Nexxen today announced the standardization of its Smart TV home screen advertising specifications across the original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs, that supply inventory to its platform, aiming to replace a patchwork of ad sizes, formats and click actions with a single request structure that demand-side platforms and buyers can activate without separate integration work for each device maker.

In short

Nexxen built one common technical format for the ads that appear on smart TV home screens, replacing separate rules for each TV brand it works with. This matters to media buyers and agencies because home screen ads have become one of the most viewed placements in connected television, yet each manufacturer set its own specifications, making campaigns hard to scale across devices. With standardization in place, buyers can in principle activate a single creative structure across multiple OEMs through Nexxen's demand-side platform partners rather than building bespoke versions for each one.

A single specification replaces years of fragmentation

The company describes the home screen as a high-attention environment, the first thing a viewer encounters when a smart TV powers on, before any app or piece of content has been chosen. According to Nexxen, that inventory - spanning prominent hero banner and tile placements - has varied widely across OEMs in terms of ad sizes, formats and click actions since connected TV native inventory of this kind first became commercially available. Buyers wanting to run a home screen campaign across several manufacturers therefore had to reconcile different technical requirements for each one, a burden that fell on both advertisers and the demand-side platforms bidding on their behalf.

That variation is precisely what the new specification addresses. According to Nexxen, a standardized request structure will let demand-side platforms and buyers bid on the inventory programmatically through Nexxen TV Home Screen using one format rather than several. The company frames this as a foundational step rather than a cosmetic one: uniform specifications, it says, will let advertisers activate campaigns within these placements while bypassing the complexity of managing fragmented formats and requirements across manufacturers.

Kara Puccinelli, Chief Commercial Officer at Nexxen, tied the announcement to the product's original goal. "From the beginning, our goal with Nexxen TV Home Screen has been to transform the home screen from a fragmented media environment into a scalable, performance-driven channel for the industry," she said. "By standardizing these formats across OEMs, it's another major step toward a more streamlined cross-platform ecosystem that better enables buyers, DSPs and brands alike."

The technical core of the announcement sits in what Nexxen calls dynamic creative optimization, delivered through Nexxen Studio, the company's in-house creative team. Rather than requiring advertisers to build separate creative assets for each manufacturer's dimensions and interaction rules, the standardized framework is designed to adapt a single creative source across the different formats that OEMs still present at the device level, aiming for what the company calls format standardization and creative adaptability across diverse inventory sources.

Why home screen inventory carries outsized attention

Home screen advertising has grown from a peripheral placement into one of connected television's most visible surfaces largely because of where it sits in the viewing sequence. It appears before, not during, content consumption, meaning every session that begins on a smart TV passes through it. That structural position is why Nexxen and its OEM partners have pursued programmatic access to the format so aggressively over the past year and a half.

Nexxen's own trajectory with this inventory type illustrates the pace of that push. Nexxen launched programmatic activation of native smart TV home screen inventory through a multiyear agreement with V, formerly VIDAA, as its initial supply source. H/L, an independent multiservice agency, then became the first organization to buy this inventory programmatically through Nexxen DSP using private marketplace deals on April 22, 2026, a structure that gave the buyer access to a curated pool of inventory at negotiated price floors while the seller retained some control over access. TCL FFALCON and TiVo Ads followed as supply sources on May 13, 2026, when Nexxen extended the geographic reach of Nexxen TV Home Screen beyond its original VIDAA-powered footprint, marking the first time either company's home screen inventory had been made available for programmatic activation through the platform.

Competing platforms have made parallel moves on the same surface. Samsung Ads opened its Smart TV home screens to programmatic buying through The Trade Desk and Google Display & Video 360 on June 10, 2026, powered by Magnite's SpringServe ad server. Teads announced a connected TV suite on June 18, 2026, that combined home screen and in-stream inventory with a measurement layer, and later secured an exclusive ten-day Black Friday takeover of V's home screen placements, a deal built on hardware-level targeting by screen size and room placement. ShowHeroes has opened Whale TV home screen inventory to programmatic buyers as well. Every major television operating system, in other words, has moved on this placement within roughly the past eighteen months, and the scale of viewer exposure explains why. Industry figures cited in Video Advertising Bureau analysis put home screen advertising on 95 percent of United States connected televisions at switch-on, up from 50 percent in 2020.

The programmatic plumbing behind the announcement

Nexxen's standardization effort sits on top of an existing programmatic stack. The company operates a demand-side platform paired with a supply-side platform, with what it calls the Nexxen Data Platform at the core, feeding audience intelligence and automation into both sides of the transaction. Buyers reach the standardized home screen inventory through that platform, software that lets an advertiser or agency bid on individual impressions at auction on behalf of a campaign, connecting to the exchanges and supply platforms where the inventory originates.

According to the announcement, partners currently utilizing Nexxen TV Home Screen include The Trade Desk, Google Display & Video 360, StackAdapt, Basis, Brainlabs and H/L on the demand side, with programmatic access extending to OEMs including V, TCL and TiVo Ads on the supply side. That roster matters because it defines who can act on the standardization immediately: agencies and brands already trading through those specific demand-side platforms gain access to the unified request structure without needing a new integration, while manufacturers outside that list remain untouched by today's change.

Automatic content recognition data underpins much of the targeting layer that sits alongside this inventory. The technology, which analyzes the audio and visual components of what a television displays to identify programs and match viewing patterns against a reference database, has become central to how Nexxen and its OEM partners price and target home screen placements. Nexxen has built a substantial data relationship around this capability separately from the home screen product itself: the company renewed and expanded its partnership with VIDAA in August 2025, investing an additional 35 million dollars to bring its total investment to 60 million dollars, representing approximately 6 percent of VIDAA's outstanding shares, and securing exclusive global access to VIDAA's automatic content recognition data alongside exclusive North American ad monetization rights through at least the end of 2029. The company also licensed its automatic content recognition audience segments to Yahoo DSP across the United States, United Kingdom and Germany on October 16, 2025, following an earlier arrangement with The Trade Desk dating to August 2024.

What the announcement does not specify

The press release leaves several operational questions unaddressed, a pattern consistent with earlier Nexxen product announcements. It does not disclose whether existing Nexxen DSP contracts automatically cover the standardized specification or whether buyers must undertake any technical migration to adopt it. It does not name which additional OEMs, beyond V, TCL and TiVo, are included in the standardization beyond the partner list already disclosed for the home screen product generally. Pricing, floor structures and whether the standardized format changes minimum spend requirements for the private marketplace deals through which this inventory has historically traded are likewise absent from the announcement.

The release also does not specify a rollout date by which all listed OEM partners will conform to the new specification, nor does it indicate whether the standardization is retroactive for campaigns already running through Nexxen TV Home Screen or applies only to new activations going forward. Those gaps mirror an observation made when Nexxen launched a self-serve data onboarding feature in July 2026: the company's product announcements have tended to omit pricing and packaging detail, leaving buyers to learn those terms directly from account teams rather than from public disclosure.

Financial context behind the product push

Nexxen's home screen strategy has been credited internally with contributing to a run of record quarterly results through the first half of 2026. The company reported record first-quarter 2026 financial results on May 13, 2026, with programmatic revenue reaching 81.9 million dollars, a 14 percent increase year over year, and connected TV revenue hitting 29.4 million dollars, up 12 percent. Contribution ex-TAC, the company's preferred non-IFRS measure that strips out non-programmatic traffic acquisition costs, reached 84.5 million dollars, up 13 percent from a year earlier. Full-year 2026 guidance was raised at that point to a range of 382 to 397 million dollars in Contribution ex-TAC and 374 to 388 million dollars in programmatic revenue.

The company's most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F, filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission on March 4, 2026, reported full-year 2025 programmatic revenue of 340.6 million dollars and cash of 133.3 million dollars. Nexxen was scheduled to report second-quarter 2026 results on August 12, 2026, eight days before today's standardization announcement, according to a separate disclosure the company issued in late July.

Today's announcement arrives as Nexxen has been layering additional product and data capabilities onto its platform through the year. The company integrated Acxiom household and purchase data into Nexxen Discovery, its audience planning tool, on July 21, 2026, and followed that eight days later with a self-serve first-party data onboarding capability inside Nexxen DSP, paired with what the company described as an identity graph whose global footprint had nearly doubled. Nexxen also joined The Trade Desk's Ventura Ecosystem alongside V as one of the framework's first collaborators on February 24, 2026, and announced a full-funnel performance suite within Nexxen DSP on March 24, 2026, incorporating tools the company calls IFO, nexAI algorithms, Auto-Allocation and ghost bidding incrementality.

Reading the standardization against a crowded field

The competitive backdrop gives today's announcement a specific meaning for media buyers rather than a purely technical one. When several OEMs and multiple demand-side platforms all offer home screen inventory, but each does so under its own technical rules, the practical effect is that a buyer wanting cross-device reach on this placement type has needed either a specialized partner willing to normalize the formats or a willingness to run separate, non-comparable campaigns per manufacturer. Nexxen's standardization effort is a bid to remove that friction specifically for the OEM relationships it already controls, rather than for the format as a whole across every platform selling it.

That distinction matters because it does not resolve fragmentation industry-wide. Samsung's home screen inventory routes through Magnite's SpringServe ad server and is bought through The Trade Desk or Google DV360 under Samsung's own specifications. Teads operates its own home screen supply arrangements with V and other partners under separate technical terms. A buyer running campaigns across Nexxen-connected OEMs and, separately, Samsung or Teads-connected inventory would still need to reconcile formats across those different technology stacks, even after today's announcement. What Nexxen has standardized is the layer it directly controls: V, TCL and TiVo Ads, activated through the demand-side platforms already partnered with Nexxen TV Home Screen.

The emphasis on dynamic creative optimization also signals where Nexxen expects buyers to feel the practical benefit. Rather than requiring a media buyer to supply differently sized and formatted creative assets for each OEM, the standardized specification is designed to let one base creative asset get adapted automatically to the technical requirements each manufacturer's home screen still imposes at the device level. That approach mirrors a broader pattern across connected television advertising, where dynamic creative tools have increasingly been positioned as the mechanism for reconciling variation in placement specifications without requiring advertisers to produce multiple discrete creative versions.

Outlook

Nexxen's forward-looking statement accompanying the release cautions that the Nexxen TV Home Screen and Nexxen Studio tools discussed remain subject to the risks the company discloses in its most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F, filed with the SEC on March 4, 2026, and that the company does not intend to update its forward-looking statements after the date of the release except as required by law. Whether the standardization measurably changes campaign scale or spend allocation toward Nexxen TV Home Screen will likely become visible, if at all, in the company's third-quarter 2026 results, expected in the autumn.

For media buyers, the near-term implication is narrower than the announcement's framing suggests: a real reduction in integration overhead across three named OEM partners, achieved through one demand-side platform's proprietary standardization, rather than an industry-wide format agreement. Whether other OEMs or competing demand-side platforms move toward a comparable, shared specification - as opposed to each building its own - remains an open question the market has not yet answered.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Nexxen International Ltd. (Nasdaq: NEXN), an advertising technology company headquartered in Israel with offices across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, operating a demand-side platform, a supply-side platform and the Nexxen Data Platform.

What: Nexxen standardized the technical specifications for Smart TV home screen advertising inventory across the original equipment manufacturers supplying its Nexxen TV Home Screen product, replacing varied ad sizes, formats and click actions with a unified request structure that demand-side platforms and buyers can activate programmatically, supported by dynamic creative optimization from Nexxen Studio.

When: The standardization was announced on August 20, 2026, roughly eight days after Nexxen reported second-quarter 2026 financial results and about three months after the company expanded Nexxen TV Home Screen supply to TCL FFALCON and TiVo Ads.

Where: The standardization applies to inventory supplied through OEM partners V, TCL and TiVo Ads, activated by demand-side platforms and agencies including The Trade Desk, Google Display & Video 360, StackAdapt, Basis, Brainlabs and H/L.

Why: Home screen inventory has become one of connected television's most viewed placements, appearing on the majority of US connected TVs at power-on, but fragmented technical specifications across device manufacturers have made it difficult for advertisers and demand-side platforms to scale campaigns across multiple OEMs efficiently, a gap Nexxen's standardization is designed to close within its own partner ecosystem.