European TV initiative sets out proposals to tackle programmatic barriers
October 1, 2026



The European Programmatic TV Initiative (EPTVI) has published its Stage Two report, setting out six proposals to make premium television easier to buy, sell, measure and operate programmatically across Europe.

Programmatic TV is gaining momentum as more broadcast and streaming inventory becomes available through automated trading. The market opportunity is significant: greater automation can reduce friction, open television to additional advertiser demand and help buyers manage TV and video more consistently across platforms. But Europe remains a fragmented marketplace, with different national measurement systems, trading practices, technology stacks and commercial models.


Stage Two found that the principal challenge facing the industry is ensuring that existing systems can work together consistently. Signals can be lost between platforms; the same creative can acquire multiple IDs; frequency and commercial-break controls can stop at system boundaries; and reporting and reconciliation can be challenging. EPTVI’s proposals are intended to address these issues while respecting the differences between national markets.

The proposals are underpinned by five North Star Principles. Each builds wherever possible on existing standards, institutions and workflows, with the aim of improving clarity and comparability, increasing transparency and supporting interoperability while preserving legitimate national and commercial differences.

EPTVI held a public Stage Two Virtual Industry Summit on September 30th to present and debate the proposals with senior executives from broadcasters, streamers, agencies, trade bodies and advertising technology companies.

The six Stage Two proposals are:

The future role of Europe’s TV JICs: Europe’s JICs are its most trusted measurement institutions, but most programmatic TV is traded beyond their reach. EPTVI proposes they expand to cover planning, activation and reporting of programmatic campaigns, and assuring audience claims based on publisher, platform and third-party data.
Impressions Reporting Specification: A common structure for reporting delivery across linear and IP-delivered television, removing much of the manual reconciliation now needed to compare records across different platforms and services.
Signals Framework: The technical foundations already exist. What is missing is agreement on what each bid requires, how that information may be used, and why bids fail. EPTVI proposes a framework covering all three, tested first in Programmatic Guaranteed and Private Marketplace deals.
Creative ID Interoperability: Europe has no shortage of creative identifiers, but there is often no link between them, so ads lose their identity through the supply chain. EPTVI proposes that every ad carries and retains an originating reference and issuer, improving traceability, reconciliation, frequency management and ad-pod controls.
Frequency capping, ad pod management and competitive separation: Television controls ad repetition, adjacency and break structure. Programmatic can too, but usually only within a platform, so controls can fail across systems. EPTVI proposes a common format for intermediaries to state their limits, allowing buyers to compare.
The Premium Programmatic Partners (3Ps) Programme: Programmatic transactions can involve a dozen parties without agreements linking them all, blurring responsibility for provenance, reporting and remediation. EPTVI proposes shared commercial principles through existing procurement, contracts and onboarding, not a new certification scheme.
Stage Three: market testing, AI and market growth

Stage Three of EPTVI will move the Initiative from design into implementation. The programme will combine three forms of activity: testing Stage Two proposals in the market; developing the elements that require further design; and examining the next generation of commercial and technological opportunities for premium television.

Trials are expected to cover impressions reporting, signals, creative IDs and frequency capping, with regular town halls to update on progress. EPTVI will also work with its participants on the JIC assurance model and the 3Ps procurement materials.

The aim of the tests is to establish whether the proposals reduce friction, improve interoperability and maintain the standards expected of premium television.

Stage Three will also look at how programmatic can grow TV advertising, through better yield, self-service buying and opening up access to new pools of advertisers. A second strand will cover AI and agent-mediated planning and buying.

EPTVI is inviting broadcasters, agencies, advertisers, technology providers, measurement organisations and industry bodies to contribute to field trials, workflow testing and the development of Stage Three. Comments and expressions of interest are invited by Friday 30 October via the contacts below.

Commercial partners supporting Stage Two comments

Sandra Whitney, Managing Director, Global Partnerships, Sellside EMEA at Google, said: “Broadcasters are putting more of their most sought after inventory into programmatic, and they need to maximise yield and protect pricing while ensuring a great viewer experience. This work establishes the practical connections needed across our industry to make that a reality.”

“Europe is not one television market and may never become a fully unified media market. A buyer working across five countries deals with five sets of trading conventions and five ways of describing the same inventory,” stated James Grant, SVP, Advanced Television at Equativ. “Shared frameworks enable companies to work with those differences rather than around them.”

William Jones, Senior Director, Head of Advanced TV and Omnichannel Activation at Adform, commented “Run a campaign across five markets and you can still end up with five different sets of numbers. As television becomes a more integrated part of omnichannel planning, greater consistency in reporting will help advertisers compare performance with confidence and make television a more seamless part of the wider media conversation.”

“Programmatic TV only scales if publishers can collaborate their own audience data with trusted partners without losing control of it,” said Luke Fenney, SVP, Publishers & Platforms, International at LiveRamp. “When every identity infrastructure can connect to the next one, without losing trust along the way, we’ll be much closer to attaining the interoperability the ecosystem has chased for so long.”

Sven Hagemeier, GM, Inventory Development, EMEA at The Trade Desk, said: “Advertisers want premium television wherever people are watching it, and they want to manage reach and frequency across publishers instead of one campaign at a time. Neither works if the same ad turns up with a different name in every system it passes through.”

“TV streaming inventory shouldn’t be treated as just another digital environment,” said Nicolas Mignot, VP Publisher Sales & Strategy, International at FreeWheel. “Publishers actively control ad frequency, break structure and advertiser placement to uphold the premium quality of the viewing experience. The challenge for the industry is to bring the efficiency of programmatic to TV while preserving those controls and being transparent about where they do and don’t apply.”

Joe Hollywood, Head of Product at Cape.io, added: “An ad should not get harder to identify just because it has been through another system. Keeping a reliable reference on it from production through delivery removes repeated checks and manual reconciliation that technology should have dealt with years ago.”