FreeWheel vs Google

CTV Ad Consumption Grows Across Europe

FreeWheel, a Comcast company, released its Video Monetisation Report for the first half of 2026, revealing that Connected TV (CTV) now accounts for 53% of premium video ad views in Europe, up from previous periods. Premium video ad views overall increased 20% year-over-year, and programmatic CTV ad views grew 44%. Live programming's share of ad views rose to 32% from 25% in the second half of 2025. The report, based on aggregated data from the FreeWheel platform, highlights the shift toward streaming and programmatic buying, with broadcasters integrating linear and digital inventory. It also notes improvements in data availability and transparency, with enriched data increasingly incorporated into bid requests. Emmanuel Josserand, Senior Director at Comcast Advertising, emphasized the growing opportunity for advertisers and the need for broadcasters to evolve their streaming and programmatic strategies.

• CTV accounted for 53% of premium video ad views in Europe in H1 2026.
• Premium video ad views in Europe increased 20% year-over-year in H1 2026.
• Programmatic CTV ad views grew 44% year-over-year in H1 2026.

Inference Engineering: The New Tokenomics of AI

The article, a paid newsletter piece, argues that the AI industry is shifting from a training-centric to an inference-centric phase. It explains that as models become more capable, the economic focus moves to the continuous operation of AI across enterprise workflows. The piece details the technical and economic distinctions between prefill (reading) and decode (writing) stages of inference, and introduces concepts like KV cache management, batching, prefix caching, and latency considerations. The author predicts that enterprise inference will become economically as important as pretraining, and that the optimization goal changes from lowest token cost to lowest cost per accepted outcome at required latency. The article is primarily an analytical commentary, not a news report, and is likely paywalled as indicated by 'Subscribe to Premium to Gain Access'.

Earth's Faster Rotation Threatens Global IT Systems

The article discusses the impending decision by the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) in October 2026 to potentially abolish the leap second due to the Earth's faster rotation. This could necessitate a negative leap second, which has never been tested and poses significant risks to IT infrastructure, including power grids, telecommunications, and satellite navigation. Google and Meta use 'smearing' techniques to smooth time adjustments, but a negative leap second remains a serious concern. Climate change may delay the need for a negative leap second until after 2029, as melting polar ice slows the Earth's rotation. If abolished, a leap hour might be introduced, but rare adjustments could be problematic. The article highlights the fragility of global timekeeping and the potential for widespread system outages.

• The General Conference on Weights and Measures will vote on abolishing the leap second in October 2026.
• A negative leap second has never been tested and could cause outages in power grids, telecom, and satellite systems.
• Google and Meta use 'smearing' techniques to mitigate leap second issues.

Data Agent Kit is now GA: Bring Google Data Cloud to any coding agent

Data Agent Kit is now generally available, enabling integration of Google Data Cloud with any coding agent.