Samsung today signed an agreement with Gracenote, the content data business unit of Nielsen, to power a range of AI and large language model-driven entertainment experiences on Samsung smart televisions worldwide. The deal, announced February 25, 2026, follows a separate partnership that Gracenote struck with Google on February 10, 2026 - just two weeks earlier - giving Google's products, including traditional search and the Gemini AI assistant, access to the same metadata infrastructure. Two major companies, two deals in fifteen days: the pattern raises a pointed question for anyone working in digital marketing and connected television advertising - what exactly is it about Gracenote's data that has become so hard to replicate?

The answer lies in something deceptively straightforward. Structured program metadata - the layer of standardised information that identifies a television show, assigns it a unique content ID, links it to cast data, genre, availability, and imagery - is the connective tissue that makes AI-powered search coherent. Without it, a large language model asked "where can I watch the new season of that detective show set in Reykjavik?" has little reliable ground to stand on.

What the Samsung deal covers

According to the announcement, Gracenote's metadata will underpin Samsung's LLM-enabled search and discovery capabilities across its smart TV platform. The scope is broader than simple search. Samsung will use the data to power conversational interfaces that allow viewers to describe what they want in natural language rather than typing keywords. Alongside this, the agreement enables what the companies describe as "lean-back" content discovery - the curation of carousels and programme recommendations that surface relevant content when a viewer has not yet decided what to watch.

The deal also extends beyond consumer-facing features. According to the announcement, Samsung gains the ability to use Gracenote's infrastructure to develop new commercial offerings and achieve operational efficiencies driven by AI. The phrasing is deliberately broad, but it signals that the data relationship is intended to run deeper than a single product feature.

"Samsung is committed to delivering the most useful and engaging entertainment experiences to our users," said Bongjun Ko, Corporate EVP at Samsung Electronics. "By combining our AI technology with Gracenote's industry-leading metadata, we aim to push content search and discovery to new heights, delighting viewers by empowering them to find the entertainment they love intuitively and naturally."

Jared Grusd, CEO at Gracenote, positioned the deal in technical terms: "The structured nature of Gracenote's entertainment metadata and the scale of our content coverage put us in a unique position to power LLM-driven use cases. We're pleased to join forces with Samsung and are confident our collaboration will yield innovative user experiences and benefits extending far beyond."

The Google deal, fifteen days earlier

On February 10, 2026, Gracenote announced a multi-year strategic renewal of its existing partnership with Google. The terms established that Gracenote's authoritative metadata would continue supporting entertainment information across Google's consumer products - including AI-powered experiences. According to Gracenote's announcement, the partnership focuses on improving the organisation and accuracy of video and sports information, with an explicit acknowledgement that more users are moving toward AI-powered discovery rather than traditional keyword search.

"We're excited to continue our work with Google to make it easier for people everywhere to find and watch the entertainment content they love," said Grusd in the Google announcement. "Our meticulously crafted, highly structured data will help Google power more intuitive, AI-driven content discovery, and this partnership is a major step toward creating better experiences for consumers everywhere."

The timing of these two announcements - Google on February 10, Samsung on February 25 - is unlikely to be coincidental. Gracenote is positioning its metadata layer as the industry's standard data substrate for AI-powered entertainment, much as it became the de facto standard for electronic programme guides and search interfaces during the streaming era.

What makes Gracenote's database distinctive

Understanding why these deals matter requires a closer look at what Gracenote has actually built. According to the company, its database covers more than 50 million titles across 260+ streaming catalogs, spans 70+ languages, and is available in over 80 countries. Content is assigned TMS IDs - persistent, standardised identifiers that create a consistent reference point across fragmented streaming inventories. The same programme on Netflix, Apple TV+, and a broadcaster's own app carries the same TMS ID, allowing systems to correlate data across sources without ambiguity.

The data production model combines three elements: editorial judgment from human curators, machine-driven workflows for speed and scale, and human-in-the-loop processes to validate accuracy. This hybrid approach is particularly relevant in the age of LLMs. AI models are prone to what the industry calls hallucination - generating plausible but incorrect responses. When an LLM is asked about entertainment content, errors in scheduling, availability, or cast information are not merely embarrassing; they actively erode user trust in the platform.

Gracenote addressed this directly with a product launched on September 3, 2025: the Video Model Context Protocol Server, which connects LLMs to Gracenote's continuously updated entertainment database in real time. The MCP Server enables television platforms to cross-check LLM responses against verified data before surfacing them to users, addressing both the hallucination problem and the cutoff-date problem - the fact that AI models' training data becomes stale while schedules, availability windows, and sports results change constantly.

Sports data presents a particular challenge. Live schedules change, scores are produced in real time, and league structures shift across seasons. Gracenote's sports metadata covers live schedules, league information, and athlete imagery across 160 sports leagues in more than 50 countries - a scope illustrated by its expanded On Sports platform announced in December 2025, which linked live events to documentaries and shoulder content as streaming sports viewing minutes rose 260% between 2021 and 2024.

Why this matters for the advertising market

The Samsung and Google deals are consumer-experience announcements. But they sit within a broader commercial architecture that has significant implications for advertising professionals working in connected television.

Gracenote's content IDs and programme metadata are the same infrastructure that underpins contextual CTV ad targeting- a capability the company introduced in July 2024 in partnership with Peer39, Magnite, and several major streaming publishers. Contextual targeting at the programme level allows advertisers to align campaigns with specific shows, genres, moods, or sports types rather than relying solely on audience demographics. When the same TMS IDs that power Samsung's search interface also enable an advertiser's brand-safety exclusion list, the data layer becomes a shared commercial resource running through the entire ecosystem.

The advertising dimension became sharper still with the launch of Gracenote Content Connect in December 2025, which provided agencies and demand-side platforms direct access to standardised programme-level metadata for CTV campaign execution. That product was positioned explicitly as addressing a measurement and targeting gap identified in Gracenote's own research: a survey of 600 U.S. brand and agency executives conducted between July 10 and 20, 2025, found that despite brand awareness being the top stated CTV objective, most continued using narrow audience-based targeting methods. Only 9.2% of respondents prioritised contextual targeting at the programme level.

Index Exchange moved to close part of that gap. The company became the first supply-side platform to integrate Gracenote contextual intelligence directly into its platform in September 2025, embedding brand-safety segments and Do-Not-Air controls. By January 2026, Index Exchange and Gracenote had introduced show-level transparency for streaming ad buyers through Spectrum Reach, enabling programme-level post-campaign reporting without requiring segment-based activation.

Samsung's advertising ecosystem, separately

Samsung's partnership with Gracenote for AI-driven search is distinct from its advertising infrastructure, though the two operate on the same devices. Samsung TV Plus, the company's free ad-supported streaming service, reached 88 million monthly active users globally as of late 2025, according to the company's own figures. Samsung Ads and Publica extended their exclusive CTV partnership on September 30, 2025, covering programmatic ad serving across Samsung TV Plus in North America, Latin America, Europe, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, and India. Samsung Ads and Magnite also deepened their partnership in April 2025, with Samsung reporting double-digit gross revenue growth on Magnite's streaming SSP between 2023 and 2024.

The convergence of Gracenote metadata across both the user experience and advertising layers of connected television is notable. A viewer who finds a show through a Gracenote-powered conversational search interface is consuming content against which an advertiser may have purchased inventory using Gracenote-powered contextual segments. The same underlying content ID threads through both transactions.

The LLM grounding problem

Behind the commercial logic is a technical constraint that neither Google nor Samsung can easily solve internally. Large language models are trained on large but bounded datasets. Their knowledge of entertainment content - what is available where, what aired when, which team won last Saturday - degrades rapidly because the entertainment landscape changes constantly. A model trained through a given date cannot know what premiered the following week.

Retrieval-augmented approaches address this by connecting LLMs to live data sources at inference time. Gracenote's MCP Server, launched in September 2025, operationalises exactly this pattern for entertainment content: the LLM generates a candidate response, the MCP Server checks it against Gracenote's updated database, and the verified result is returned to the user. According to Gracenote, the server covers 40 million titles across 260 streaming catalogs in 70 languages and 80 countries, providing what the company describes as real-time verification through editorially-vetted data.

This architecture is directly relevant to what Samsung is deploying and to what Google has renewed its partnership to support. For Google, the stakes are especially visible. Gemini's user base grew from 450 million monthly active users in July 2025 to 650 million by October 2025, according to data tracked by PPC Land. As more entertainment queries flow through Gemini, the accuracy of responses about films, schedules, and sports results becomes a product quality issue at scale. Inaccurate entertainment information in an AI response does not just frustrate a single viewer - it damages the platform's credibility as a reliable search alternative.

Metadata as infrastructure

What these deals collectively describe is a shift in how the media and entertainment industry values structured data. For decades, programme metadata was considered back-office infrastructure - essential for electronic programme guides, important for search, but rarely central to strategic partnership discussions. The AI era has moved it to the front of the stack.

An LLM cannot reason reliably about entertainment content it has not been trained on, and it cannot know what has changed since its training concluded. Structured, continuously updated, human-verified metadata from a trusted source is, in practical terms, the only durable solution to that problem. Gracenote, with its 50 million-plus title database and persistent content ID graph, occupies that position in the market. Both Google and Samsung appear to have concluded that building a comparable resource internally is less viable than licensing access to one that already exists.

According to Gracenote, the company's curated, edited, and human-verified data "will serve as the source of truth for all entertainment experiences across video, sports and music" in the AI age. Whether that claim proves accurate across an increasingly competitive landscape remains to be seen. What the February 2026 announcements confirm is that two of the largest technology companies in consumer electronics and search have, at least for now, reached the same conclusion.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Gracenote, the content data business unit of Nielsen, together with Samsung Electronics and Google. Supporting context includes advertising technology companies including Index Exchange, Magnite, and Publica, which use Gracenote's metadata for CTV ad targeting.

What: Two separate licensing agreements announced within fifteen days of each other. On February 10, 2026, Gracenote renewed its multi-year strategic partnership with Google to support entertainment information across Google's products, including AI and Gemini experiences. On February 25, 2026, Gracenote announced an agreement with Samsung to power LLM-enabled conversational search, content discovery, lean-back curation, and AI-driven operational capabilities across Samsung's global smart TV platform.

When: The Google deal was announced February 10, 2026. The Samsung deal was announced February 25, 2026.

Where: New York, where Gracenote is headquartered. The agreements cover global smart TV and search deployments, with Samsung's platform reaching users in markets across North America, Europe, and Asia.

Why: Both companies require continuously updated, structured entertainment metadata to ground their AI and LLM-driven content experiences. Large language models are limited by training data cutoff dates and prone to generating inaccurate responses about schedules, availability, and sports results. Gracenote's database of 50 million-plus titles, universal content IDs, and human-verified editorial processes addresses this constraint by providing a real-time, authoritative source of truth that AI systems can reference at the point of query.

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