Sky, ITV, Channel 4 Plan UK Premium Video Ad Marketplace 2026

Sky, Channel 4, and ITV have announced plans to launch a joint self-serve TV advertising marketplace in 2026, aimed at making premium on-demand and streaming ad inventory more accessible to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and digital-native advertisers. The marketplace will allow these advertisers to run a single campaign across all three broadcasters, leveraging biddable pricing, user-friendly tools, and analytics to optimize and measure ad performance. Powered by Comcast Advertising's Universal Ads platform and FreeWheel's technology, this initiative seeks to open up TV advertising to new brands accustomed to buying media in social and digital environments and to compete with big tech companies like Google and Meta that dominate the digital ad market. The broadcasters are also exploring a joint agency-facing solution based on ITV’s Planet V technology to simplify addressable inventory purchases for media agencies. This collaboration builds on prior partnerships, such as the joint advertising measurement tool Lantern, and aims to provide a streamlined and innovative way to attract a broader range of advertisers to premium TV content. Executives emphasize that this marketplace is a strategic fightback against big tech's dominance in advertising, offering the scale, quality, and trusted environment of TV advertising in a more accessible format.