Gracenote, the content data business owned by Nielsen, and Magnite, which describes itself as "the largest independent sell-side advertising company", on November 10, 2026 announced an expanded collaboration to curate custom connected TV deals from Gracenote's program metadata. Gracenote converts an advertiser's targeting criteria into content segments, Magnite assembles the matching streaming inventory, and the buyer receives a deal identifier to run through Magnite's own buying tool or another platform. The arrangement covers the United States only. Advertisers and agencies request a deal by contacting Gracenote, according to the companies.

In Short

Gracenote, a Nielsen company that keeps detailed records on TV shows and live events, will now build custom packages of streaming TV ad space with Magnite, grouped by the content those ads run next to. That matters for advertisers who want to know what is actually on screen when their ad plays, a piece of information that streaming ad auctions have often left out. US buyers can ask Gracenote for such a package and then buy it through Magnite or their usual buying platform, though neither company has said what the service costs.

How a deal is built

The announcement describes three steps. An advertiser supplies its targeting criteria. Gracenote, using what it calls its "proprietary, first-to-market content graph", translates those criteria into content segments. Those segments are then used to create custom deals "by targeting specific CTV inventory on the Magnite SpringServe platform", in the release's words. SpringServe is the ad server and sell-side platform Magnite operates for streaming publishers.

The result is a deal ID, a code that tells a buying platform which pre-arranged package of inventory a bid belongs to. According to the release, buyers "can then use the resulting deal IDs to activate campaigns directly through Magnite ClearLine or their preferred demand-side platform." That second route matters. A Gracenote package is not locked inside Magnite's buying tool. An agency running its streaming budget through another platform can, on the companies' description, bring the deal ID into that platform and bid on it there.

The graph underneath is large. According to Gracenote, it links records from different sources into shared identities for 58 million TV and streaming titles, each carrying a durable identifier and what the company calls source-verified metadata: genre, content rating, language and mood among them. Inconsistent descriptions of the same program across services have made streaming inventory hard to evaluate at scale, the release argues, and a single identifier per title is Gracenote's answer to that.

There is also a fallback. Where a bid request arrives without a content identifier, the graph can still identify some programming from other signals in the request, Gracenote says. The release does not say what share of programming can be recovered that way, or how often the match is correct.

On the Magnite side, the product carrying the deals is ClearLine Curation. According to the release, the arrangement gives advertisers more options for finding and selecting relevant streaming content, and a more consistent basis for planning and placement.

Who said what

Jake Richardson, vice president of partnerships at Gracenote, framed the deal around a gap in the data buyers receive. Audience signals alone, he said in the release, do not tell buyers what is on screen; the partnership brings content information into the moment a deal is created, so buyers can judge relevance, suitability and brand alignment before they bid. Kristen Williams, senior vice president of strategy partnerships at Magnite, said the arrangement enriches publisher inventory and helps buyers find programming, and argued that curation done at the platform level brings more consistency and scale to a fragmented streaming market.

What the release does not say

Several things are missing. Neither company gives a price, a fee structure or an indication of whether Gracenote is paid per deal, per impression or through a share of Magnite's take. No participating publishers are named. No deal volumes, campaign results, latency figures or launch customers appear. And nothing is said about markets beyond the United States, although Gracenote's own description of its business cites coverage of more than 80 countries and more than 70 languages.

Live sports as the test case

The companies chose one example to illustrate the problem. "For example, live sports are expanding across streaming platforms, further fragmenting the viewing experience," the release states. "Buyers who once turned to a single network for in-game inventory now must navigate multiple apps selling ad space during the same event." Gracenote's identifiers, it continues, "span that content landscape, allowing Magnite to curate packages containing inventory from participating services carrying the game."

The qualifier "participating" carries weight. A package for a given match can only include services that have agreed to take part, and the release does not list them. Whether a buyer receives every stream of a game, or only those whose owners sell through SpringServe and opt into the arrangement, is not specified.

The fragmentation itself is documented. A Gracenote survey of 3,000 adults in six countries, fielded between June 29 and July 8, 2026, found that 26.1% of sports fans are always or often unable to tell which channel or service is carrying a game, rising to 35.6% among 18 to 34 year olds. If viewers struggle to find a game, buyers trying to reach the same audience across several apps face a similar problem on the inventory side.

Magnite has been building for this. In November 2025 it launched Live Scheduler inside SpringServe, a tool through which media owners share event names, timing, sport, league, broadcaster and expected concurrency before a broadcast, with Roku among the first adopters. By September 2026, 37 media owners had used it to schedule and sell more than 4,000 live events, and Magnite reported that live sports ad spend on its platform rose 56% year over year between January and July, with more than 5,800 advertisers buying live sports inventory they had not bought the year before.

Not the first time

The word "expanded" in the release points to history. On July 25, 2024, when Gracenote entered streaming ad targeting with a set of standardized contextual categories, Nielsen's announcement named Magnite as the first supply-side platform to support and scale them. Publishers in that launch included Cineverse, DIRECTV Advertising, Philo, Tastemade and Xumo, and the categories reached buyers through Peer39. Kristen Williams, then quoted as senior vice president of strategic partnerships, spoke for Magnite on that occasion too. The 2024 release also noted that Magnite's controls let publishers decide when content metadata is shared with advertisers.

The scale has grown since then, though the figures Gracenote attaches to its catalog have moved more than once in 2026 alone. The 2024 announcement cited 30 million titles. When Index Exchange began offering show-level impression reporting powered by Gracenote's content ID graph in January 2026, with Spectrum Reach as the first media partner, the cited figure was more than 50 million titles across more than 260 streaming catalogs. In August it was more than 55 million. The November release says 58 million. None of the releases explains whether the increase comes from new catalogs, new content or a change in how titles are counted.

A year of Gracenote deals

The Magnite arrangement is the latest in a run of programmatic partnerships for Gracenote, each placing its metadata at a different point in the buying chain. In December 2025, Gracenote launched Content Connect, offering program-level metadata to agencies, brands and platforms for contextual advertising on streaming TV. In May 2026, a Gracenote survey of 500 US media professionals found that 86% of media planners would move more linear TV budget to streaming if show-level data were consistently available.

On June 17, Gracenote and PubMatic announced an integration that matches bid opportunities against Gracenote's episode-level data in real time during the auction and attaches selected inventory to curated deal IDs. That deal also feeds Gracenote's live sports schedule data into PubMatic's Live Sports Marketplace, according to the two companies, which put the added latency at 0.1 to 0.5 milliseconds per transaction. Then, on August 27, Gracenote announced its first integration with a buying platform, giving The Trade Desk show-level streaming data. Gracenote grounded that announcement in its 2026 study, in which 91% of programmatic traders said the lack of show-level data limited their streaming campaigns.

Set side by side, the deals differ in where the work happens. The PubMatic integration matches content during the auction and gives a latency figure. The Trade Desk integration puts the data in the buyer's hands. The Magnite arrangement, as described, places Gracenote at the deal-creation stage on the sell side: the content decision is made when the package is built, before any bid. The November release gives no detail on whether matching also happens at auction time.

What it means for Magnite

Streaming television is now the larger half of Magnite's business. In the third quarter of 2026, CTV contribution ex-TAC rose 39% to $105.4 million, or 53% of the total, while net income rose 70% to $34.0 million. On the earnings call that followed, chief executive Michael Barrett said about 20% of Magnite's political ad spend had flowed through ClearLine. He also told analysts that ClearLine charges its own fee, which adds to the take rate Magnite already earns from publishers.

That detail bears on the Gracenote arrangement. A buyer who activates a Gracenote deal inside ClearLine may pay a buyer-side ClearLine fee in addition to the seller-side fee, while a buyer who takes the same deal ID to another platform pays that platform's fees instead. Where Gracenote's own charge sits in either path is not disclosed. Magnite folded curation and activation into ClearLine in October 2025, citing reach of 109 million US ad-supported streaming households. Curation claims elsewhere on Magnite's platform remain hard to check. In September, Cognitiv said real-time curation through Magnite cut cost per click by 31% against curation that was not real-time. That figure was measured on DV+, Magnite's web, video and app business rather than streaming TV, and it was published without a method, sample or date range.

Why this matters for buyers and publishers

The underlying problem is old. Streaming inventory has long been sold with thin information about the program surrounding an ad, and buyers trained on linear television, where the schedule tells them exactly what airs and when, have treated that as a reason to hold budget back. A March 2026 analysis by the contextual data company Peer39, cited in Gracenote's May report, found that only 40% of streaming bid requests carried usable program-level content signals. Every Gracenote integration this year has been an attempt to fill that gap from a different position.

The Magnite version raises a question about who does the selecting. Curation has become one of the busiest terms in programmatic advertising, and the German digital association BVDW's February 2026 white paper defined it as the targeted selection, combination and enrichment of inventory and data signals into packages tied to campaign goals. That paper identified four types of curator, one of which is the data provider. Here, a data provider sits at the start of the process, translating a brief into segments, while the sell-side platform assembles the supply. The buyer receives the finished package.

For buyers, the practical change is a request route that did not exist before November 10: a brief to Gracenote can produce a package that spans several streaming services, including those carrying the same live event. For publishers selling through SpringServe, the arrangement offers a route for content metadata to reach buyers in a form the market has repeatedly said it wants, provided their services participate. What remains open is the price of that route, how much of each dollar the curation layer keeps, and whether the packages perform any better than the deals buyers were already striking directly with streaming services.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Gracenote, Nielsen's content data business, and Magnite, an independent sell-side advertising company, with Jake Richardson of Gracenote and Kristen Williams of Magnite speaking for the two companies. Advertisers, agencies and streaming publishers selling through Magnite's SpringServe are affected.

What: An expanded collaboration under which Gracenote translates advertisers' targeting criteria into content segments drawn from its graph of 58 million titles, custom deals are built against matching streaming inventory on SpringServe, and buyers activate the resulting deal IDs through Magnite ClearLine or another demand-side platform. No pricing, participating publishers or volumes were disclosed.

When: Announced on November 10, 2026. Advertisers and agencies can request deals now by contacting Gracenote.

Where: The United States only, on Magnite's SpringServe and ClearLine platforms, with activation also possible through other demand-side platforms.

Why: According to the companies, streaming buyers lack consistent information about the programming around their ads, and live sports spread across several apps make the same event harder to buy as one package. Gracenote is placing its metadata at every stage of the programmatic chain, and Magnite, whose streaming business now accounts for 53% of its contribution ex-TAC, gains another source of curated demand for ClearLine.