Alliance Digitale this month published a comprehensive guide to technical standards for connected television advertising, setting out a reference framework for the French digital TV market across video delivery, programmatic buying, and supply chain traceability. The 300-member industry association released the document on March 12, 2026, describing it as a pedagogical tool rather than a prescriptive mandate, with the stated aim of reducing fragmentation in an ecosystem that encompasses CTV, BVOD, FAST, IPTV, and streaming environments.

The guide arrives as France's broadcasting landscape shifts beneath the feet of buyers and sellers alike. Telecom operators have begun introducing FAST channels through their TV boxes and applications, streamer-launched ad-supported tiers are multiplying, and new advertising formats are surfacing across sales houses at pace. According to Stéphane Bismuth, co-lead of the Alliance Digitale Digital TV Working Group and co-founder of Viznet, "The CTV market is evolving very quickly. After ad-supported offerings launched by streamers and broadcasters, telecom operators are now entering the space by introducing FAST channels through their TV boxes and applications. At the same time, new advertising formats are emerging within sales houses' offerings."

Three families of standards

The guide is structured around three distinct categories, each addressing a separate part of the advertising supply chain. Video standards cover ad delivery, interactivity, and measurement through VAST, SIMID, and OMSDK. Bidding standards address programmatic buying and monetization via OpenRTB 2.6. Traceability standards - encompassing ads.txt, app-ads.txt, sellers.json, the SupplyChain Object, inventorypartnerdomain, and ACIF - support transparency, reconciliation, and trust across the supply chain.

The division is deliberate. Each family answers a distinct operational question: video standards address what is being delivered and how; bidding standards address how transactions are executed at scale; traceability standards address who sells what and through whom. According to the document, these standards, taken together, "help structure a coherent Digital TV value chain - from creative delivery to campaign measurement, including the transaction layer itself."

VAST adoption: a divided ecosystem

One of the more striking data points in the guide concerns the actual distribution of VAST version adoption across publishers in 2025. According to analysis from the Cape Ad Validation tool - which is primarily used by publishers in EMEA and North America - VAST 2 and VAST 3 together remain dominant, with VAST 2 accounting for 41.4% of declared compatibility. VAST 4 represents 22.2%, VAST 4.1 reaches 2.4%, and VAST 4.2 stands at 3.7%. The document notes this reflects "a high degree of inertia in the ecosystem, particularly due to the diversity of players."

This concentration of older versions matters for buyers and sellers operating programmatically. VAST 4 and its successors introduced capabilities including Universal Ad ID registration, high-resolution asset support for large screens, and extensions for the EU Digital Services Act. Remaining on VAST 2 or VAST 3 forecloses access to those features and limits creative reconciliation capabilities across platforms. The figures cited in the guide do not represent impression volumes or actual usage - they capture declared compatibility at the broadcast level, making them a conservative indicator of true implementation progress.

The IAB Tech Lab released VAST CTV Addendum 2024 in July 2024, specifically adding Universal Ad ID support for VAST 2.0 and 3.x - a node already present in VAST 4.0 - and introducing DSA icon support for EU compliance. That addendum was designed in part to bridge the gap between older deployed versions and newer capabilities without requiring full migration. The VAST adoption data in the Alliance Digitale guide suggests the gap between what is technically possible and what is operationally deployed remains wide.

OpenRTB 2.6 and the programmatic TV stack

On the bidding side, the guide identifies OpenRTB 2.6 as the relevant standard for TV-like buying in programmatic environments. The document categorizes it under keywords of bidding, decisioning, and scalability. OpenRTB 2.6 introduced support for CTV-specific signals including content object extensions, live event parameters, and placement type attributes through the plcmt field that helps distinguish CTV inventory from other video environments.

The relevance of OpenRTB 2.6 to the French market reflects a broader industry direction. Google completed its full transition to OpenRTB protocol on February 15, 2025, abandoning its proprietary Authorized Buyers RTB protocol and signaling that the standard has effectively become the baseline expectation for interoperability between buyers and sellers. The IAB Tech Lab released CTV ad format standards for public comment on December 11, 2025, with specifications that explicitly integrate with OpenRTB for bid request signaling - further reinforcing OpenRTB 2.6's position as the connective tissue of programmatic CTV.

For DSPs and other adtech platforms, the Alliance Digitale guide specifies that they "are responsible for technical support, signal readability, and transparency of implementations offered to the market." The phrasing is notably direct. It positions signal fidelity not as an aspiration but as an operational responsibility, particularly in environments where the diversity of players - smart TVs, set-top boxes, streaming sticks, IPTV infrastructure - creates persistent inconsistency in how bid requests are formed and transmitted.

Traceability: maturity gaps across five mechanisms

The traceability section maps five distinct standards at different stages of adoption. Ads.txt and app-ads.txt are classified as mature, as are sellers.json. The SupplyChain Object is listed as in adoption. The inventorypartnerdomain field - which identifies the domain of an inventory partner when inventory is purchased through an intermediary - is classified as emerging. ACIF (Ad Creative ID Framework) carries a POC (proof of concept) designation.

Each addresses a different question about who is in the supply chain and what creative is being delivered. Ads.txt allows publishers to declare which sellers are authorized to sell their inventory, blocking domain spoofing and inventory arbitrage - a mechanism PPC Land has covered since its early days. Sellers.json extends this by requiring SSPs to list the publishers they work with, enabling DSPs to verify the source of each impression. The SupplyChain Object - which Centro required of its supply partners in 2022 - encodes the full chain of entities involved in a transaction in the bid request itself, allowing buyers to trace the path from publisher to their own platform.

The gap between mature and emerging standards carries practical implications. In CTV environments where inventory frequently passes through multiple intermediaries - content distributor, ad server, SSP, network, SSAI provider - buyers relying only on ads.txt and sellers.json may still encounter opacity at intermediate steps. The SupplyChain Object was designed to close exactly that gap, but its classification as "in adoption" in the guide suggests French market implementations remain incomplete. Inventorypartnerdomain, even newer, is still emerging.

ACIF's POC classification is notable given its relevance to creative reconciliation. The framework assigns Universal Ad IDs to creatives, enabling matching between what a buyer intended to serve and what was actually delivered at the player. In an ecosystem where multiple transcoding and insertion layers can alter or substitute creative assets, the ability to verify what ran is foundational to measurement accuracy. Its early-stage status suggests that while the concept is understood, operationalization across the French publisher and platform landscape has not yet begun in earnest.

French publishers and the format landscape

A dedicated section of the guide catalogs French broadcaster inventory and the ad formats each supports. FranceTV Publicité offers Full Screen Non Skippable and Pause Ads. TF1 Pub supports Pause Ads, Format Display, Format Video, and In Content Banner. M6 Unlimited offers the widest range, including Full Screen Non Skippable, Pause Ads, Format Display, Format Video, and QR code. Canal+ Brand Solution supports Pause Ads and table formats.

This publisher-level mapping is operationally significant. It provides buyers with a structured view of what is purchasable across French broadcaster inventory, reducing the research overhead that typically accompanies CTV campaign planning. Format fragmentation - where similar formats carry different names, different technical specifications, and different activation requirements depending on the publisher - has been one of the persistent frictions in scaling CTV campaigns programmatically.

The guide acknowledges this directly, noting that its "Innovative Formats & Standardization" component - currently classified as "in structuring" - aims to harmonize innovative CTV formats to make them "easier to activate, compare, and scale at industrial level." The classification itself signals that this work is unfinished. IAB Tech Lab's Ad Format Hero program began collecting format submissions from more than 40 companies in 2024, narrowing to six standardized formats released for public comment in December 2025. That global effort and the Alliance Digitale's French market work are moving in parallel rather than in sequence.

Among the ad formats detailed in the guide, four are confirmed as available in France: Content Squeeze Back Ads (the current program is resized to make room for the ad, most often in an L-shape), Pause Ads (the format appears when the user pauses the content), Screen Saver Ads (similar to Pause Ads but triggered by the operating system after an extended period of inactivity), and Ad Squeeze Back Ads (the original ad is resized to include additional elements, most often referred to as a Companion Ad). Each is classified as an in-stream format.

Roles and responsibilities across the chain

The conclusion of the guide assigns explicit responsibilities to each part of the value chain. Advertisers and agencies are called upon to demand compatible inventories, integrate standards into evaluation grids, and train teams in the technical challenges of digital TV. Advertising agencies, broadcasters, and SSPs "must continue to integrate and certify key standards and ensure their proper functioning in increasingly complex broadcasting environments." DSPs "are responsible for technical support, signal readability, and transparency of implementations offered to the market."

The framing is significant. By naming DSPs explicitly on signal readability and transparency, the document places a technical obligation on platforms that often describe themselves as neutral conduits. In CTV environments particularly, where the diversity of ad servers, content delivery networks, and insertion mechanisms can make debugging difficult, this responsibility assignment clarifies where accountability should sit.

According to Mélanie Toustou, co-lead of the Alliance Digitale Digital TV Working Group and Associate Director Platforms at Magnite: "Measurement is widely discussed today. But before talking about measurement, we need to talk about standards. As long as we do not share common definitions, aligned methodologies and a clear framework, we are not measuring the same thing - and therefore cannot compare or optimize effectively."

The document was produced by the Alliance Digitale Digital TV Working Group, which brings together publishers, sales houses, technology platforms, agencies, and market experts. Acknowledgments in the guide identify AudienceProject, Canal+ Brand Solutions, cape.io, Equativ, and RMC as contributing organizations.

Why this matters for the marketing community

The guide arrives at a moment when CTV advertising in Europe is developing rapidly but unevenly. IAB Europe's CTV Working Group published findings on March 11, 2026 - one day before the Alliance Digitale release - identifying that CTV remains constrained by fragmented identifiers, shared-device attribution gaps, inconsistent platform standards, and the absence of a universal cross-screen measurement framework. The two documents address related but distinct problems: the IAB Europe work focuses on conversion measurement capability, while the Alliance Digitale guide focuses on the technical infrastructure that must function correctly before measurement can be trusted.

Without reliable ad delivery (VAST), without clean transaction signals (OpenRTB 2.6), and without a traceable supply path (ads.txt, sellers.json, SupplyChain Object), measurement output is unreliable regardless of how sophisticated the attribution methodology. The document makes this point directly: standards "are a prerequisite for a connected and traceable advertising chain from end to end, from creation to measurement, including programmatic buying and broadcasting."

The guide also addresses something the broader industry often sidesteps: that not all standards carry the same urgency. By publishing maturity classifications - mature, in adoption, emerging, in structuring, POC - Alliance Digitale gives market participants a prioritization framework rather than a flat inventory of requirements. A broadcaster deploying VAST 2 can continue operating in the short term while understanding that VAST 4's Universal Ad ID capabilities represent the next necessary step. A DSP that has implemented sellers.json but not yet the SupplyChain Object knows where the gap lies.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Alliance Digitale, a 300-member French digital marketing and data association representing publishers, sales houses, technology platforms, agencies, and advertisers. The guide was produced by its Digital TV Working Group, co-led by Stéphane Bismuth (Viznet) and Mélanie Toustou (Magnite). Contributing organizations include AudienceProject, Canal+ Brand Solutions, cape.io, Equativ, and RMC.

What: A reference guide to technical standards for CTV and digital TV advertising, structured around three families - Video Standards (VAST, SIMID, OMSDK), Bidding Standards (OpenRTB 2.6), and Traceability Standards (ads.txt, app-ads.txt, sellers.json, SupplyChain Object, inventorypartnerdomain, ACIF). The guide includes VAST adoption data showing VAST 2 at 41.4% and VAST 4 at 22.2% declared compatibility in 2025, a French publisher format catalogue covering FranceTV Publicité, TF1 Pub, M6 Unlimited, and Canal+ Brand Solution, and explicit responsibility assignments across the value chain.

When: The guide was published on March 12, 2026, produced by the Alliance Digitale Digital TV Working Group drawing on international standards developed by the IAB Tech Lab.

Where: The guide targets the French digital TV market primarily, though its technical content is referenced against IAB Tech Lab specifications applicable across EMEA and beyond. It is available via alliancedigitale.org.

Why: Digital TV environments - CTV, BVOD, FAST, IPTV, and streaming - present a high degree of heterogeneity in technical stacks and implementation maturity. Without shared standards, performance comparability, cross-environment measurement consistency, and overall market quality cannot be assured. The guide also addresses format standardization, where the emergence of innovative CTV formats without consistent implementation frameworks has limited programmatic scalability for French advertisers and publishers.

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