INVIDI's Gambit to Finally Make Live Sports Ads Personal and Profitable

PRINCETON, NJ – November 25, 2025 – For years, the holy grail of television advertising has been a simple, yet elusive, concept: delivering a unique, personally relevant commercial to every single viewer during a massive live event like the Super Bowl or the World Cup final. While personalization is standard on websites and social media, the technical and economic hurdles of doing so for millions of simultaneous live video streams have made it a costly fantasy. Until now, that barrier has remained stubbornly in place.

Today, INVIDI Technologies, a veteran in the addressable advertising space, announced a solution that it claims demolishes this economic wall. The new product, INVIDI Fuse™, introduces an innovative architecture designed to make targeted advertising during internet-delivered live events not just feasible, but highly profitable. By fundamentally changing how ads are delivered, the company is making a bold play to unlock billions in untapped revenue for broadcasters and offer advertisers a level of precision previously reserved for the non-live digital world.

The Billion-Dollar Bottleneck of Live Streaming

To understand the significance of INVIDI's move, one must first grasp the core problem plaguing the industry. The current standard for delivering ads within live streams is a technology called Server-Side Ad Insertion, or SSAI. Also known as ad stitching, SSAI works by having a cloud server create a single, continuous video stream for each viewer, seamlessly “stitching” the advertisements directly into the content before it ever reaches the user's device. This method is popular because it bypasses ad blockers and provides a smooth, buffer-free experience akin to traditional broadcast television.

Industry giants like Google, with its Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) platform, and the Comcast-owned FreeWheel have built formidable businesses around this technology. However, SSAI has a critical economic flaw: its cost scales directly with its audience. Because the server must perform the computationally intensive task of stitching a unique stream for every individual viewer, the costs for cloud processing and delivery skyrocket as viewership grows. For a niche program with a few thousand viewers, the cost is manageable. For a championship game with tens of millions of concurrent streams, the expense becomes prohibitive, erasing any potential profit from selling targeted ads.

This scaling-cost problem has effectively locked broadcasters out of the addressable market for their most valuable inventory: major live events. They are forced to show the same national ad to everyone, leaving a tremendous amount of potential revenue on the table.

Flipping the Model with Client-Side Innovation

INVIDI Fuse™ proposes to solve this by upending the SSAI model. Instead of stitching ads on a central server, it employs a technique called Client-Side Manifest Manipulation (CSMM). In this framework, the heavy lifting is shifted from the expensive cloud server to the viewer’s own device—the “client.”

Here’s how it works: the broadcaster sends the same primary content stream to all viewers. However, the video player on each user's device is given a unique manifest, which is essentially a playlist that tells the player what video segments to play and in what order. The INVIDI Fuse™ technology dynamically modifies this manifest on the client-side to instruct the player to fetch and insert personalized ads from a nearby server at the designated ad break. The cloud’s only job is to deliver one main content stream and the lightweight ad manifests, not millions of unique, fully stitched video streams.

This architectural shift is what underpins INVIDI’s claim of a flat-cost delivery model. The server costs no longer balloon with the audience size. “Until now, the cost of technology has been the single biggest barrier to scalable addressable advertising on live TV,” said Prasad Sanagavarapu, INVIDI’s Chief Operating Officer, in the company's announcement. “INVIDI Fuse™ shatters that barrier. We are enabling our clients to finally unlock the premium value of their live inventory, dramatically improve their margins, and offer advertisers precision targeting at a scale that was previously unimaginable.”

A Calculated Play from an Industry Veteran

While the technology is new, the company behind it is a deeply entrenched industry player. Founded over two decades ago, INVIDI holds two Technical Emmy® Awards for its pioneering work in addressable advertising on traditional linear television. Its credibility is further solidified by its ownership structure: the company operates as an independent entity jointly owned by media titans DIRECTV, Dish, and the advertising powerhouse WPP.

This backing provides INVIDI with a significant strategic advantage. It’s not a startup hoping for a break; it has a direct line to some of the largest television distributors in the United States, who are prime candidates to become early adopters of Fuse™ for their own streaming services. These partners, who have relied on INVIDI's technology for household-level targeting on set-top boxes for years, represent a clear path to market.

If INVIDI Fuse™ delivers on its promise, the implications are vast. For broadcasters and streaming platforms, it could transform the economics of live sports and entertainment, turning premium events into powerful engines for high-margin, personalized ad revenue. For advertisers, it grants access to highly engaged audiences during culturally significant moments with the same targeting capabilities they expect from digital platforms.

The Road Ahead: Adoption, Competition, and the Viewer

The immediate challenge for INVIDI will be market adoption. The company's press release noted that “the market response has been overwhelmingly positive,” but as the product was just announced, a true measure of success will depend on which major broadcasters or streaming services sign on for trials and deployments in the coming months. The industry will be watching closely to see if INVIDI’s powerful backers, like DIRECTV and Dish, become its flagship customers for this new technology.

Competitors are not standing still. Companies like Yospace are actively developing next-generation SSAI variants, such as Server-Guided Ad Insertion (SGAI), which aim to reduce latency and costs while maintaining the benefits of a server-side approach. INVIDI's CSMM represents a more radical departure, betting that a fundamental cost-model disruption will be more compelling than incremental improvements to the existing standard.

Ultimately, this innovation will reshape the viewer experience. The prospect of seeing an ad for a local restaurant or a niche hobby during the Super Bowl instead of another national car commercial promises greater relevance. It also, however, continues the inexorable march toward deeper data collection and analysis in every facet of our media consumption. For viewers, the arrival of truly scalable addressable advertising on live TV will present the familiar modern trade-off: more personalized content in exchange for more personal data.