• by Wayne Friedman , November 2, 2016

The service Premion, a division of Tegna Media, aggregates advertising inventory from more 80 over-the-top (OTT) platforms including Roku, Sling, Xumo, TubiTV, NBC Sports, FX and Discovery.

Premion will use Tegna’s TV existing advertising sales personnel of more than 700 -- servicing what the company says is more than 14,000 local and regional advertising clients targeting long-form episodic content.

With most OTT providers, the ads will run either 15 or 30 seconds in length. They are in fast-forward disabled, pre-roll and mid-roll pods.

Premion has been in a testing phase since July in Dallas and Houston. Initial results have yielded advertising completion rates exceeding 96%.

“We partnered with Premion to be the first to market because we see the clear benefit of their approach to reaching the OTT consumer,” stated Michelle Levins, director of media strategy for The McCarthy Companies, a Dallas, Texas-based ad agency.

A McLean, VA-based TV station group, Tegna has 46 TV stations  reaching about one-third of all television households in the U.S. and more than 90 million Americans overall.