The two minutes of television inventory sold by multichannel video players (MVPDs) – which can be made addressable by targeting through the set-top box – has historically been fragmented across providers, making it complex for a national advertiser to run addressable campaigns at scale.
Today, MVPDs are jockeying to sell each other’s addressable TV supply, and NCC Media, majority-owned by Comcast, and AT&T’s Xandr unit have risen as frontrunners.
Both companies, headed up by former Xaxis exec Nicolle Pangis at NCC and Brian Lesser at Xandr, agree they’re making a similar play for more addressable inventory.
And both deny they’re competitive with each other. AT&T, after all, is a major NCC customer.
NCC is a sales consortium between Comcast, Cox and Charter, all three of which use it to sell inventory, as do most major MVPDs and 200 local TV networks. NCC sells across 85 million US homes, 45 million of which are addressable.
Xandr sells addressable TV across DirecTV’s 19 million satellite homes, and last September signed exclusive deals to represent addressable inventory from Altice, which covers the tri-state area, and Frontier, which covers small and medium-sized markets along the east coast. The deal brings Xandr’s reach to 18 million homes. (Interestingly, NCC is the exclusive sales rep for DirecTV and Altice in the local linear markets, showing how intertwined the MVPD landscape is.)
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