Pay-TV operators are in a race to stay competitive and improve their services, rolling out advanced advertising, content recommendations, improved video-on-demand services, TV Everywhere, etc. While data is the foundation for all these types of services, because pay-TV operators have had so many different silos of data, they have been unable to fully tap into them.

To address this problem, BlackArrow has announced that its BlackArrow Audience 2.0 data management platform (DMP) is now available. The platform includes Profile Manager, which enables pay-TV operators to consolidate their first-party subscriber data and third-party data in one place.

As Chris Hock, BlackArrow's SVP of Marketing and Business Development explained to me, the primary benefit is that pay-TV operators will be able to unify and fully leverage all of their data sources to maximize opportunities across screens. A key opportunity is to create more sophisticated audience segments for on-demand, linear and interactive TV advertising. However Chris envisions the consolidated data contributing eventually to multiple product offerings as well.  

Chris said a number of large, more advanced operators are currently testing the DMP, but there is still a significant part of the pay-TV operator market that isn't fully ready.

Meanwhile, in the online video world, data-centric advertising approaches are gaining huge momentum. So, as the lines continue blurring between online video and TV, and data becomes more central in optimizing advertising, operators who don't embrace data-centric advertising will fall behind.