Already flooded with competitors, entrenched and upstart alike, the TVOS business was further roiled last week when advanced advertising company The Trade Desk officially announced plans to launch its own OS platform.
Named after the Southern California city that serves as its headquarters, The Trade Desk (TTD) insists Ventura will remove conflicts of interest that exist in connected TV advertising. Part of that rationale is because TTD is a dyed-in-the-wool demand-side platform (DSP) ad exchange operator, and unlike other TV OS providers – such as Roku and tech giants Google or Amazon, doesn’t own its own content service like say, a Roku Channel, YouTube or Amazon Prime Video. TTD claims Ventura will simplify CTV advertising for streaming companies and also make it more profitable for TV OEMs, since the company only wants a piece of ad revenue, not a share of inventory. And the first-party data captured by Ventura could help TTD across its leading advertising DSP ecosystem.
Indeed, Trade Desk CEO and founder Jeff Green detailed a broad range of reasons underpinning the rationale for launching Ventura in this 36-minute, 45-second podcast produced by The Current, TTD’s in-house news platform.
But none of those reasons matter if Ventura “cannot get to a meaningful level of scale,” wrote LightShed Partners analyst Rich Greenfield in a note to investors.
TTD said it’s been quietly developing its TVOS for three years and plans to start deploying it “as early as 2025.”
In its press release, TTD included tech gadget company Sonos as a supporter of Ventura, with executives from Disney, Paramount and Tubi also lending testimonial statements. But “nobody, including us, believes Sonos is or can be meaningful in the CTV space,” Greenfield said.
There is potential for meaningful CTV disruption if Trade Desk can get influential smart TV original equipment manufacturers (OEM) on board.
The company, which insists it won’t start making its own hardware like TVs and streaming pucks, “could offer a compelling value proposition to OEMs to reach millions of homes in 2025 as a starting point,” wrote Greenfield, noting over 40 million TVs are sold in the U.S. each year. “That might be enough to begin disrupting the CTV ecosystem.”
So the fledgling TVOS could capture a beachhead with the right quantity and quality of OEM deals. However, exactly what scale is needed remains to be seen.
And TTD faces competition as it seeks to position Ventura to catch fire. For one, existing players like Roku currently dominate the TVOS market in the U.S. – Roku, for example, recently reported that its TVOS is in 85 million households.
A study published last month by McLean, Va.-based analytics company Pixalate indicated that Roku devices still controlled an industry-leading 37% of open programmatic advertising globally in the third quarter, followed by Samsung, Amazon, Apple, LG and Vizio.
Also, there are other upstart TVOS platforms banging on the door, including Xperi’s TiVo-branded product and Xumo, the joint venture between cable companies Comcast and Charter Communications. There’s also Vidaa from Hisense, which continues to also sell TVs powered by Roku, Amazon and Google as it attempts to hoist its own gateway OS product, as well as entrants like Whale TV.
“The unknown question is how much scale The Trade Desk needs to disrupt the marketplace and how quickly they can reach it,” wrote LightShed’s Greenfield. “With over 40 million TVs sold annually in the U.S., and well over a third of those at Walmart, we suspect Walmart will play a key role in Ventura’s rollout plan (with Walmart’s acquisition of Vizio making it that much more intriguing) [emphasis LightShed’s].”
But for his part, TTD’s Green believes Ventura — which the CEO described by repetitively using keywords including “open,” “efficient” and “transparent" - could win out based on its qualitative virtues, with the broader video business seeking a more independent and neutral gatekeeper.
Those virtues involve streaming’s never-ending quest to develop superior search and discovery features for consumers — an effort that Green said has been stymied by incumbent TVOS companies prioritizing their own content.
“I was seeing that most of the operating systems that are good are owned by big tech companies, who also own content,” Green said on his recent podcast. “Google owns YouTube and YouTube TV, for example, and of course, there’s Amazon.” (Notably, Green said he still sees Roku, a Trade Desk partner, as “independent” and hopes “they do well.”)
Meanwhile, amid his talking points, Green envisions Ventura as being better tailored to the more “open and efficient” CTV marketplace to which the broader video business is headed, given antitrust action against Google that will transform the business no matter how it shakes out.