Starling bets show-level data is the missing piece in CTV

Who needs another CTV supply-side platform? No one, by founder Michael Bassik's own admission, which is precisely why he built one. Starling launched last month with about 20 staff after a year in stealth to attack the single biggest pain point in streaming TV buying: the absence of show-level data. Starling works directly with CTV publishers including AMC, TelevisaUnivision, Paramount and Telly, turning program-level signals (content, genre, app, show title) into custom audience segments buyers can target in private marketplace deals. Pairing show titles with audience identifiers "is the holy grail" for buyers, Bassik said, and from the supply side "deals backed by content signals typically see higher demand and better ad prices." The obstacle is legal as much as technical: the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act makes many publishers reluctant to attach show-level data to user IDs in a bid request. "The VPPA has convinced certain publishers, especially larger media companies, that they should not be sharing content-level signals," Bassik said. Starling's answer is to keep the data inside clean rooms and audience modelling so personally identifiable information is not exposed, though it declined to name its third-party modelling partners.

The crux

Starling is staking a company on the gap between what CTV buyers demand (show-level transparency) and what publishers are legally and competitively willing to share, betting it can broker that data through clean rooms in a way that lifts yield without breaking the VPPA.

Sell-side read

Show-level transparency is the clearest lever to pull CTV budget off linear and toward programmatic. Publishers that resist sharing content signals to protect a competitive moat may be pricing themselves out of the very premium that content signals unlock, because buyers consistently reward clean, direct supply.

Watch

whether Starling names its data-modelling partners and whether larger media companies, beyond AMC and Paramount, sign on given the VPPA risk.