Every ad break on your channel, filled from a competitive auction.
Sky Boosts monetizes connected TV applications and FAST channels with server-side ad insertion: advertising is stitched directly into the stream, breaks are structured as pods with competitive separation and frequency control, and every slot is filled by the same unified auction that serves our mobile supply. The viewer experience stays broadcast-smooth, with no stall at the break, and the transparency standards buyers expect on the open web, app-ads.txt, sellers.json, supply chain objects, apply to your TV inventory unchanged.
Built for streaming on the biggest screen.
Connected TV is where broadcast-grade viewing habits meet programmatic-grade buying. The product exists to serve both sides of that: viewers get breaks that look and behave like television, with no ad-blocker loss, while your inventory is exposed to open auction demand, private marketplaces and guaranteed deals through a single decisioning layer. Whether you operate one flagship OTT app or a portfolio of FAST channels, the same pod rules, separation policies and reporting apply across every stream.
Illustrative CTV delivery · ads stitched server-side
Advertising becomes part of the stream itself.
Server-side ad insertion builds advertising into the content manifest before the player ever sees it. The player renders one continuous stream, content and ads together, which is why major streaming services work this way, and why the viewing experience and the measured delivery both improve at the same time.
No client buffer
The transition into an ad break happens inside the stream, so there is no spinner, no player handoff and no resolution drop at the moment that matters most. Viewers experience breaks the way they experience broadcast: the picture simply continues. Sessions survive ad breaks that would otherwise send players into rebuffer loops and viewers elsewhere.
TV-like breaks
Breaks behave like broadcast pods: fixed slot counts, ordered creatives, and an unbroken return to content. Pod structure is declared up front in your VMAP plan, so ad load is fixed at scheduling time, before the stream ever runs. The result is an experience television audiences already understand and accept.
Delivery that survives
Because advertising is part of the manifest, delivery does not depend on client-side ad callouts that blockers and hardened players strip out. What your reporting records is what was actually played in the stream. For FAST channel operators, that difference shows up directly in fill and in what buyers end up paying for.
In practice the flow reads left to right. Your packaging or origin produces the content manifest; the VMAP plan declares where breaks fall and how long they run; the stitcher requests fill for each slot from the auction; and the winning creatives are spliced in and delivered as one stream. Beacons for start, quartile and completion events are fired and forwarded server-side, so measurement survives even though nothing executes in the player. Every step writes to the same impression-level log the rest of the platform reports from.
Breaks designed like broadcast, priced like programmatic.
A pod is a scheduled break with a defined duration and slot count, and it is the unit your revenue is actually built on. Sky Boosts treats pods as first-class objects: structure, pricing and policy all attach at the pod level.
Pod structure
PoddingAds are grouped into breaks of defined duration and slot count, matching the cadence of your content, a two-slot break in a fast-moving clip show, a longer pod in a film. Position inside a pod carries value: first-in-pod reaches the full audience before anyone can disengage, while later slots reach retained viewers and are priced accordingly. The auction prices each slot on its own merits, and pod rules are enforced on every break.
Separation and frequency
PolicyCompetitive separation keeps rival advertisers out of the same break, so an automotive brand never follows its closest competitor into your viewers' living room. Frequency control limits how often one campaign reaches the same household, within a pod, across pods in a session, and across the day. Both policies are configured per channel and enforced by the platform during pod assembly, before the manifest is stitched.
Direct and programmatic buyers meet in one auction.
CTV selling has historically meant choosing between direct sales tools and programmatic pipes. The platform collapses that choice: every demand source able to bid on a slot does, inside one decision, with the outcome recorded per slot.
Who competes for each slot
Open auction demand from connected DSPs, private marketplace deals negotiated with specific buyers, programmatic guaranteed lines with committed volume, and direct campaigns sold by your own team. All four routes deliver into the same pods, under the same separation and frequency rules, and all four are visible in the same reporting.
One decision per slot
Direct and programmatic demand compete in a single unified decision rather than through chained waterfalls that leak price information and leave inventory under-sold. Floors can be set per pod position, so a first-in-pod slot is never cleared at mid-pod pricing. When direct is outbid, the log shows what beat it and at what price.
Deals without the spreadsheet layer
PMPs, programmatic guaranteed and direct IOs are managed in one interface alongside open auction settings, with pacing and delivery tracked per deal. Your sales team can see what a guaranteed line actually delivered against what programmatic paid for the same break, in the same report, which makes the next quarter's rate card easier to defend. Forecasting for guaranteed commitments is available on the enterprise arrangement.
TV supply held to the open web's standards.
Buyers moving television budgets onto programmatic rails ask the same questions they learned to ask on display: who is selling this, and can I check? Three mechanisms answer that question on this platform, an authorization file per app, a public seller registry, and a machine-readable supply path on every bid request.
app-ads.txt for TV apps
Each TV platform's developer portal carries a website field, and that domain is where your app-ads.txt file lives. We crawl it on a schedule, validate every supply path against it, and drop anything unauthorized before the auction. When your declarations change, enforcement follows within the crawl cycle instead of waiting for a manual sync.
Published sellers.json
Every account ID that can appear on your inventory maps to a legal entity in our published sellers.json, with its relationship to the inventory declared. A buyer who wants to know who stands behind a CTV bid request can resolve it in seconds. Combined with app-ads.txt, the two files close the loop on authorized selling for TV supply.
schain and content signals
Bid requests carry the IAB supply chain object so the path from your channel to the buyer's seat is machine-readable, plus content-level signals, genre, rating, episode and stream metadata, wherever the TV platform exposes them. Buyers can verify what they bought and target against what the viewer is actually watching. The CTV ecosystem guide covers which signals travel on each platform we support.
Ad load you set, measurement you can defend.
Viewer experience standards
Frequency caps
Campaign-level and household-level frequency limits are enforced across pods, within sessions and across the day. Repetition that irritates a viewer is also repetition that wastes an advertiser's budget, so both sides of the marketplace are protected by the same policy.
Pod duration limits
Break length follows your content cadence within the platform's published pod limits, and ad load is agreed with you per channel before launch. The limits exist so that monetization never quietly becomes the thing viewers remember about your channel.
No surprise ad load
If ad load policy changes, partners hear it first and get a transition window before anything ships. The current standards are documented in the publisher policy.
What is measurable on CTV
Server-side beacons record pod structure, slot position, quartiles, completions and failures, and land in the same impression-level reporting as your mobile inventory. Viewability and third-party verification on CTV depend on what each TV platform's measurement interfaces expose, so the support matrix is confirmed per platform and documented plainly for you and your buyers.
Who is moving budget into CTV
Television budgets have been shifting into streaming for years, and the buyers arriving with them, agencies assembling guaranteed packages, brands that previously bought linear, and DSP traders chasing engaged audiences, are exactly the demand this platform is built to receive. The CTV ecosystem guide walks through how that demand reaches your inventory, and the eCPM benchmarks report tracks what it pays by format and region.
From existing channel to monetized stream.
CTV integration is a joint project with our team: the steps are fixed, the timeline is scoped up front, and nothing goes live until your pod plan and declarations have been verified end to end.
SSAI setup
Manifest manipulation is pointed at your packaging or origin, VMAP pod plans are mapped to your content cadence, and beacon forwarding is configured per platform. Your separation and frequency policies are codified in the setup, so the platform enforces them on every break.
Store listing checks
Each TV platform developer portal is checked for the website field that app-ads.txt discovery depends on. This is the step most channels discover was broken only after launch, when buyers start asking why their requests fail authorization checks.
app-ads.txt publication
Your authorized sellers file is verified at the root of the developer domain, with our line added and automated crawl monitoring enabled. From the first impression, only authorized paths can carry your inventory.
Launch and tune
Pods go live with auction demand, ad load is tuned against your content, and reporting confirms delivery per slot and position. The first weeks of data drive the first round of floor and pod-structure adjustments with your account team.
CTV inventory settles on Net 60, aligned to CTV delivery cycles. Pricing is CPM-based on every deal type. Media groups running multiple channels can add deal-level forecasting on the enterprise arrangement.
CTV in practice.
Yes. The developer website field in each TV store can point to any domain you control, including a simple company site. The file lives at that domain root, and we re-crawl it on a regular cycle. The ads.txt for CTV guide covers the setup, including how live channels handle declarations.
Pod structure follows your content cadence within the platform pod limits. Short breaks with one or two slots are fully supported, and they often hold retention better than long pods, the auction prices each position honestly, so a one-slot break is not penalized for being small.
Yes, they compete. Direct lines enter the same auction on price, with competitive separation honored across the pod, and programmatic guaranteed or PMP demand fills what direct does not. Your sales team can see exactly what each slot cleared for.
Completion varies with pod position, content genre, break length and geography, so we do not quote a universal figure. The eCPM benchmarks report tracks completion and pricing by format and region, and your account team will set expectations against your actual content.
Platform coverage is confirmed during onboarding against current SSAI capabilities, certification requirements and measurement support. If your platform is not yet covered, you will get a straight answer and a timeline.
The same pre-bid invalid traffic filtering that protects mobile supply runs on CTV requests, plus authorization enforcement against app-ads.txt and sellers.json. SSAI itself removes the client-side spoofing surface that plagues web video, since delivery is stitched into the manifest rather than called from the player.
Monetize every break, without breaking the viewer.
Bring your channel list, platforms and content cadence. The CTV team returns an integration plan with pod structure and an app-ads.txt check.
SSAI · ad pods · unified auction · Net 60