As the new year kicks off and CES takes place in Las Vegas this week, independent players are flexing expansions and product updates regarding their respective offerings and footprints in the competitive TVOS market.
Kicking the week off, on Monday Xperi’s TiVo announced its official entry into the U.S. market with Sharp Home Electronics Company of America as its newly named TV OEM partner.
TiVo has already entered the market abroad, mainly in Europe, where slices of market share are more easily up for grabs. Sharp Europe is an OEM partner for TiVo internationally, alongside seven other smart TV makers representing 33 brands. As of the end of Q3 TiVo was approaching 1 million smart TV’s powered by its OS in Europe. But now the company is looking to make a mark in the more saturated U.S. smart TV – and importantly – potentially lucrative advertising market.
In the announcement Xperi’s Ben Maughan, general manager of smart TV and media platform, said the partnership with Sharp and TiVo’s TVOS entry into the U.S. “represents a significant milestone for us.”
Sharp smart TVs powered by TiVo will be the first TV series made available to U.S. consumers, expected as early as February 2025. During Q3 earnings TiVo noted that it’s deployment timeline target of 2 million TiVo OS-powered smart TV in the market by the end of 2024 was squeezed due to product delays attributed to two OEM partners that were slow to deploy. According to Xperi CEO Jon Kirchner, speaking in November on Xperi’s quarterly earnings call, those delays meant shipments, primarily to the U.S., that were supposed to happen over the summer were instead expected in the final weeks of 2024. With Monday’s announcement, the U.S. entry and partner are official, but it looks like TiVo’s timeline for availability in the market has again been bumped until at least next month.
Unlike operating systems from companies that count their own streaming TV or video content services (such as Google, Amazon, and Comcast and Charter’s Xumo), TiVo boasts itself as an independent alternative for OEM partners, potentially offering better monetization terms and claiming a less biased approach to surfacing content recommendations and personalization for consumers.
Jim Sanduski, president of Sharp Home Electronics in the U.S., echoed this sentiment in the announcement.
“We have partnered with TiVo to provide a truly independent platform that allows our consumers to find, watch and enjoy content easily,” said Sanduski in a statement. “As we look to gain more foothold in the U.S. television market, partnering with credible and trustworthy businesses such as TiVo to provide an experience that aligns with our consumers needs, is crucial. TiVo’s unbiased, personalized and content-first approach is exactly the type of operating system our consumers are looking for.”
Whale TV intros profit-sharing program
Also coinciding with CES, Singapore-headquartered Whale TV (which rebranded from Zeasn last year) announced it’s starting to rollout the Whale OS 10 this quarter beginning with existing partners, and it introduced a new profit-sharing program for OEMs.
As mentioned, independent TVOS players are vying for customers and looking to appeal to OEM partners with improved or new monetization mechanisms as device hardware sales themselves have become less of a profit driver. Established leading smart TV makers and TVOS providers Roku and Vizio have seen this play out themselves in the U.S. – as each has increasingly turned to CTV advertising as a revenue and growth driver amid shrinking device sales margins.
Whale TV CEO Jason He highlighted this dynamic in a statement about the new profit sharing program.
“We firmly believe in harmony and ensuring everyone is fairly compensated for their contributions. That’s how you build partnerships that last, based on trust. Hardware margins on TVs are razor-thin, so TV brands need other sources of revenue to drive business growth,” stated He. “We enable our partners to reinvest into their business so they can protect themselves against competition and expand their market share.”
Specifically, the initiative means Whale TV will compensate partner brands for every TV shipped, plus a share of platform revenue “with a combined total of up to 40% of Whale TV monetization revenue.”
While some monetization comes from placements within the user interface or homescreen, embedded free streaming content offerings (aka FAST) are also a key source for advertising revenue. To that end, the revamped Whale TV+ FAST service is being rolled out to all Whale TV devices, with content partners such as Lionsgate, Bloomberg, Trusted Media Brands and more.
As for features, Whale TV said its new OS offers more personalized viewing with AI-powered recommendations, as well as a voice remote powered by ChatGPT and LLM. In terms of footprint, Whale said it has more than 43 million monthly active TVs globally and collaborates with 13 TV OEMs, including Moka, KTC, Express Luck, HKC and SQY. It’s targeting the global market, with a TVOS that supports all tuner standards and offers UI localization in 68 languages.
VIDAA discloses 33M monthly active units
VIDAA, meanwhile, a company initiated in 2019 by TV maker Hisense that has a global presence and is looking to compete against the likes of Roku and others in the U.S., shared 2024 updates via LinkedIn over the holidays. A deck posted by VIDAA CEO Guy Edri stated that the company ended last year with more than 33 million monthly active units worldwide. VIDAA’s platform is present in more than 180 countries.
“With the average global household at 3,45 people per home, this means we’re serving more than 115 million individuals globally, which is up 32% compared to last year,” wrote Edri in the post. Average time spent on the VIDAA platform also increased by nearly 10%, he noted, with the average VIDAA smart TV streaming more than 1 hour and 52 minutes of content daily.
VIDAA too has leaned into ad-supported free streaming content as a way to monetize, rebranding and positioning the streaming product as TV Channels+. And he noted that VIDAA struck a strategic alliance with leading European smart TV OEM Vestel (separately Vestel in 2022 became the first OEM partner for TiVo in Europe) – which took a 4.6% shareholder stake in the company at a valuation of more than $1 billion.
But even as they mark momentum and updates – independent players have to contend with a crowded space, particularly in the U.S., with the likes of leading smart TV makers Samsung and LG as well, not to mention the force of tech behemoths like Google. At CES the company previewed updates to its own Google TV OS software platform, including the addition of generative AI tool Gemini, with more natural voice commands, improved content search and deeper YouTube integration.