Viant Technology on September 24, 2026 extended Direct Access, the route its demand-side platform uses to reach streaming publishers without an exchange in between, from open-market buying to negotiated private and guaranteed deals. The Irvine, California company said the change is live with publishers that account for 94% of demand transacted programmatically, a figure it attributes to Jounce Media, and that neither buyer nor seller pays anything to set up or run a deal on the route.

In Short

Viant, a company that buys streaming TV ads on behalf of brands, now lets advertisers book pre-agreed deals with large streaming publishers through its own direct connection instead of through a middleman exchange. This matters because much of the most valuable streaming TV inventory is sold through such deals, and every middleman in the chain usually keeps part of the money. Viant says the deal itself costs nothing extra on this route, so more of a brand's budget is meant to reach the publisher, though the company has not yet published cost figures for deals.

What changed on September 24

Viant set out the change in a statement distributed through Business Wire at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on September 24. Direct Access is the company's flagship supply path optimization product, which Viant describes as connecting advertisers to premium connected television inventory through more direct and cost-efficient routes. Until then, it handled open-market buying only. It now also executes private marketplace deals, in which a publisher invites selected buyers to bid above a floor, and programmatic guaranteed deals, in which price and volume are fixed before the campaign runs.

Deal support is live across four connection types, according to Viant: FreeWheel, Magnite's SpringServe, Publica and custom OpenRTB integrations. The company says the expansion reaches the industry's largest publishers, which it puts at 94% of programmatic demand, citing Jounce Media.

Several details are absent. The headline of the release refers to the largest publishers in CTV, while the body refers to the industry's largest publishers without tying the Jounce figure to streaming television, so whether the 94% measures connected TV demand or programmatic demand across every channel is not stated. Neither the date of the Jounce analysis nor its method is given. No list of participating publishers accompanies the release; the only seller identified is DIRECTV, whose advertising chief supplied a statement.

Viant describes the move as the second in a series of announcements tied to its Publisher Solutions program, which it says partners can use at no cost.

How a deal travels without an exchange

Deals are old plumbing. In a conventional arrangement, a publisher or its supply-side platform creates the deal and a deal ID travels inside each bid request, so the buying platform can recognise the negotiated terms. OpenRTB, the protocol maintained by IAB Tech Lab, carries that identifier in a private marketplace object attached to each impression, together with a floor price and an auction-type field that can declare the floor to be the agreed price rather than a reserve. The exchange that clears the transaction normally charges for the service.

Direct Access takes that step out. The route connects buyers to publisher inventory without routing through a supply-side platform, and all three named partners are ad servers - the systems streaming publishers use to decide which advertisement fills each slot in a commercial break.

Each has its own lineage. FreeWheel, a Comcast subsidiary, runs one of the largest ad servers in premium streaming, with a publisher base that includes A+E, DIRECTV, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount and NBCUniversal; Amazon began applying its shopping and streaming signals to programmatic guaranteed deals inside that ad server on June 19, 2026. SpringServe is Magnite's streaming ad server, which Magnite combined with its sell-side platform capabilities on April 23, 2025, and which Jounce Media's March 2025 benchmarking credited with a connection to 99% of US streaming supply. Publica, bought by Integral Ad Science for $220 million in August 2021, handles ad pod decisioning, unified auctions and server-side ad insertion; Viant extended open-market Direct Access to streaming services running on Publica in July 2026. Custom OpenRTB integrations cover publishers that run on none of the three.

What the release leaves open is almost as instructive as what it states. It does not say where deal terms are negotiated - inside Viant's platform or in the publisher's ad server. It does not say whether a deal struck on the route is visible to other buying platforms, or whether deal IDs already running through exchanges can be moved across.

What "no fee" covers

According to Viant, unlike a purchase through an exchange, Direct Access carries no fee to set up or execute a deal for either party, so more of every advertiser dollar goes to working media instead of transaction costs. The claim concerns the route itself. The release does not address Viant's own platform charges to advertisers, the ad serving fees publishers pay FreeWheel, Magnite or Integral Ad Science, or data costs attached to a campaign. Nor does it offer a price comparison between a deal run on Direct Access and the same deal run through an exchange.

The only cost figure on record predates deal support. On the second-quarter earnings call in August, chief financial officer Larry Madden attributed an average 35% reduction in CPMs to Direct Access - a company figure, covering open-market buying rather than deals, and not independently verified.

Industry benchmarks show what is at stake. IAB Spain's April 2026 supply-side platform guide, citing the ANA Programmatic Transparency Benchmark 2025, put the share of programmatic investment reaching genuine, measurable, viewable impressions at 41%, with 26.1% consumed by transaction costs covering DSP fees, data and SSP charges. The same guide estimated that a direct connection between publisher and SSP delivers 70% to 80% of an advertiser's money to the publisher, against 40% to 50% on indirect paths.

Competitors price their direct routes differently. The Trade Desk charges publishers a flat 4.5% fee for OpenPath, which chief executive Jeff Green described to investors in February 2026 as meant to be nearly breakeven; that same month, Dentsu and WPP were reported to have left OpenPath over transparency concerns and what they described as hidden fees. When Viant opened its SupplyIQ dashboard in June, it said it charged publishers nothing for Direct Access participation, in contrast to competing programs that take a percentage of advertiser spend.

Deals or auctions: an unsettled argument

Richie Hyden, Viant's senior vice president for supply and CTV, framed the change around how buyers already behave. "By extending Direct Access to support deals, we're closing the gap for how advertisers actually transact CTV, via deals," he said.

That is not a consensus view. Green told investors in February 2026 that the shift from insertion orders and programmatic guaranteed toward biddable connected television was accelerating, particularly in live sports and premium episodic content. On August 6, he used The Trade Desk's earnings call to criticise rivals wrapping fixed-price deals in agentic products at fees near 1% - coverage that also recorded Amazon charging 1% for open web publisher ads through its DSP and nothing for programmatic guaranteed deals on its own inventory.

Buyers, at least in stated preference, lean toward deals. A State of Programmatic survey of more than 200 decision-makers published in January 2026 found 76% rating curated marketplaces, private marketplaces or deal ID-based supply as important or very important for the year. IAB research published on July 14, 2026, based on 360 digital video decision-makers, put buyer confidence in where CTV ads ran at 57% for publisher-direct and guaranteed deals and 33% for the open exchange.

Even the most prominent recent opening of premium streaming supply kept a deal wrapper. Netflix inventory, previously reachable only through programmatic guaranteed or private marketplace deals, became available on The Trade Desk through always-on marketplace deals with no minimum spend on July 20, 2026. The movement ran between deal types, not away from deals altogether.

So which camp has the money on its side? Neither Viant nor The Trade Desk has published the split between deal-based and auction-based CTV spend on its platform.

An upfront milestone and a longer forecast

Viant placed the expansion against television's annual negotiating cycle. According to Viant, eMarketer's forecast projects that US CTV upfront ad spending will exceed primetime linear TV upfront ad spending in 2026 for the first time. The release gives no dollar figures for either side of that comparison.

eMarketer's broader projection is more cautious. The research firm places total US connected TV advertising at just under $38 billion for 2026 and does not expect it to overtake linear TV spending until 2028, and then by only 2%. The two statements measure different things - commitments made in advance of a television season against full-year spend across every buying method - and they are not contradictory. The milestone Viant cites is simply the narrower one. Nielsen's 2026 Upfront Planning Guide captured the imbalance underneath: streaming held 66.7% of ad-supported television time among adults aged 18 to 49, while linear still took 67.5% of total television advertising spending.

The release pairs the forecast with an argument about budgets. As performance channels become harder and more expensive to mine for existing demand, it says, brands increasingly look to CTV to create new demand, reaching the next customer rather than retargeting the last one. Viant offers no data for that shift. It is the company's stated thesis, and the one around which it says its platform was built.

Direct Access inside Viant

The route has absorbed a steadily larger share of Viant's own connected TV money. When Viant expanded its identity partnership with TransUnion in January 2025, the Direct Access Program was already described as the source of its direct integrations with streaming platforms. LG Ad Solutions joined through the program in July 2025, bringing 45 million connected devices in the United States. By the third quarter of 2025, when CTV reached 46% of total advertiser spend on the platform, nearly half of that CTV spend flowed through Direct Access, with pathways to Disney+, Paramount+, NBCUniversal, Tubi and Samsung.

Then the share climbed quickly. Just over half of CTV spend went through the route in the first quarter of 2026 and more than 80% in the second, Viant disclosed in August, with management expecting the figure to pass 90% as Publica publishers come on board. At the June 11 debut of Viant's SupplyIQ dashboard, the company put it at 85%.

Those percentages describe open-market buying, because deals were not supported. How much of Viant's CTV spend was running through exchange-based deals before September 24 - and therefore how much could now migrate onto the route - the company has not said.

Two customers on the record

The release carries two external statements, one from a seller and one from a buyer. Both come with commercial context.

Amy Leifer, chief advertising sales officer at DIRECTV Advertising, spoke for the supply side. "Premium content deserves a supply path built for its value. Direct Access with Viant has given us a more efficient path to advertiser demand and real transparency into how our inventory performs. Extending that model to deals lets us bring those same benefits to more advertisers, at scale, without adding friction," she said. DIRECTV sells through several buying platforms. It developed a custom Ventura TV operating system with The Trade Desk in 2025, and in April 2026 the satellite and streaming MVPD became the first multichannel distributor to plug into LiveRamp's Conversions API Hub.

Courtney Manning, senior manager for brand media at WHOOP, spoke for the buy side. "As a performance-driven brand, every dollar we spend on CTV needs to work harder. Direct Access has let us put more of our budget into working media instead of transaction fees, and the transparency into where our inventory comes from has made it easier to see which impressions are actually driving results," she said. WHOOP is not a neutral observer. The wearable technology company named Viant its DSP of Record in a multi-year agreement disclosed on March 5, 2026, covering North America and 56 international markets.

Neither statement contains a figure for yield, cost or outcomes.

Four products around one bidder

Direct Access is one of four core products in Viant Publisher Solutions, according to Viant, alongside SupplyIQ, Household ID and the IRIS Content ID. Together, the company says, they give publishers greater transparency into supply quality and monetization while giving advertisers access to higher-quality, better-addressable inventory.

Each piece has a separate origin. SupplyIQ is the publisher dashboard opened in June, which shows publishers which signals are present on their bid requests and how Viant scores their inventory. Household ID is Viant's identity framework, which the company says covers 95% of US adults aged 18 and over through its TransUnion data. IRIS Content ID derives from IRIS.TV, which Viant acquired in November 2024, and classifies programming down to scene level.

A fifth ingredient appears in the release without being named as a product: attention signals. Paired with them, according to Viant, the same capabilities let advertisers move from knowing who was exposed to an ad to evaluating the quality of that exposure. The attention data comes from TVision, which Viant agreed to buy for $40 million on April 15, 2026, split between $22.5 million in cash and $17.5 million in Class A stock, and completed in May. Ownership of a measurement panel by a buying platform has drawn scrutiny; PPC Land's coverage of the VAB engagement guide in July asked whether a vendor presented as independent measurement stays structurally independent once a DSP owns it.

Viant also says its supply quality scoring is verified by Jounce Media. The scope and method of that verification are not described.

Hyden tied the pieces together. "Every direct connection between an advertiser and a publisher strengthens the signal quality that drives the entire performance flywheel," he said. "Publishers receive increased yield from their direct buys, advertisers see an increase in working media and delivered outcomes, and that shared value is exactly what Viant Publisher Solutions was built to create."

What it means for exchanges

Every deal executed on Direct Access is one that does not clear through a supply-side platform. For a category already under pressure, that is revenue leaving by design. Magnite chief executive Michael Barrett said in July that the market would end up with far fewer SSPs, while PubMatic has spent more than a year attributing revenue declines to a single demand-side platform that changed its supply path routing in mid-2025.

The integration list contains a twist. One of the three ad servers carrying Direct Access deals, SpringServe, belongs to Magnite, the largest independent sell-side company, whose ad server and SSP technology were brought together in 2025. The release does not say whether Magnite earns anything on deals executed through SpringServe under Direct Access, and Magnite is not quoted.

For publishers, the argument is yield: fewer intermediaries, more of the buyer's money arriving. For buyers, it is working media and transparency. Both are claims Viant makes, and neither has been quantified for deals. For the wider market, the open question is less whether a direct route to streaming inventory exists - several demand-side platforms now run one - than who pays for each route, and whether those charges are disclosed at all.

Corporate backdrop

The product statement arrived during a busy stretch for the company. On August 10, Viant reported second-quarter revenue of $104.3 million, up 34%, with a net loss of $1.8 million, and 21,135,122 Class A shares outstanding as of August 7.

Eight days before the Direct Access expansion, on September 16, a selling stockholder began an underwritten public offering of 8.5 million Class A shares, according to Viant, with underwriters holding a 30-day option to buy up to 1,275,000 additional shares from the company. Viant receives proceeds only from those option shares. The stock last traded at $12.60 on September 15, according to the preliminary prospectus supplement, and fell more than 11% in extended trading once the offering was disclosed, according to MT Newswires. The Business Wire page carrying the Direct Access release also lists the appointment of Craig Abrahams to Viant's board, effective August 10, 2026.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Viant Technology (NASDAQ: DSP), the Irvine, California demand-side platform, with statements from Richie Hyden, senior vice president for supply and CTV; Amy Leifer, chief advertising sales officer at DIRECTV Advertising; and Courtney Manning, senior manager for brand media at WHOOP. FreeWheel, Magnite's SpringServe and Publica are the named integration partners, and Jounce Media is cited for the demand figure.

What: Viant extended Direct Access, its supply path optimization route that bypasses exchanges, from open-market buying to private marketplace and programmatic guaranteed deals. According to Viant, no fee applies to buyer or seller for setting up or executing a deal on the route, and the change reaches publishers representing 94% of programmatic demand. The release does not cover Viant's own platform fees or ad serving costs, names no publisher list beyond DIRECTV, and does not specify whether the Jounce figure is limited to CTV.

When: The statement was distributed on September 24, 2026, at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, following the June 11, 2026 debut of Publisher Solutions, the July 2026 extension of Direct Access to Publica and a September 16, 2026 secondary share offering.

Where: The United States connected television market, through deal support live on FreeWheel, SpringServe, Publica and custom OpenRTB integrations.

Why: Much premium streaming inventory is bought through negotiated deals, which until September 24 sat outside a route that already carried more than 80% of Viant's CTV spend. Removing exchange fees from those deals shifts money away from supply-side platforms, while Viant argues it raises working media for advertisers and yield for publishers - claims that remain unquantified for deals.