Starling launched last month with roughly 20 employees after a year in stealth, betting show-level streaming TV data is the wedge a crowded CTV SSP market has missed.

Founder Michael Bassik told AdExchanger that his team is chasing what advertisers and agencies have demanded for years: show-level transparency on par with traditional TV buys. "Our vision is ambitious," Bassik said.

Starling works with four named CTV publishers out of the gate — AMC, TelevisaUnivision, Paramount and Telly — plus access to audience and identity data from third-party providers the company declined to name. The platform ingests content signals such as genre, app and show title, then assembles custom segments for buyers.

Pairing show titles with audience identifiers is the "holy grail" for programmatic TV buyers, Bassik said.

What does the VPPA block?

The 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act — a Blockbuster-era statute — still shapes what publishers will share. Many media companies interpret VPPA to forbid pairing show-level data with user IDs inside a programmatic bid request.

"The VPPA has convinced certain publishers, especially larger media companies, that they should not be sharing content-level signals," Bassik said.

Starling routes publisher data through clean rooms and partners with unnamed third-party modeling vendors to keep personally identifiable information from leaking back to individuals, according to Bassik. The startup says it will publish more specifics on those modeling partners soon.

Privacy-friendly plumbing is the precondition for the deal flow Starling actually wants to broker.

How does this work for buyers and sellers?

Starling aggregates morning-news inventory, for example, into private marketplace deals buyers can purchase at scale. Bassik said the company layers audience modeling on top to widen reach beyond the seed segment.

Publishers, in turn, get higher demand and better CPMs on content-signal-backed inventory, according to Bassik.

The trade runs clean: sellers hand over signals inside a privacy guardrail; Starling packages audiences; buyers get scale and relevance in a single PMP.

So what now?

Starling joins a small but growing field of CTV SSPs chasing the same show-level prize. It sits alongside sellers such as Spectrum Reach and Amazon that have begun exposing program-level data on their own.

Bassik said Starling's near-term focus is to "support [media] optimization and drive better outcomes for publishers and advertisers." Whether the four-publisher roster and unnamed modeling stack can hold up against larger competitors running their own clean rooms will define the next twelve months.