FuboTV, the sports-focused live TV streaming platform, announced today it will adopt Unified ID 2.0—joining a growing list of publishers, analytics companies and ad tech businesses using the identity solution for advertisers as the industry continues to search for alternatives to the third-party cookie.

“We believe Unified ID 2.0 has the potential to both enhance targeting capabilities for our advertisers as well as allow our viewers to experience relevant advertising,” said Diana Horowitz, senior VP, ad sales, fuboTV. "As an early adopter of addressable and programmatic advertising, as well as one of the leaders in the CTV space, fuboTV is excited to partner on Unified ID 2.0 with The Trade Desk and other partners to develop industry-wide standards and solutions that enhance and support the CTV advertising ecosystem.”

The Unified ID 2.0 initiative, led by The Trade Desk, works by creating an anonymized database of user browsing habits. When a user signs into a publisher’s website, the publisher creates an encrypted identifier of that user. That identifier—and only that identifier—is then shared with a larger pool of data, one that The Trade Desk says will eventually be governed by a third party. Advertisers can use the pool to find audiences based on web activities without needing to know the user’s identity. 

Several ad tech companies and publishers have committed to Unified ID 2.0, including The Washington Post, LiveRamp and Nielsen. The Trade Desk says that this year it expects to announce additional partners for Unified ID 2.0 and lay out details on independent governance of the solution.

Still, Unified ID 2.0 is just one of several replacements or alternatives to the third-party cookie, spurred on by a shift in Big Tech away from the technology and by privacy legislation from Europe and California. The TV industry could even see multiple identity solutions emerge, experts say.

“We expect a lot of solutions in the next couple of years, a lot of testing in the part of advertisers and agencies,” says Aimee Irwin, vice president, strategy, Experian Marketing Services, during this year’s CIMM industry summit. “There are going to be solutions that are better at different things, and it’s going to take a while to figure out how many we need and how we get to addressability and issues.” Irwin says the issue is complicated by the variety of offerings, from traditional TV providers that have deep, household-level subscriber data to OTT and CTV providers.

Matt Emans, VP of measurement for LiveRamp, says there is room for multiple solutions to coexist. “There isn’t going to be a single ID system to rule them all,” says Emans at CIMM. He says there is an opportunity for an interoperable ecosystem. “Each one of these solutions is going to be dominant in different ways, and we like the fact that there’s healthy competition,” says Emans.