Reinventing Live Sports Advertising: How Transmit Live Unlocks New Value in a Streaming-First World
Broadcasters and streaming platforms are facing a revenue gap caused by sharp differences between traditional and streaming advertising models. Transmit Live aims to bridge that divide with its next-generation media advertising platform that revolutionizes how live video content is monetized.
The company, a member of the 2025 cohort of Comcast NBCUniversal SportsTech, focuses on creating new premium inventory for live events and extending the reach and revenue potential of content. Transmit’s software allows streaming platforms and broadcasters to monetize better by creating new in-stream inventory, filling traditional ad breaks, and developing more effective ad-pods.
Founded in 2017 by CEO Seth Hittman and CPO, Scott Young, the company sees itself as an innovator challenging decades-old advertising approaches in the streaming industry. Its core innovation lies in its ability to programmatically insert advertisements into live streaming content without disrupting the viewing experience.
Comcast SportsTech Head of Research Tripp Baltz spoke with Bo Han, Transmit’s Chief Commercial Officer, to discuss the company’s approach, which is a significant departure from traditional commercial breaks that have remained unaltered for decades.
Han explained how Transmit’s tech transcodes live programming in real time and identifies the perfect moment to introduce a more custom, less obtrusive ad unit, allowing for seamless integration of ads while not disrupting the viewer’s experience of the live event.
The tech creates a new form of monetization in the streaming video category through fully addressable picture-in-picture (PIP) ads during live sports and events. Transmit’s platform serves streaming platforms, broadcasters, and content publishers by providing real-time advertising management and monetization capabilities.
The advertising technology industry has recognized Transmit for its innovative approach. The company received accolades from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) in the inaugural release of its Connected TV Creative Best Practices.
What follows is a transcript of Baltz’s interview of Han.
Tripp Baltz:
I’m here with Bo Han, Chief Commercial Officer, Transmit. Thanks for giving us your time, Bo.
Bo Han:
Glad to be here.
Baltz:
Tell us about yourself. How did you get your start?
Han:
The way that I’ve really defined myself is as an immigrant, a Korean immigrant. My parents immigrated here when I was three years old. They were grad school students at Vanderbilt, and came from very humble beginnings.
I had the opportunity to grow up here and be educated here. My parents really prioritized education and saw education as a great outlet and tool to advance my personal and professional development.
And as a young child, I always had intellectual curiosity about whatever that was in front of me. I fell in love with sports early on because I grew up in a time where my identity was not widely accepted.That’s what’s so beautiful about sports is that it’s this unspoken love and language, a sense of belonging and community.
My sister just sent me a video clip of my 8-year-old nephew with his first walk off. It was the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, in a tie game and he hit a walk-off double. And he’s just cruising around with his hands doing the airplane and his team is waiting for him at home plate.
And again, he’s a Korean boy, right? But at that moment, he’s a teammate and he just won the game. I bring that up because it’s just so fresh and pure about why we love sports.
The best day of the year in New York is November when the New York City Marathon is running. The streets are filled with spectators and people who are cheering the runners on. You have no idea who they are, where they’re from, what they believe in. But they are doing a remarkable feat, which is running 26.2 miles, right? And, we all applaud that. That’s what sports really does.
And that’s something that has really been core to my identity and experience of a sense of belonging. It is something about sports I’ve really grown to love.
You see our beloved Knicks and how the city came together, right? It’s something so exciting that hasn’t happened in such a long period of time. I think now more than ever, this message of unity and community and belonging is so important.
Baltz:
Where did you go to college?
Han:
I went to Cornell, and after college I moved down to New York and began working at Microsoft, where I had the opportunity to work in the online services business, monetizing all of the consumer online products, whether it be Windows or Office, later Xbox.
In 2012, I met the president and chief revenue officer of Twitter in a hotel lobby during a conference and had the opportunity to join the Twitter team back in 2012.
And again I worked in our monetization group. And then the back half of my seven years at Twitter, I worked in our live content licensing specifically within live sports.
And so if you can remember, in 2016, Twitter won the rights of 10 Thursday Night Football games, which was a huge shock because it was the first time games were on streaming platforms and on a non-linear TV property.
The ability to watch an entire NFL game on Twitter was something that was very compelling. We also saw that Twitter was kind of that quintessential second screen experience.
Where if you’re watching the game, if you’re a big sports fan, you’re following the commentary and, and the fans and, and all that. And so, and so that kind of sparked this new consumer use of user behavior for me – how to get fans engaged and conversational.
It became kind of the world’s largest sports bar where you can come together and begin conversing with strangers who you don’t know. But also with notable figures and influential voices within the sports industry. So it was a very cool phenomenon to see and be part of.
Baltz:
Explain a bit more about how fans engage with content.
Han:
We began to see that if we provide more live content on the platform, there will be more tweets about it. And so that really embarked my four-year journey in leading content acquisition for live sports where, after the NFL, we did a deal with the NBA and NHL, MLB, PGA Tour, the World Cup and the Olympics, and the list goes on.
If you’re not watching the game and you stumble on a piece of news via a tweet, you’re rushing to your TV or sports bar to see it live. So I became curious about how, ok, if people are not watching, how do you get them to watch live sports? And it turns out that social pressure and FOMO is a great driver of that.
If you’re not part of the party, you want to immediately be part of the party. If a sports bar is rocking and it’s loud, you want to know why. That prompted me to make the difficult decision to leave Twitter in 2019 to start a company called Buzzer.
Baltz:
And what was Buzzer?
Han:
Buzzer was a mobile-first live sports app that understood your interests in all the sports data based on your interest and then secondly, more importantly, provided triggering moments when those moments are interesting to you.
And so if Tripp is a Denver Nuggets fan, more likely than not he’s always watching a Nuggets game. But if he’s not, then, he’ll get an alert saying the Nuggets are at Wolves and there’s a 4-point game with five minutes left.
And if you have a subscription, it’s free because it’s authenticated. And if not, then you have the opportunity to buy that moment for 99 cents.
If you put $20 on a three and a half point spread between the Knicks and the Celtics, then I’m going to alert you when it’s a four-point game because that is a point of interest and, and I would drive you into that live moment.
It’s no secret, TV ratings are declining (with some exceptions), the cable bundle is becoming unbundled, and there is declining economics in the affiliate structure that cable has really bolstered over the years. There’s also a problematic trend that fewer fans under 40 are watching live sports.
Pull up any Nielsen stat with the average age that watches the major four leagues, and it’s upper 40s. Maybe that gets younger with streaming platforms, but it’s still, you’re losing the Gen Z and future Gen Alpha audience.
Baltz:
How did that play into what Buzzer was doing?
Han:
It has to do with a few things. One is just they’re not a linear TV-based audience generation, they’re a mobile first audience. And even if we repurpose TV content on mobile, they use both devices very differently.
So there needs to be an experience that makes sense on mobile because we don’t stare at a mobile screen for two hours unless you’re a super fan.
What has always been top of mind for me has been how do you capture an incremental audience that’s not watching television? How do you capture an audience with an average age of 27 who will watch 5 to 10 minutes of a live game? If we can solve that, it would be a huge win for the sports industry in terms of the longevity and long term value of sports rights.
Baltz:
What happened with Buzzer?
Han:
Unfortunately, with the rising cost of license fee and sports rights, and the difficult market and economy, I had to unfortunately wind the company down. But it was a great learning experience. And we still had this challenge: How do you make a shrinking pond larger? How do you capture an incremental, younger audience?
The long-term value of the sports industry is primarily driven by live media rights. And so it’s safe to say that the sustainability of media rights are driven by a few things. One is obviously scarcity, but second is the long-term value of its audience. And you have to cater to a younger audience, and engage with that next generation live.
Baltz:
Describe how you came on board with Transmit.
Han:
Throughout the years while I was at Twitter and Buzzer, I had the opportunity to meet Transmit co-founder and CEO Seth Hitman and we became close friends. I had the opportunity to advise for Transmit over the years. Eight years ago when I met them, they were doing something that was very simple that no one else was doing – build products for the shift of the future from linear to streaming.
It’s the Wayne Gretzky analogy of not going where the puck is, but where the puck is going to go.
Seth and our COO Ricardo were amazing supporters of Buzzer, and they were also investors. They got a master notice that said, “Hey, we’re winding down the company.”
And the timing was kind of perfect where the moment that I wound down the company, you know, we initiated conversations about the possibility of me joining full time. For me it was just very natural. One, I’d already fallen in love with the product and believed in it.
I could also see the broader industry landscape and the challenges Transmit was solving, and it was incredibly important to me to be part of an innovative solution for the future.
Baltz:
Tell us how Transmit works.
Han:
If we were to ask ourselves eight years ago if the NFL was going to be on a streaming platform, we would say that’s crazy because why would we devalue the multi-billion dollar business of linear television, you know, and undercut that by putting it on a streaming platform, right? NBCU/Peacock did it first in 2024 AFC Wild Card game between the Miami Dolphins & Kansas City Chiefs. Netflix had the two Christmas games over the holidays.
But now as you can see with the new NBA rights deal, yes, there’s ESPN and NBC, but also Amazon, which is a streaming-only platform, has been introduced to the mix. And on top of that,, the new NBA deal will also have NBA games playing on ESPN, the flagship D2C as well as, as well as Peacock.
What I love about our product, and this may sound a little bit self-serving, but it is that this team has been building a product for that future transition. And if you think about it, it’s a tremendous paradigm shift for our industry
When NBC decided to put an AFC wild card game exclusively on Peacock.That was a very deliberate and intentional decision with very specific business outcomes. And it drove 2.8 million incremental subs with a majority of those subs retained post-game. That is the power of the NFL and live sports.
But it’s also the power of tapping into a new audience that linear television is not, which is, which is streaming, which Peacock caters to.
And so in a lot of ways, you know, Transmit was very forward-thinking. We have this fundamental problem that the audience is shrinking. Instead of trying to make the pond bigger, Transmit is trying to extract more value for partners from a shrinking pond, from shrinking viewership.
You need to do more with less. That’s why we believe in creating new revenue channels using incremental surface areas, meaning live moments that don’t disrupt the experience. On average, we’re creating 30% more ad inventory for a live game.
You already have these existing streams and these existing opportunities. It took a while for it to catch on because, you know, rightsholders were not ready to put valuable IP – live sports – on streaming platforms. But it’s hard to find a media company that’s not doing that now. .
Now you have Disney CEO Bob Iger saying you’re going to see more content on the ESPN flagship D2C product than on ESPN.
So we’re talking about ad experience, a consumer experience, when to natively integrate in-stream ads and make them thematic marketing messages. How natural is it that for every single walk that happens, you get a Johnnie Walker “Keep Walking” ad, or every time there’s a stolen base, you get a free taco, or you miss two free throws, you get a Chick-fil-A sandwich ad.
Using AI and sports data we can isolate and naturally integrate these moments, very much like the live experience of sitting in a ballpark, stadium or arena. And that is so inherent to brand messaging. With it we see higher brand recall and brand effectiveness. We’re integrating the marketing message within, and you’re seeing higher brand recall.
And again, when you’re looking at the broader macros: Viewership is going down. Sports rights are going up, while the ability to monetize it is going down. Transmit becomes this very viable learned product that is able to kind of bridge that gap, you know, as many media entities and media companies and publishers are transitioning from a linear first, streaming second world to a streaming first, linear second world.
We’re just another sports tech company that is kind of engaging with a shrinking pond. This is an actual solution to the broader future. And we haven’t even talked about regional sports networks (RSNs) that are trying to bridge the gap between an affiliate-first world to direct-to-consumer where subscriptions will drive revenue. We seen a lot of success through our partnerships with ViewLift and various RSNs & teams who have DTC products.
It takes time to grow that audience and ultimately subscriptions … which means there is a tremendous revenue gap and opportunity costs of moving away from an affiliate model. But it’s also very necessary to wean off of that affiliate model because it’s also not a sustainable model.
Baltz:
Describe how AI is part of Transmit’s solution.
Han:
Sports data is enough, to be frank. But AI makes us smarter and quicker about it. It also allows us to scale different scenarios and different natural moments where advertising comes into play.
For example, when you and I are watching the exact same game, and Julius Randall is on the line, you and I might see two different ads because our consumer behaviors are very different. It’s like no one’s Amazon homepage is the same. And the addressability is going to be very important based on our consumer behavior.
Amazon was celebrated and touted for Black Friday when they basically surfaced a different ad to a different user based on prime behavior. We’re doing that every day.
Baltz:
Who are some of your clients?
Han:
We work with FIFA, Paramount+, Fox Sports, Gotham, Marquee, Univision, and a number of entertainment partners like AMC. The simplest way to look at Transmit is that we’re a two-sided live sports marketplace. On the supply side we create via in stream ads within a live game. We create incremental supply inventory and incremental demand of that ad inventory.
And then we have the demand side where we have nine figures of parked advertiser revenue that we’re able to basically fill on behalf of our supplier partners. And when I say supplier partners, it’s leagues, networks, publishers and so forth.
The demand side is very important because that also differentiates us from the rest of the market. What use is it to create more inventory if you can’t fill it?
Specifically from an RSN solution, it means a lot because to put the Utah Jazz example out there again, there’s only so much you can do to sell ads within the state of Utah. Within your regional network, there is a ceiling for local sponsorships. The merit of Transmit is that we stitch together and combine a network of RSNs where national advertisers run through different pieces of brand safe content – live sports at a compelling CPM (cost per thousand impressions).
And so in a lot of ways, when you’re looking at an RSN, it’s two bites at the apple.
The first bite is obviously your local sales and sponsorship team, they’re selling what they can sell and then the second is to create incremental inventory where their local sponsorship can fill that as well.
The unique nature of Transmit and the position that we are in in the market is that we’re a full solution of creating inventory and then being able to fill it.
Baltz:
Who are your competitors and what threats do you face?
Han:
I think our two biggest competitors are Amazon Media Tailor and Google DAI (Dynamic Ad Insertion). In many ways, it’s a good thing. We’re very flattered to be included with those two. But also, they’re a solution to a broader problem – Google ad management and AWS solutions.
Our strength is that we specialize in the server side ad insertion and dynamic ad insertion, and we also bring advertiser demand. We’re not a generalist, and we’re proud of that. We’re specialists in a very important aspect of a media rights holder, which is revenue.
Baltz:
What does the future look like for Transmit?
Han:
At the end of the day, TV is not going anywhere. But the economics will have to reset. Transmit is an important part of the broader solution – a bridge across the revenue gap that is present today. In many ways, a viable solution to the quintessential innovator’s dilemma. Our proposition to RSNs that are going direct-to-consumer is very simple: Growing users and subs are going to take time. So while you grow, subs, integrate us, and we’ll help you bridge the revenue gap in the meantime
We’re a solution that is additive, it doesn’t disrupt subscribers and their consumer experience and augments that opportunity cost of revenue that you’ve had on day one while you grow the subscriber revenue.
Baltz:
What’s coming next for advertising and branding in the sports media landscape? What sports tech trends are you keeping tabs on?
Han:
I’m a big believer in the potential of women’s sports and emerging leagues — but to give them, and all live sports, a fair shot at becoming more valuable in the future, we need to think beyond the traditional playbook.
That starts with breaking free from a distribution model still built around linear TV economics. It’s not just about airtime — it’s about access, timing, and relevance. Women’s sports are more popular than ever, but without intentional placement in optimal dayparts and platforms that reach younger audiences, we’re limiting their ability to scale.
The real question is: are we meeting the next generation where they are — and are we doing it live? That’s how we unlock long-term value. Not just for women’s sports, but for the future of live sports as a whole.
This matters because if you look at any league’s collective bargaining agreement, media rights are the driving force — they determine team valuations, fund player salaries, and ultimately power the entire ecosystem. Media rights are the heartbeat of the sports industry.
As stewards and stakeholders, we have a shared responsibility to ensure the long-term sustainability of that ecosystem. That means moving away from a fragmented distribution landscape that may boost short-term revenue but creates a frustrating, disjointed experience for fans. Sure, more platforms might mean more partners and surface area — but if a fan has to search across 10 different apps just to follow their team, that’s not sustainable.
We need to solve for fragmentation. And more importantly, we need to engage the next generation live — because that’s how we future-proof the value of media rights. That’s how we build long-term value across the entire industry.
Baltz:
Please give us your best predictions for sports tech going into 2026 and beyond.
Han:
Looking ahead to 2026 and beyond, I think there are two defining questions for sports tech:
First, how do we evolve media rights in a way that balances growth with accessibility? With massive events and soaring media deals, we’re at a crossroads — and the real unlock will be platforms and technologies that make live sports easier to find, personalize, and watch. Fragmentation is the biggest friction point for fans today. The next wave of innovation won’t just be about content; it’ll be about orchestration. Companies that can curate, simplify, and unify the viewing experience will win — whether through AI, search, or interface innovation.
Second, the long-term play is global. Leagues are realizing that growth isn’t just about domestic expansion — it’s about global reach. That’s why partnerships with platforms like Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube matter: they offer scale without borders. In the future, sports tech won’t just be about distribution — it’ll be about activation at a global level: localizing content, expanding IP, and building community across geographies.
The smartest leagues and tech companies will think like global media companies — blending sports, entertainment, and technology to build future-proof loyal audiences across time zones and cultures.