AOL bought Adap.tv, Facebook bought LiveRail and, last month, RTL Group bought a majority of SpotXchange – a wave of consolidation is under way, as large media groups buy up programmatic video ad tech vendors.

“Consolidation is a great thing for the industry,” says the emerging media VP of another such vendor, Turn, Chris Smith,” and shows we’re making a lot of great strides in the technology perspective. “You’re starting to see how valuable video is … to the overall marketing mix.”

Smith also tells Beet.TV, in this video, there is still market confusion about exactly what “programmatic TV” is, but the opportunity will first be realized in the US since that is where most vendors are established.

We spoke with Smith  for “The Road to DMEXCO,” a series of interviews with industry leaders produced in New York, London and San Francisco.  It is sponsored by the automatic content recognition (ACR) technology provider Civolution.

Please find more videos from the series here.  Beet.TV is a media sponsor of DMEXCO and will be covering the conference extensively.