www.nabshow.com | April 21, 2026 | TUESDAY
“Bringing some of that simplification and programmatic is going to be a way for our customers to access different demand, particularly from small and medium-sized businesses. “They know how to buy impressions on Facebook. What they don’t know is how to navigate the complex buying of traditional TV through proposals going back and forth. We think bringing programmatic on top of our sales and traffic system will be super important.” Imagine is also working on agentic systems. Some are being deployed in its channel creation products. But there will be applications in advertising as well. “The next big step would be to have AI agents on the buy side and sell side negotiating,” Heap said. Humans would still be in the loop to approve transactions, but AI would open more programmatic pipes. “I think that’s the journey that we see the industry going on.” LTN is embedding ad tech into its network to help programmers better monetize the burgeoning amount of live sports and other events on free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) platforms. “The amount of live content on FAST platforms alone is growing significantly,” Rick Young, senior VP and head of global products at LTN, said. “So, the ability to get the ad triggers inserted in enough time to make decisioning engines downstream smarter is a big ask.” With sports, you don’t know exactly when a commercial break
Imagine has been rebuilding its OSI-X traffic and sales system to enable crossplatform sales and connect with ad servers.
will occur. When the game action stops, you don’t always get the 10 seconds needed to tell dynamic-insertion systems about spots as they become available. By integrating the ad stack with the channel origination system, Young said, it can be ready to process ad requests that satisfy the deal requirements of multiple clients in real time. That means that in the middle of a soccer game, if there’s an injury and play stops, the network can trigger an ad request and get it filled before the player is taken off the field. At the same time, instead of needing humans to monitor games for commercial opportunities, AI systems can identify special situations, such as when a goal is scored. But even AI will have to get faster for advertising applications. “AI isn’t there when it comes to live processing,” Young said. “It’s
extremely expensive, it’s extremely CPU-intensive and you might be 10 seconds behind real time before you identify a goal. “If you’re trying to get the ad trigger in immediately, it doesn’t work. There are use cases when
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you can wait, but live news, live sports, live events, you don’t always have the time.” Madhive last year invested in Precise.ai, which is focused on building ad planning and buying tools for brands and agencies. Wilson said Madhive is looking to use AI to create better products and improve the value proposition for clients. On a secondary level, Madhive will use AI internally to speed up the creation of new products. “From a development perspective, how can we scale more quickly?” Wilson asked. “How can we more quickly deliver more intelligent feature sets to our clients? That’s also really important.” The company is also looking at ways to use AI to improve campaign management, campaign delivery and ad operations, Wilson said. l
EXECUTIVE
Q&A
Andreas Hilmer Chief Marketing Officer Lawo AG
Q: What technology trends will you be following most closely at NAB Show this year? A: I’m watching how software-based architectures on COTS accelerate the shift to Dynamic Media Facilities — unlocking dramatic gains in flexibility, scalability and resource utilization compared to bespoke software-defined hardware. This also means less space, lower complexity and reduced costs. I’m equally excited about converged audio-video platforms: with HOME and apps like HOME Multiviewer and HOME mc² DSP, we already deliver these benefits at any scale, while our new I/O platform, Edge One, extends them from small to extremely large deployments. Q. Lawo is a longtime exhibitor at NAB Show. What brings the company back to this event each year? A: We come back to NAB Show because it’s the one place where partners, customers, innovators and the odd napkin visionary all collide in the best possible way. It’s the perfect venue to show how Lawo’s growing platform simplifies orchestration, configuration and secure management across IP-based operations — making life easier for broadcasters of every size. And naturally, we also return because people have learned to “follow the pretzel” to our booth for the day’s most productive happy hour.
LTN is embedding ad tech into its network to help programmers better monetize the growing number of live events on FAST channels.
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