The Trade Desk's angle into the smart TV OS looks a tad like TiVo's

The Trade Desk, a top ad-tech company, has finally acknowledged that it is developing an operating system (OS) for connected TVs and is just weeks away from its formal launch into the market.

Jeff Green, The Trade Desk's founder and CEO, told Axios that its OS, called Ventura, will be rolled out in the early part of 2025. Axios noted that the company's has been working "quietly" on the project for three years.

Janko Roettgers, who runs LowPass, a newsletter focused on the entertainment tech arena, blew the cover off The Trade Desk's plans a few months ago, noting that the company would be looking to target licensing at device makers that are disinterested in running operating systems from the likes of Google, Amazon and Roku.

The Trade Desk has already notched deals with still unnamed original equipment manufacturers and streaming aggregators as it approaches its early 2025 debut.

Roettgers recently reported that The Trade Desk is working with Sonos on an inexpensive streaming player, with Sonos on board to design the hardware, develop a custom user interface and gain access to revenue-sharing agreements that purportedly are better than others in the market. Sonos hasn't detailed how it will work with The Trade Desk, but CEO Patrick Spence issued a statement that Sonos is "excited to explore the integration of premium audio and video with The Trade Desk and the Ventura OS."

Crowded market

A move into the smart TV OS sector would presumably put The Trade Desk up against several others, including Samsung, LG Electronics, TiVo, Hisense, Vizio and Xumo, the Comcast-Charter streaming joint venture.

Green outlined The Trade Desk's strategy in some detail in the Axios article. He said The Trade Desk has "no intention of getting into the hardware business." Green likewise believes that others in the market, such as Roku, Amazon and Google, have a conflict of interest because they also own content and that this conflict causes them to prioritize the content they feature on their respective platforms.

"We're looking at a concentration around a handful of players that lack objectivity," Green told Axios, noting that the company intends to partner with TV manufacturers and target other industry segments that distribute TVs, including airlines, hotel chains and gaming companies. "We think we're in a unique position to make the ecosystem better."

In its announcement about Ventura, The Trade Desk held that its offering "solves key issues with prevailing market systems today, including frustrating user experiences, inefficient advertising supply chains, and content conflicts-of-interest." The company said Ventura's use of OpenPath (a system that provided direct connections between The Trade Desk and its publishing partners) and Unified ID 2.0 (privacy-focused targeting) will help advertisers value and price ad impressions across streaming platforms more accurately and improve ad targeting. Notably, Roku recently announced it is adopting UID2.

TiVo's focus on 'unbiased' content

The Trade Desk's gripe about content-related conflicts of interest in the TV OS market might ring familiar to people who have been following this segment of the market. Providing "unbiased" recommendations and featured content is exactly the position TiVo began to talk up in recent years as it started to flesh out its own OS product/strategy for smart TVs. As Geir Skaaden, Xperi's chief products and services officer, explained it at CES 2023, TiVo's OS aims to differentiate in the market with a "content first" approach to apps and services along with an "unbiased" angle into search and recommendations.

As companies, TiVo and The Trade Desk don't warrant an apples-to-apples comparison. But they do share some similarities in how they believe they can differentiate in the market with an unbiased view into the way they aim to feature content.

Meanwhile, The Trade Desk, which pulled in Q3 revenues of $628 million and expects to generate at least $756 million in Q4, is already gathering support from some big names. The company, which runs a top demand-side platform (DSP) that enables advertisers to automate their ad buys, featured quotes from execs from Disney Advertising, Paramount Advertising and Tubi Media Group, which is linked to Tubi's popular free, ad-supported streaming television (FAST) service.

There's no telling yet how successful The Trade Desk will be with its smart TV OS plans and how long it will take to scale up that portion of its business.

TiVo has had some limited success initially in Europe and will soon start selling TiVo-powered smart TVs in the US. Xperi, TiVo's parent, expects to have about 2 million TiVo TVs in the market (again, mostly in Europe) by the end of 2024, and to raise that sum to 7 million by the end of 2025.