stream outside of the traditional ad pod break. And each viewer that's watching simultaneously can see different messages. That's also, if you ever see the picture-in-picture squeeze back ad, where you can actually take video ad creative and integrate that into a background skin with uh also while alongside content playing while it's live, we do things like that as well. We even incorporate vertical video into uh the horizontal element to create more engaging ad experiences that can even enhance the experiences for viewers.

Tim Rowe 5:34

Very interesting. I was uh over the weekend watching something on YouTube with my son. It was like a live, live influencer boxing match, which was ridiculous in itself. But there was an ad that came on screen during the live broadcast, and there was some sort of YouTube. This is like a live in-stream ad, but it was it was a political ad. And it was like a terrible political ad. And it was so misaligned to this content experience, which is like this very funny. We're watching this influencer boxing match that's not very serious. It's my son and I. And then bam, this politician's really bad, doom and gloom. Uh, make sure to go vote. And it was so disruptive. So, how do you think through that? How do you think through like the user experience as we start to okay, we're gonna introduce more ads into an ad-supported viewing experience where we're already we we're we're open and willing to receive ads. We want them to be personalized. We like that they're relevant to the content, but how do we how do we think through the user experience? I'm sure this is something you've spent a lot of time thinking about, but how do we think about the user?

SPEAKER_00 6:42

Yeah, absolutely. So there's a lot of um considerations that go into that because one, you have to know what the viewer's watching, and then you have to be able to prompt the ad creative to adjust to that. So, what I mean by that is like, so we've basically mapped out every certain style of content. I mean, we've we've been doing this over the last 10 years. So we've gained a lot of learnings that we can put forth in our algorithms of how we determine the right moment for an ad to appear within the content. So, first it's about right moment. So, someone's watching NBA, when are the best moments? Well, we've identified lulls in action after, you know, there's a shooting foul occurs, or you know, certain fouls are called and we fine-tune that so we can signal also what's happening on screen. So this is a shooting foul moment, or a basket was just scored, or a slam dunk just happened. So not only have we aligned the viewer experience of like when these right moments are by sport, by program, but we also can in real time send a signal of what this moment is so the ad creative can adjust dynamically. So there could be elements of different types of ad creative messages for different types of moments on screen that also can fluctuate in price or value back to the advertiser decision.

Tim Rowe 8:01

That's a that's a great point, too. Just being able to price the inventory based on, hey, who's trying to reach who in that moment with which creative, what matches best. And obviously, there's a lot of moving parts to make that all work in a perfect world, but it does seem like this continues pushing the conversation back towards creative.

SPEAKER_00 8:21

Yeah, I think creative and context is the most important thing and the most important missing pieces that kind of plague the advertising industry. As digital advertising became an opportunity, all technologies immediately went for data, audience data. Let me find out exactly how to pinpoint my audience to eliminate message waste. There's a great platform for that now. So we have all these tools and all these sophisticated technologies to identify a consumer and target them. But what we lack is the template in which we engage them. So now, all right, we know someone's watching something, but they're not paying attention when my ad was served. Or I don't have the right tools to actually make this ad creative and engaging. So I think that that was that's been lost. And I think where technology really has to step up is to create a better template for advertising so audiences pay attention, so your consumer can pay attention to your ad, and then allow for like more of a conversational native element so you can communicate with them about what they're watching and what you're trying to get them to buy. So it's more personal.

Tim Rowe 9:26

You guys have clearly been at this for a while. What does success look like for the publisher, for maybe a specific content experience? Can you kind of paint a picture of what a win looks like for this?

SPEAKER_00 9:41

So what and what what we've seen for the publishers that adopt our software in their stack is they could experience over 20, it ranges from 20 to 30 percent lift on incremental revenue growth throughout their you know entire portfolio from their ad revenue. I mean, when we work with publishers that already, streamers that already do a ton of ad revenue, it's a really big lift. Um, and I think it could go even farther, and we can get into what that looks like, but that's on the revenue side. But then you have more of the performance-driven elements of like from the advertiser perspective, like is it is this working for them? And obviously, they're adopting these, you know, in-content ad experiences because it does. They see attention rates go up, all based off of third-party measurement standards that they're tracking and measuring their campaign's effectiveness. We've seen return on ad spin get driven up by four times, which is a really big lift. And obviously, one of the most important drivers behind advertising, because if no one's seeing it and your revenue's not growing as an advertiser, then you're not going to pay a premium for it. And that publishers like these types of formats because they drive a premium, because you get more of a one-to-one experience with an intended consumer. So, how do you buy it?

Tim Rowe 10:56

How do you find this sort of inventory? Is it is it direct through the publisher? Is it available programmatically?

SPEAKER_00 11:02

How do folks buy it? So I think that that's the best question because I think technology has existed for a long time to put a graphic on a screen. The challenge is how you make that graphic or whatever that in-content ad is, how you make that compatible with the way that advertisers buy ads today, track and measure. And they do that all from an ad server, all from a demand side platform. So we've designed this to not be a heavy lift or overly customized effort on the advertiser or buying platform. So, yes, there are certain ways that you can tap into this inventory programmatically. There's certain ways that you could create a really custom creative ad opportunity on a direct sold basis. But the bottom line is you can target this inventory just like you can target a mid-roll or pre-roll ad that exists online with all the same tools, measurement, and ad decisioning. So compatible with any industry standard ad servers. And we're actually one of the only, we are the only compatible server-side ad insertion partner that can facilitate this among Freewill and Google Ad Manager activated ad delivery. You know, we've been doing this for 10 years, like I said. So we've actually built our own, like we work with the publishers to create the inventory. We also work with ad agency holding companies and preferred partners to buy it. So we have a demand marketplace that operates this as well. So the publishers themselves can sell it programmatically or direct however they want, but we also have like our own programmatic marketplace that we allow advertisers to connect with across our entire network. So we've kind of proven it from both sides.

Tim Rowe 12:44

Where are some of the publishers where we were likely to have seen this already? Is this something that I probably like came in contact with?

SPEAKER_00 12:52

Sure. Yeah. We work with a large majority of the regional sports networks. You know, if you're watching a Yankees game, you're watching a Nets game, you're watching the Knicks, like you know, the list marquee list goes on and on. So streaming sports content. Also, we power over 250 fast channels, and that's continues to grow. So we're working across major OEMs to uh power this ad experience within the free ad supported streaming platforms that they like Video Plus LG channels, so we've definitely already seen it.

Tim Rowe 13:26

And you said there's a bigger picture. There's there's more opportunity beyond what we've already achieved, the 20 to 30 percent additional revenue growth, the great results for advertisers. There's more opportunity, you think. What does that mean? What does that look like?

SPEAKER_00 13:42

Yeah, I think you know, the the first point of adoption is usually if you just look at any broadcast network or streaming platform, they're gaining subscriptions, but they have a lesser tier, right? For this comes with ads, and then one that doesn't. So their first point of adoption for this is let's put this in the ad tier. And I think you gain a lot of value. That's a 20 to 30 percent incremental lift. But we've been working to deploy this with a select few uh direct and consumer applications that have a, you know, a no ads tier because this isn't like a break in action. You know, you're not taking the viewer away with a long duration ad pod break. So you can gain a lot of incremental value by delivering a better quality ad experience that's not annoying to the viewer with the higher pricing plan for a subscription. So I think it enhances it the value of like, you know, you you can even think of this as just a more native ad experience, and it doesn't have to fit into like the standard classic, I'm they're gonna disrupt you for two minutes every 30 minutes, you know, or it's a lot longer on some plot.

Tim Rowe 14:43

It feels more like an extension of the content then than it does an ad to your point that's disrupting this viewing experience. It's just it's maybe we'll call it an enhancement because obviously we like selling ads. That's very interesting. Very interesting. What's the timeline? Is that uh is that something that's already in testing? Is that something that's already in market?

SPEAKER_00 15:05

Yeah, I mean, it's something that we have uh right now. We're in market with a few on this, but we're launching in 2026 with some really large players who will be re-releasing this type of ad innovation on their no ads tier subscription plan.

Tim Rowe 15:21

Interesting. Well, hopefully folks are learning about it here first. And Scott, if they want to get in touch, where do they go? What's the best place to get in touch with you, to connect with you, learn more about transmit? Um, they could email me, Scott at transmit.live. Awesome. Before we let you go, I do want to talk about obviously 2026. You you just teased a little bit there. If we look forward to the World Cup, that was a big headline for transmit here in 2025. What's transmit's involvement with the World Cup? Why should we be excited about live sports and the opportunities going forward?

SPEAKER_00 15:56

Yeah, so we'll be um powering some major ad experiences in and around the World Cup, especially with our work in the uh FIFA streaming network. I think just 2026 is a major year for sports streaming in general. I mean, you're it's an Olympics year, it's a World Cup year in North America, so I think we'll just experience such massive volume of viewership from the North America market, unlike we've ever seen. And I think it'll be a major indicator of streaming's future growth potential. And I think we'll see some new and innovative ad experiences that we have teed up and around that content. And then I also think it's also a major year where we'll see the fast streaming space gain a lot of growth, not just from a viewership perspective. And I'm talking about the interface from the OEMs. I think they have such a major opportunity like Samsung LG, Visio, in their free streaming channels, because I think we'll continue to see a lot more and more pen poll live content be exposed through those channels and be available to viewers. And I think that we'll see a ton of ad innovation around that, especially because they have so much control over the entire interface and experience. And uh, we're working with a lot of them to do that. So I'm really excited about the growth in those sectors specifically.

Tim Rowe 17:17

That is interesting. And and actually, a guest we we just chatted with recently, we're talking about it's not just sports anymore, it's live anything. Live anything is the most premium opportunity. Can you give us maybe tease a little bit more detail around what some of those experiences might look like?

SPEAKER_00 17:37

Yeah, I mean, I think it's just a lot, it's a lot of um what we're talking about. I think it's more of just like the live sports, which is historically contained just within subscription walls or providers. I think we're seeing a trend of wider distribution across varying platforms. And I think the fast platforms are one that we're starting to see more and more live tenpole events from the regional sports networks, MLB games, NBA games, NHL games, even NFL to a certain extent, releasing live 10-pole sporting events, professional sporting events for free across those channels. And the main driver for that is ad revenue, ad revenue and discovery. And uh, we're powering a lot of those ad experiences.

Tim Rowe 18:24

It's a good theme. Hey, the game is changing, and we've got to find a way to continue to make money and ideally make more money. And I think this is obviously a great way to do that. So, Scott, thank you again for being here. Thank you for this great conversation. We look forward to 2026 and obviously having more dialogue just like this. Thanks so much. Thanks, Scott.