Fox, NBCU and others to share streaming data and certify measurement firms in new partnership

“This is the first time that our industry has come together and said, ‘Look, there are principles of currency that need to be adhered to by any of these new currency products to become standard,’” Halley said. “There have been other efforts in the past to help enable those products, but never have we put them under the microscope and said how do they work and how do they interface with what the industry needs?”

Among the basic standards, according to Halley, are “transactional model flexibility” that gives buyers and sellers the ability to choose between doing business on demographics, advanced audiences or outcomes. “They have to be interoperable with the current ecosystem,” Halley said. “They need to be built on modern infrastructure and support things like clean rooms. They have to be transparent. They have to be auditable.”

Similar to markets outside U.S.

U.S. players have been looking at joint industry councils in other countries, said Krishan Bhatia, president and chief business officer of NBCU.

“We felt strongly we should take a page out of the book of those other markets and formalize it in a new entity that can accelerate execution,” he said. “The track record we had with OpenAP over the past few years created both a trust among members and putting points on the board. We’ve built a multi-hundred-billion advanced advertising platform and business that governs, very similarly, data and audience targeting standards for activations for agency and client partners.”

The move comes as advertisers and audiences rapidly shift dollars and viewing to ad-supported streaming. And by limiting its standards and certification effort to streaming at this point, the JIC has bypassed some of the thornier issues of measurement. Much of the hardest part of measuring TV viewership is in quantifying linear TV audiences that use a variety of devices, including broadcast signals.