How RTBF Modernized Its Ad Monetization to Meet the Scale of the FIFA World Cup

The Overview:  

RTBF, Belgium’s public broadcaster, held the rights to broadcast the FIFA World Cup, bringing a monetization challenge at a scale few European broadcasters had tackled with an SGAI approach before. Millions of fans watched matches live, while a significant portion of viewers, faced with late-night kickoff times in Belgium, caught up the next morning on the RTBF app. These viewers paused, rewound, and resumed streams at arbitrary points. Standard SSAI architectures typically require generating per-viewer manifests to handle unpredictable seek positions at this volume. To streamline this without manifest inflation, RTBF needed a modern, server-guided approach.

RTBF worked with Bitmovin, RMB, Red Bee Media, Dotscreen, and Ad Insertion Platform (AIP) to evolve its ad monetization workflow. Built around AIP’s SGAI platform, AdBlendr, and Bitmovin’s Player and Observability solutions, the new architecture executes real-time ad decisioning at the exact moment of playback. Bitmovin’s Observability solution gave RTBF’s team real-time visibility into how it was performing, match after match, for the entire tournament. The result is one of the world’s first large-scale SGAI deployments using open standards (HLS Interstitials) during a major global sporting event.

The main requests were:

Key Benefits with Bitmovin and Partners:

How Bitmovin Delivered:

Delivering real-time ad insertion without per-viewer manifests

RTBF’s old approach tried to predict every viewer’s moment and pre-build a manifest for it. The new one, built with Bitmovin, RMB, Red Bee Media, Dotscreen, and AIP, waits for that moment and decides in real time instead. Red Bee Media, acting as systems integrator, prepares RTBF’s live and VOD streams with SCTE-35 markers and hands them to Ad Insertion Platform’s AdBlendr.

AdBlendr steps in as an intelligent proxy between the player and the ad ecosystem, calling the ad servers configured in RTBF’s rules, applying routing and business logic, and enforcing compliance before the request ever reaches the viewer. Bitmovin’s Player takes it from there, executing the decision the instant playback happens, across every platform Dotscreen built the application layer to support.

Enforcing regulatory ad rules automatically at the point of playback

Belgium’s public broadcasting rules require strict, dynamic compliance across RTBF’s entire catalog, whether enforcing frequency capping and creative deduplication during live sports, or applying strict category restrictions on children’s programming across daily channels.

While the World Cup provided the ultimate high-concurrency stress test, AdBlendr calculates these complex rules centrally in real time. Bitmovin’s Player executes the resulting instructions seamlessly at the point of playback, giving RTBF a unified, compliant SGAI workflow built for the tournament and fully ready for their everyday multi-channel schedule.

Gaining real-time visibility into ad and playback performance

Bitmovin’s Observability solution for video playback put ad performance data in front of RTBF’s team within five seconds of it happening.

Data flowed upstream to Red Bee Media and AIP too, so the whole ecosystem could tune infrastructure to live viewer load as the tournament unfolded, while RMB used that same live picture to back its advertiser guarantees with actual numbers.

Delivering reliable ad monetization at FIFA World Cup scale

From June 11 to July 19, 2026, RTBF’s rebuilt ad monetization workflow ran without interruption across the full tournament window, handling over 50 million video plays and serving 80 million ad impressions, an average of under 2 ad impressions per play, delivered at a median startup time under 1 second.

Viewers on connected TVs and mobile stuck around for longer, fuller sessions, generating more ad impressions per play, androidTV ran about 4 ad impressions per play and iOS about 3, against 1 on web. Belgium accounted for over 90% of all ad impressions, exactly as expected for a national broadcaster, with a real and growing audience reaching into France, Spain, Germany, and beyond.

Making SGAI work across a fragmented device ecosystem

Delivering SGAI consistently across RTBF’s application landscape was as demanding as the server-side workflow itself. Dotscreen integrated the SGAI workflow into RTBF’s existing applications across Web, iOS, Android, Smart TVs, Android TV, Apple TV, and operator set-top boxes, while simultaneously adding Amazon Fire TV and Hisense/VIDAA to the platform portfolio.

Extensive validation and regression testing verified that introducing SGAI preserved every aspect of the existing viewing experience across more than 100 device models, from playback and DRM to navigation and content discovery, allowing RTBF to introduce a new advertising architecture without compromising reliability during one of the world’s largest live sporting events.

Building a replicable blueprint for regulated broadcasters across Europe

Only a few broadcasters had implemented SGAI within their workflow and possibly none at this scale before, which makes RTBF’s tournament an early, public proof point rather than a one-off success story. Many of the constraints RTBF had to address, including frequency controls, content restrictions, and advertising compliance, will be familiar to public broadcasters across Europe.

Because it runs on open HLS interstitial standards instead of proprietary manifest logic, what RTBF proved during this World Cup is not locked to one broadcaster or one tournament. RTBF is already carrying those lessons into its everyday programming, applying the same workflow to its regular broadcast schedule, not just tournament coverage.

About RTBF:

RTBF is Belgium’s French-language public broadcaster, delivering live and on-demand television, radio, and digital services to audiences across Belgium and reaching viewers across Europe. RTBF holds broadcast rights to major sporting events including the FIFA World Cup and operates under strict European public broadcasting regulations governing advertising delivery.