Field Garthwaite
Co-Founder & CEO at iris tv
Co-founder and CEO of IRIS.TV, the contextual-video data platform whose IRIS_ID became a de facto content identifier across CTV. Garthwaite has led the company since founding it in 2013 and continues to run the unit inside Viant Technology following the November 2024 acquisition.
Field Garthwaite has spent the past decade arguing that streaming advertising can’t work without a shared way to identify what’s playing next to an ad. IRIS.TV — the company he co-founded with Richie Hyden in 2013 — built that layer in IRIS_ID, a contextual content identifier that publishers, DSPs, and measurement vendors now plug into across the CTV stack.
The trajectory crystallized in November 2024, when Viant Technology acquired IRIS.TV in a deal that left Garthwaite running the unit independently inside the public DSP. Viant’s pitch to the market: IRIS_ID stays open to the rest of the ecosystem; the team keeps shipping. For Garthwaite, the acquisition is less an exit than a distribution upgrade for the standard he and Hyden have spent eleven years pushing.
Elsewhere
- Viant Technology Announces Acquisition of IRIS.TV
- Viant Acquires Data Biz IRIS.TV To Expand Its Programmatic CTV Reach
- IAB Tech Lab OpenRTB Community Extension: Extended Content Identifiers
- Field Garthwaite — IRIS.TV Blog
- How Can Streaming Content Get Organized? Field Garthwaite Explains it to a Teenager