Viant Technology Inc., a leader in AI-powered programmatic advertising, announced it acquired IRIS.TV, a global content data platform built for CTV. Major content owners and platforms rely on IRIS to supply a consistent content signal to marketers. IRIS has integrated with over 1,400 video content owners, platforms and content management systems indexing over 60,000,000 streaming video files. This acquisition will accelerate the mission of IRIS to expand its CTV content identification at scale across premium publishers.

“We are excited to support IRIS’s mission to enhance the value of premium CTV content in the bidstream,” said Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Viant Technology.

“The IRIS team has built an outstanding platform that addresses a huge problem in the ecosystem around standardizing content classification in CTV,” said Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Viant Technology. “We are excited to support their mission to enhance the value of premium CTV content in the bidstream. IRIS’s position at the intersection of CTV and the ad tech ecosystem aligns seamlessly with Viant’s vision for the future.”

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IRIS enables major advertisers and agencies to target and measure video campaigns using content-level contextual, emotional and brand-suitability data. IRIS’s technology leverages AI to analyze video content about each episode, movie or clip. The IRIS Content Data Platform and IRIS_ID was built to support a diverse set of use cases to enable CTV to reach its full potential, and Viant is committed to continue making the IRIS_ID available to the entire ecosystem. IRIS will continue to operate independently, led by co-founders Field Garthwaite and Richie Hyden.

“We are excited to join the Viant team while continuing our global CTV content identification mission,” said Field Garthwaite, co-founder and CEO of IRIS.TV. “Tim and Chris are true industry visionaries, who have withstood the test of time in an industry that is constantly evolving. Their leadership in AI, CTV, and innovation will provide us with the support we need as we continue to expand IRIS.TV’s reach.”

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Viant management will be discussing the acquisition on their upcoming third quarter 2024 earnings webcast, which will be held today November 12th at 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time (5:00 p.m. Eastern Time).