A television screen, not a feed
Connected TV viewers sit back, across a room, often with no skip button and nothing to click. The spot has to work at a distance: bold framing, legible supers, slower pacing than social and sound mixed for living-room speakers. Fifteen and thirty seconds are the standard lengths, though some platforms take six, twenty or sixty. Deliver 1920x1080 at the market's frame rate, 25 fps in Europe and 29.97 or 23.976 in the US, as a high-bitrate mezzanine file that the platform transcodes. Most inventory has no clickable elements, so a QR code is the usual bridge to a phone, sized and held long enough to scan from a sofa.
Loudness is a compliance item
In Europe, delivery follows EBU R128: -23 LUFS integrated loudness with true peaks no higher than -1 dBTP. In the US, ATSC A/85 sets -24 LKFS, and the CALM Act of 2010 made it the basis of FCC rules for broadcast commercials; streaming platforms publish targets of their own, often in the same range. A spot mastered for social media is far louder, and will either be rejected or turned down. Generated music beds and synthetic voice-overs are no exception: they need a proper mix and a measured loudness pass for each market, with the measurement report kept alongside the delivery files.
Safe areas and supers
Television interfaces overlay the edges of the frame, and some sets still crop them. Keep graphics inside the graphics-safe area, which EBU R 95 defines as the central 90 per cent of the picture, and important action within the central 93 per cent. Legal supers are where connected TV ads most often fail: text too small or on screen too briefly to read. In the UK, BCAP guidance on superimposed text, applied by Clearcast, sets minimum sizes and hold times. Generated compositions should leave generous margins around the product and reserve a clean band for supers from the first frame, rather than squeezing them in after the edit is locked.
Clearance and versions
In the UK, Clearcast clears ads for broadcasters against the BCAP Code: scripts first, then the finished film, with each version given its own clock number. Claims need substantiation, and a generated demonstration that flatters the product fails like any misleading demo. In the US, networks' standards and practices teams clear ads, and each version carries an Ad-ID. Every version is a separate clearance and delivery item, so plan the matrix before production. The studio builds the versions from one approved master, with dubbing into 30 languages and timing preserved, licensed music and product-lock, plus a per-asset record of which model made each shot.
Updated 25 September 2026