LtvAdx
A programmatic exchange for Connected TV and linear television
Television inventory sold programmatically — Connected TV, FAST channels and addressable linear breaks — through one exchange that also carries the ad server and the stitching layer.
The problem
Television advertising was built for agencies buying quarters in advance. Streaming broke the model without replacing it: a FAST channel has breaks to fill every hour and no practical way to fill them beyond a handful of direct relationships. Meanwhile the buyers who could fill them have no self-serve door into anything except the largest platforms.
How it is put together
- 01
An ad server handling VAST and VMAP requests, plus a control plane holding campaigns, inventory and reporting — deployed as separate services so a serving incident cannot take the dashboard down with it.
- 02
Serving events travel through a Redis stream rather than a direct write, so a slow reporting database never becomes a slow ad response.
- 03
Reporting aggregates into daily summaries on a schedule. Raw events are storage; the summaries answer every query.
- 04
A single-source waterfall ranks six deal types — direct sold, programmatic guaranteed, direct IO, addressable, private marketplace, open auction — and filters on flight dates, channel, break type, duration, platform, country, household segment, completion-rate threshold, floor price and pacing before ranking on effective price.
The hard parts
Zero database reads at serve time
A television break does not wait. The entire decision runs against an in-memory snapshot refreshed from the control plane every fifteen seconds — which means every targeting rule, budget and floor has to be expressible in a structure that can be rebuilt, swapped atomically, and reasoned about when it is briefly stale.
Frequency capping across a household, not a device
The same household watches on a television, a phone and a tablet. Capping has to collapse those into one identity and decrement a shared counter fast enough to stay inside the decision budget.
Spending money that does not exist yet
Budget pacing has to hold a campaign to its daily share while auctions are still resolving. Overspend is a refund conversation; underspend is a churn conversation.
Yours does not have to be television.
The shape repeats: real-time decisions, money that has to reconcile, and tenants who must never see each other's data. Tell me what you are building.
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