Blockgraph's Aleck Schleider On The Value of Universal IDs

As part of our partnership with the TV Data Initiative, we're going to be showcasing video interviews with various consortium members where they will discuss the key issues surrounding the TV data ecosystem and the what they hope the consortium can accomplish.

First up is Blockgraph's Chief Revenue Officer, Aleck Scheider, on why universal IDs are so important and why we need to try and make them interoperable.

ALECK SCHLEIDER: There's multiple companies out there that aren't making it more difficult, but they have to manage their own business. And the managing of their own business and supporting how they look at data, how they apply data and ultimately how they provide services—whether it be a supplier or a device owner or an MVPD—is to really have a solution that solves for their needs, but is somewhat interoperable when it comes to the rest of the ecosystem.

So I'll take an example of a universal ID. Most companies out there are creating some level of their required identifier for supporting their business and in some cases it is a form of a universal ID. There's not going to be one universal ID that supports the entire industry, because that means that companies need to change the way they do things in their own data structure to be able to change and support a universal ID.

We believe with Blockgraph as an example, we're not telling organizations to change how they manage their business or if they want to adopt the universal ID, but providing solutions and services that allow them to do things the way they do it, but be able to interoperate with other companies who also might have adopted a different universal ID.

And so the ability for this level of interoperability between multiple identifiers to reduce this level of complexity, to remove silos, and to allow for a level of interaction between supply and demand, between data partners and measurement partners—whatever the list is—is really an important part of what we hope to get out of this TV Data Initiative and really what Blockgraph is looking to support and bring into the industry.