Addressable TV advertising lets a cable or satellite TV operator show different ads to different homes that are watching the same programme at the same moment. "Addressable" means that each home's set-top box can be reached on its own, as if it had its own address. It is used mainly in the United States, where large cable and satellite operators have offered it for many years.
On ordinary TV, every home that watches a channel sees the same ad break, because the channel sends one signal to everyone. Addressable TV changes this inside the operator's own system. The operator receives the channel's programme and its ad breaks from the television network. In some breaks, a few slots are marked as addressable. For these slots, the operator's software stores several different ads in advance, either in the set-top boxes or on the operator's servers. When the break begins, each box plays the ad chosen for its own home.
Consider two neighbouring homes in Ohio, in the United States, both watching the same evening news on the same cable channel. At 7:18 p.m., a two-minute break begins. The first home is a young family who moved in recently. The operator's data, linked to the home through an identity graph, suggests that they may need home insurance. Their set-top box plays a 30-second insurance ad. The second home is a retired couple. Their box plays an ad for a travel company in the same 30 seconds. Both homes then return to the news at the same instant. Each advertiser pays only for the homes that match its audience, instead of for every home watching the channel.
The system must also report what happened. Each set-top box records which ad it played. The operator sends these counts to the advertiser, without names. Independent audience measurement companies check how many homes saw each ad.
Privacy is the main difficulty. The operator knows each home's address and billing details. So the data that links a home to an ad must stay inside the operator's systems, or be matched in a sealed system where the advertiser never sees the names.
In India, cable and DTH networks mostly show the same ad to every home watching a channel's feed. Large channels sometimes send separate feeds, with different ads, to different regions or languages. In India, ads that differ from home to home reach TV viewers mainly through streaming, where server-side ad insertion (SSAI) stitches a different ad into each viewer's stream.