This article has been provided by Portada’s sister publication Adtech.com
IAB Wants to Stop Calling Everything on a TV “CTV”
An ad playing on a Smart TV in a living room, on a smartphone during a commute, and on an airport display screen may contain the exact same pixels. That does not mean all three impressions carry the same value.
The first impression might take up the entire screen, play with audio on, and reach multiple co-viewers. The second competes with notifications and scrolling. The third appears in front of a hard-to-identify audience that might only spend a few seconds looking at the monitor.
Despite these differences, the market continues to group drastically different experiences under broad terms like CTV, streaming, online video, social video, or digital out-of-home (DOOH). The underlying issue is that buyers, publishers, and platforms often interpret each category differently.
The IAB is seeking to fix this fragmentation through Redefining Media Types (RMT), a standard developed alongside the IAB Tech Lab to establish a shared language for video planning, buying, selling, and measurement. The draft remains open for public comment through August 8, 2026, according to official IAB documentation.
While it may sound like a semantic debate, classification directly dictates which inventory enters a media plan, what CPMs publishers can defend, which metrics get benchmarked, and which placements end up excluded altogether.
Redefining Media Types: CTV No Longer Adequately Describes What Marketers Are Buying
Today, CTV can refer to a physical device, an app, a distribution method, or a commercial category. A traditional network channel streamed over the internet, a YouTube video played on a television set, and a connected screen inside a restaurant can all end up under the exact same buyer label.
Redefining Media Types attempts to resolve this through a primary layer based on the consumer’s physical and behavioral experience. The draft…