April 28, 2021 | Authored By
One month ago, we took the virtual stage at ONE21 and redefined what it means to be a developer with a leading media and technology company. The through line of ONE21 was convergence: showing the world that innovation and partnership are inextricably linked—and when combined, an unstoppable force.
At Comcast and NBCUniversal, we’ve begun writing the next chapter of Broadband, Aggregation and Streaming. It’s a massive undertaking—one that will change our company, and the industry, for the better. We can’t do it alone. And we wouldn’t want to.
Because we know that when we come together—when we join forces to connect our content with consumers, consumers with marketers, and marketers with technology and data—we can multiply our impact. And there’s no better example of the power of collaboration than OpenAP.
Today, OpenAP unveiled OpenID, marking a historic moment for our industry. Together, alongside the vast majority of programmers and agency partners, we’re creating a truly scalable solution for the premium video marketplace that will propel the entire advanced advertising ecosystem forward.
Since the beginning, OpenAP and NBCUniversal haven’t just created shared value—we have shared the same values.
OpenID follows those same principles. A solution that drives interoperability at scale, OpenID is powered by collaboration and grounded in trust. It will empower programmers to share data and information without sacrificing consumer privacy, all with the knowledge that the identifiers created will be some of the most deterministic in the industry. This will also enable more competition in the measurement space, as legacy approaches are increasingly inadequate in keeping up with the accelerating shift in consumption. NBCU alone has 300 consumer endpoints and no single measurement solution measures them all accurately. Through OpenID, programmer viewership data will become the basis for planning and measurement across content owners, enabling multiple partners to create more comprehensive cross-platform solutions.
Just as NBCUniversal continues to double-down on our own investments in data and identity—from the NBCU Audience Insights Hub to NBCU ID—we are also committed to achieving interoperability with all our partners. Because that’s how we create real, scaled, meaningful change—and push our companies and our industry forward.
As a member of OpenAP, it’s been a privilege to work with CEO David Levy and his team. We’re looking forward to participating in this critical work in the months and years ahead—and inviting many more industry partners to the table.
OpenID is a giant step forward for each of us. And the spirit behind it—the collaboration, innovation, and trust—will do more than just help our entire industry leap into the future. It will help us create that future, together.