Exec named VP of advanced TV

Beachfront, a programmatic video technology company, said it hired former SpotX executive Ben Abbatiello as VP of advanced TV.

Abbatiello will work out of Beachfront’s year-old New York headquarters and will head the company’s business development initiatives and develop partnerships with publishers media owners and brands.

“I’ve known Ben for years and admired his media business acumen and relationship-building savvy,” said Beachfront CEO Chris Maccaro. “Ben is connected with the biggest media owners in the world, and he knows there isn’t a one size fits all approach to help them. We have to understand the media owner in front of us and design a plan that speaks directly to their strategy.”

Related: Oath Executive Maccaro Named Beachfront CEO

“The brand offers an agile product focus and robust platform required for any rapid development cycles with custom or sophisticated ad decisioning needs,” said Abbatiello. “Further, Beachfront’s independent status also affords us significant flexibility when developing and/or applying our enterprise tech stack to cable’s and media owners’ biggest monetization inhibitors.”

Abbatiello said he wanted to pay his respects to SpotX. “It was a great opportunity to do some things that were truly unique. This just represented such an opportunity,” He said, he felt Beachfront would be a better fit for him because it is an “agile product driven company” and because its founder, Frank Sinton, is still actively involved.

Beachfront recently announced it has developed a system that enables programmatic advertising sales for multichannel video programming distributors’ set-top-box video-on-demand inventory.

The company said it already manages the set-top-box VOD inventory for a top ten MVPD, enabling dynamic ad insertion in the VOD environment and in the near future in live linear.