Pixalate has launched a private beta that takes aim at one of CTV advertising’s stubborn blind spots: what is actually on screen when an open-market ad slot goes up for auction?
What the new products do
OpenEPG DB 1.0, released September 21, 2026, is a reference database covering more than 580,000 shows, 13,900-plus FAST and linear channels, and 6,192 US streaming apps. The companion Pre-Bid API reads two mandatory fields from an OpenRTB request, the app bundle and the device user agent, then writes title, series, genre, content rating and channel information back into the request’s Content object.
Pixalate says the API is built to IAB Tech Lab’s OpenRTB 2.6 specification and enriches asks in real time. Nothing else is touched, and a confidence score from 0.00 to 1.00 travels separately in an HTTP response header.
Why ‘what show is this?’ matters
Most CTV bid requests still arrive without a programme name. A Peer39 analysis from March 2026 found only 40% carried usable programme-level signals, and IAB research in July put buyer confidence in open-exchange CTV placement at just 33%. That forces advertisers to treat an entire app as one environment, mixing news, cartoons and cooking shows into a single buy.
Pixalate’s pitch is finer control: price inventory by its actual content, apply suitability rules by genre and rating, and verify afterwards what the look-up estimated.
The mechanics, in brief
- More than 580,000 shows and 13,900-plus channels in the look-up database
- 6,192 US streaming apps across nine operating systems
- Two delivery routes: REST at roughly 10 ms median target latency, or AWS RTB Fabric at about half that
- Zero publisher SDKs or lines of code required
The confidence score is the real product
Pixalate is not declaring what aired. It is inferring it from a public schedule, an app bundle and a device string, then attaching a probability. The buyer picks the threshold for bidding or blocking. That is useful, but it also creates risk: spoofed bundle IDs and user agents could resolve to a plausible show label and make invalid traffic look more legitimate.
It’s one of several routes to transparency
Gracenote, IAS, FreeWheel, Nano Interactive, Viant and Wurl are all attacking the same gap. Pixalate’s difference is that it sits outside the supply chain and needs no publisher agreement, which creates scale but means channel owners have no clear way to review or dispute how their programmes are labelled.
What to do next
Ask your DSP or SSP whether it can consume app.content fields and confidence thresholds. Test a threshold high enough to protect brand suitability, compare show-level buys against your current app-level blocks, and keep invalid-traffic screening separate from enrichment.
Source: PPC Land
