Real-Time Advertising at NFL Scale: What It Takes to Serve Personalized Ads on Live Sports
Real-Time Advertising at NFL Scale: What It Takes to Serve Personalized Ads on Live Sports
In the fast-paced world of digital advertising, delivering personalized ads at scale during live sports events represents one of the greatest technical challenges. At the forefront of these innovations isJeet Mehta, a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix and ex-Amazon, whose leadership in building advanced real-time ad delivery systems and patented digital advertising technologies has been critical to Amazon’s success with the Thursday Night Football (TNF) streamed on Prime Video.
From 2020 through 2024, Mehta architected foundational systems to deliver personalized, dynamic ads to over millions of concurrent viewers during live TNF broadcasts. His work has enabled Amazon to provide targeted advertising on an unprecedented scale, transforming how digital ads engage audiences during live sports.
Delivering Dynamic Ads at Massive Scale
Serving ads during live sports like the NFL games involves unprecedented burst traffic and the need to maintain flawless viewer experience. Mehta designed a multi-layered approach to handle these challenges. His team built an innovative ad prefetch and caching system that smooths bid request traffic across ad breaks, significantly reducing infrastructure requirements and latency. Additionally, the development of a stream-based processing pipeline allowed ingesting more than 100 million impressions and related events within seconds of ad delivery.
Beyond traditional ads, Mehta also led the creation of interactive ad experiences for live streams, enabling features such as QR codes and polls to provide richer engagement. Further architectural innovation introduced a single-bid, multi-impression model, which simplified bid handling at scale by enabling reuse across multiple simultaneous impressions for over 100 million users.
These advancements coincided with a market experiencing steep growth. The global live streaming market is projected to reach$2.6 billion in 2025, growing at approximately 18% annually through 2033. Meanwhile, the sports streaming platform market is expected to expand from$65.38 billion in 2024to more than $330 billion by 2033.
According to industry sources, streaming services will exceed$11 billion in sports rights spending in 2025, creating massive demand for high-quality, scalable advertising solutions. This shift drives innovation in ad targeting, real-time measurement and interactive formats.
Industry Collaboration Accelerating Innovation
The live sports advertising ecosystem requires ongoing collaboration among technology providers, advertisers and rights holders. Key players, including Index Exchange, Amazon, NBCUniversal and FreeWheel, have partnered through the IAB Tech Lab to establish technical standards and APIs, such as the Concurrent Streams API, that enable near-real-time viewership data sharing. This innovation improves ad decisioning at peak concurrency moments and ensures reliability during high-traffic live events.
As an active contributor to solutions of this scale, Mehta’s work aligns with these industry-wide efforts to make personalized, real-time advertising during live events technically and commercially viable. Mehta commented, “Delivering personalized ads on live sports goes beyond technology at scale as it also involves collaboration across the ecosystem to solve complex challenges that benefit both viewers and advertisers.”
Leveraging Innovations to Enhance Advertising Technology
The advancements in live sports advertising are supported by critical patented technologies. Jeet Mehta is one of the inventors of two foundational patents: “Data storage interface layer with access and transformation management” and “Data storage interface for protocol-agnostic storage services.”
These patents establish the backbone for scalable and flexible data access in distributed environments. The first patent introduces a storage interface layer that manages access across heterogeneous backend clusters and, better yet, enables in-line data transformation and granular access control. The second extends this capability further, creating a protocol-agnostic interface that allows seamless access to clusters across network boundaries, including across private cloud systems such as VPCs.
By applying these innovations to advertising technology, Mehta’s work enables precise attribution and scalable ad event tracking: core functions for real-time bidding and interactive ad delivery. Integrated within distributed platforms, these patented systems reduce operational risk and infrastructure costs while simultaneously improving ad relevance and engagement at massive scale.
Business Impact at Amazon and Beyond
Amazon’s strategic investment of over $1 billion annually in streaming NFL rights underscores the importance of a reliable, scalable advertising platform. Live sports ad revenue is a critical contributor to monetization, therefore making system failures financially impactful. Mehta’s work on developing platform enables Amazon to capitalize on this opportunity by seamlessly delivering geo-targeted, personalized ads and hence enhancing revenue and subscriber growth.
Reflecting on the project success, Mehta stated, “Our team faced the challenge of delivering an uninterrupted, personalized ad experience to tens of millions of viewers simultaneously. The key was building systems that could operate reliably at scale while giving advertisers innovative options to engage audiences.”
