How Can Streaming Content Get Organized? Field Garthwaite, Founder and CEO of IRIS.TV Explains it to a Teenager

I met with Field Garthwaite on the beach, and he taught us about what an IRIS ID was and how it relates to organizing the new wave of technology and media. 

What is IRIS.TV?

The way I think of IRIS.TV is a platform that attaches hashtags on top of every moment of streaming so other businesses can do their job. The company uses IRIS IDs, and they are attached to video clips, shows, movies, or whatever the consumer is watching. This helps platforms where content is viewed better cultivate more specific ads and more personalized ads that the consumer is more likely to interact with and that brands want to place. 

What's interesting about IRIS.TV?

When streaming services emerged, it made it hard for companies and brands to identify who was going to be watching what and when. It made it hard for them to tell content apart from each other, and where IRIS.TV helps by assigning different labels or IDs to those pieces of content. This makes it easier for advertisers to advertise to the right audience and helps the algorithm assign the right content to an audience based on stuff they’ve already seen.

What I like about his message:

His message was to start taking advantage of new technologies, which I think is a great idea, especially if you take into consideration the new wave of AI, is amazing advice to listen to. His way of taking advantage is to find a way to organize a whole lot of content with IDs, which is needed in this day and age. 

TRANSCRIPT:

RIO: Okay, so hi. I'd like to start off with what I start with everybody, what is your name? And what do you do?

FIELD: Field. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Iris TV. Iris TV is a technology that's really centered around a technology called the iris ID, which is a content identifier. So this is an identifier that we append any TV show, movie or video clip, to basically have a standard way of understanding what it is. And then we store a whole lot of information that I have on that ID, so we can make it accessible to the entire ecosystem.

RIO: From what I understand, please correct me, it takes clips from certain things. Well, actually, do you think you could explain again, sort of, help me understand a little?

FIELD: Yes. So when we work with like a broadcaster, say, like, AMC, their content comes into our platform, so you know, Walking Dead, or Madmen, we get those TV shows into our system. And we assign a unique content ID to every single one of them. And then we work with all these sophisticated companies that do AI. So they'll actually look at the images, they'll listen to the audio, and they'll create this standardized data that helps advertisers to better understand what's going on in the content. And the reason this is valuable is we've often had those experiences where we see those ads that don't really have anything to do with us by understanding what's going on in the content, you actually know the mindset of the consumer at that moment. And so it makes it possible to actually make the advertising suck a little less, and make it a little bit more enjoyable for the viewer.

RIO: So it's like you take the show, and then you take what someone-if someone watching the show would want to watch for an advertisement and sort of select it to them, like you've given like something from the show like an ID. Give an ID and then give it advertising, same idea and give it to an AI.

FIELD: Yeah. And so like, you know, when you browse the web, and you're kind of going to a web page, and that web page is actually a unique identifier for the content on that page. But in streaming video, there hasn't been an identifier that's been standardized, that kind of allows that information to be accessed. So sometimes, when you're searching the web, you'll see that there's like relevant ads based on what you search for. It's kind of the same thing only in video. Now you can understand what the videos about what the consumers watching. And, you know, a billion times in a week, you can reach people who are watching family content right before Mother's Day, and you know, send them flowers, you can reach, you know, consumers at scale in a way that's never been possible before. At the right moment. Instead of collecting a bunch of information about you, and trying to kind of understand who you are, instead, we just understand what you're watching at that moment. And we have no idea who you are, we have all that information about what's going on in the program, to then make sure that when the ad plays, it's actually relevant to you.

RIO: Oh, it's like if you watch like a sports show, you're getting sort of advertisements about sports?

FIELD: Sure. Or, you know, it might be a major car brand, who sponsors a lot of sports, but maybe they're not sponsoring the NBA Finals. Anytime someone's watching NBA Finals, clips or content highlights that's in the news. They can make sure that their brand shows up, even if they weren't necessarily the sponsor that was on the court, right? Or actually, you know, paid for the halftime show.

RIO: Yeah. So another question, how do you make money?

FIELD: So we make all this data available on that thing I was talking about earlier, that kind of data container we call the IRIS ID that has all this information. And on it, there's data from a bunch of different companies, anytime the data is used, whether it's to target and make sure that that adds a little bit more relevant to you, or if it was used to kind of share information after the fact to basically understand kind of where did that ad run, that there's a fee that is applied? And it's a very low fee, that's transactional anytime that someone's running a campaign.

RIO: All right. And just the last question, do you have a message or any messages to a marketer out there? 

FIELD: message to a marketer out there? Yeah, I think in terms of a message to a marketer, one of the most important things that you can be doing right now in video is taking advantage of new technologies to tap into a mindset, because there's so many different consumers in a household. If you're limited just to identity data, then you're not necessarily knowing who in the household is watching at any given moment. But if you understand the contextual nature of what's actually playing in the video, which is what we do at IRIS TV and the IRIS ID, then you actually can reach consumers no matter what when they're in the right mindset for your ad.