TV technology company Gracenote will be testing addressable ads in smart TVs in the coming months in an effort to deliver personalized ads to TV consumers, says Stephen White, President of Gracenote, in an interview with Beet.TV. “We are using the technology to insert or overlay on top of ads in a traditional linear broadcast so the user doesn’t know they are seeing a different ad. The ads are targeted to the individual user,” he tells us.

That sort of personalization requires Internet delivery for the ads, so that means only smart TVs and other Internet-connected TVs are capable of this type of ad targeting. The market trials will begin in the new year reaching a few thousand homes in DMAs across the country, he tells us. The technology can handle full ad replacement and works with any ad-decisioning system, he says.

Gracenote was founded in 1998 as a media recognition company, and has evolved to enable fingerprint recognition for audio and video, as well as powering guides for smart TVs.