Live events used to be advertising’s most dependable premium real estate: guaranteed attention, emotionally charged audiences, and little competition from the pause button. But in streaming, “live” has been anything but straightforward. Inventory is fragmented, planning is messy, and advertisers often don’t know what’s coming until the content is already rolling.
Magnite thinks it can change that.
The company—already the largest independent sell-side ad platform—has unveiled Live Scheduler, a first-of-its-kind tool designed to help media owners plan, activate, and measure ads around live moments with the kind of structure and predictability the streaming era has often lacked.
For an industry still trying to standardize what “live” even means in the programmatic world, the move is significant.
What Live Scheduler Actually Does
Live Scheduler isn’t a new marketplace or another layer of targeting. Instead, it’s infrastructure: a standardized framework living inside Magnite’s SpringServe platform that lets media owners define upcoming live events with real details—event name, timing, league, broadcaster, expected concurrency, and more.
Think of it as turning live streams from chaotic one-offs into predictable, packaged advertising moments.
For DSPs and buyers (including Amazon DSP), the value is clearer visibility into what’s coming and when. That unlocks better pacing, more accurate planning, and timely campaigns built around cultural moments—sports playoffs, political debates, award shows, and other “don’t miss” events.
Why This Matters
Because live streaming is now the growth engine of connected TV, but the pipes beneath it are still surprisingly analog. Without standardized signals, live inventory is nearly impossible to plan around programmatically. Magnite is trying to build the missing layer everyone assumed already existed.
A Strategy Built on Live Stream Acceleration
Magnite’s existing live tech, Live Stream Acceleration (LSA), already supports major global livestreams—sports championships, tentpole premieres, and other high-stakes events where latency and scale matter. LSA improves delivery and optimization for those streams.
Live Scheduler is the next evolutionary step. While LSA solved speed and performance, Live Scheduler aims to solve visibility and workflow. Combined, the two form a more complete ecosystem for live programmatic buying.
Adam Soroca, Magnite’s Chief Product Officer, puts it this way: the industry needs more than optimization—it needs operational clarity.
This is Magnite betting that the future of live ads isn’t just about better tech under the hood, but also a common language for the ecosystem to speak.
The Industry Reaction: Finally, Some Structure
Amazon Ads, which has been investing heavily in live sports and event-based advertising, calls the move a chance to add “digital-level precision and flexibility” to campaigns that have historically been hard to scale.
Roku, now one of the biggest gateways to streaming in the U.S., highlighted the monetization opportunity as Live TV continues shifting online. Roku’s identity-driven ad framework also pairs well with a system that promises more reliable live signals.
The sentiment from partners boils down to this: advertisers want to reach “leaned-in” audiences, but they need tools that make live streaming less unpredictable. Magnite is giving them a map.
Why This Matters in the Bigger AdTech Picture
The timing is strategic. Live sports rights are exploding across streaming platforms; political cycles are intensifying; and brands are demanding better ways to position themselves in real-time cultural moments. But programmatic hasn’t kept up—event metadata is inconsistent, workflows are manual, and pacing is guesswork.
If live events are the new tentpole of streaming, Live Scheduler is an attempt to standardize the tent.
Potential Industry Impact
- More predictable live inventory means easier integration into multi-channel media plans.
- Better measurement could bring more performance dollars into live streaming.
- Improved pacing and forecasting may help DSPs reduce wasted impressions.
- Media owners get a cleaner path to premium CPMs.
And importantly for Magnite, it strengthens its position as the live-streaming sell-side leader just as competition intensifies from Amazon, YouTube, and proprietary walled gardens.
