Discovery, Inc., the world’s leading provider of live entertainment, announced today that it has acquired the assets, technology, and intellectual property of ZEDO, an advertising technology firm with offices in the United States and India. The acquisition will bring ZEDO’s technology in-house, allowing Discovery’s ad solutions to innovate more quickly. This acquisition adds significant ad technology platform capabilities to Discovery’s worldwide direct-to-consumer (DTC) platforms, such as a Supply-Side Platform (SSP) and Real-Time Bidding (RTB), which improves the user experience and boosts monetization. Employees from ZEDO in India and the United States will be onboarded as part of the transaction.
“This deal will bring the Discovery and ZEDO teams together to enhance the overall consumer ad experience, as well as help push new innovation by integrating ZEDO’s capabilities with our global direct-to-consumer platform,” said Sudheer Sirivara, EVP, DTC – Global Technology, Discovery Inc. “We are excited to welcome the ZEDO team to the rapidly growing technology presence in our India Development Center, which is a strategic priority for us to build talent and expertise across the country to help scale globally.”
“Discovery entered the streaming space with the launch of discovery+ and quickly became an industry leader,” said Roy de Souza, CEO and Co-Founder, ZEDO. “With the acquisition of ZEDO’s assets, Discovery will have its own proprietary Real Time Bidding (RTB) platform and SSP to sell advertising programmatically. Discovery’s advertisers will soon have one place to buy advertising on a high-quality set of streaming platforms and reach Discovery’s vast global audiences.”
The ZEDO asset acquisition builds on Discovery’s acquisition of AdSparx’s assets in 2020, which brought Server-Side-Ad-Insertion (SSAI) capability to Discovery’s global tech platform. The combination of ZEDO’s technology with Discovery’s SSAI and global video platform will deliver unparalleled video and ad experiences to our consumers worldwide.