In this video is from our report FASTs Are The New Cable, Part 2: Advertising, Magnite SVP Paige Bilins explains why the lack of transparency is such a big issue for streaming and what Magnite is doing to help solve it.

PAIGE BILINS:

I would say transparency is probably the number one issue that comes up when we get buyers and sellers in a room together. And so it definitely is something that we have gotten better at and we've improved.

But it's an extremely complicated problem, and I don't think it is just about “cherry picking.”

If it was just cherry picking, we could just solve that with price.

Though then I think you would hear both sides say, “I'm willing to pay if you'll just tell me what I'm running on and I see the value in it.”

And then you have the publishers on the other side of that saying, “you know, are you?”

But it's much more complicated than that.

There are privacy regulation that comes to bear in terms of not being able to share particular information.

There are carriage agreements between programmers and distributors that restrict certain data points from being shared or being used, as well as fears of companies trying to reverse engineer audiences.

I think the issues that are more fear-based, like cherry picking and reverse engineering audiences can be solved from a price or a technical perspective.

I think the issues that really get people to hold back on sharing data, especially to the extent that the buyers want, are around privacy regulation and some of the larger media conglomerates comfort level with sharing information given the trust that they're building with their users and wanting to ensure they don't feel like they're violating that trust with their end users.