Adtech company The Trade Desk is planning to launch its own streaming TV operating system, partnering with several smart TV manufacturers and other streaming aggregators to deploy its Ventura OS. According to a statement given to Axios, the OS has been in development for the past three years and is expected to release in early 2025.
According to the company, several well-known streaming and hardware companies are backing the effort, including Disney, Paramount, Tubi and Sonos. The goal of the system, as purported by Lowpass, who broke the initial news on this, is to offer the OS to device makers who don’t wish to run Google TV, Amazon’s Fire TV, or Roku OS on their devices.
The big draw for the Ventura OS, however, is that it is designed to be a content agnostic OS for smart TVs. Specifically, The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green states that Roku, Amazon and Google all have a conflict of interest in how the OS performs because all of them own content that gets displayed on the TVs. It’s that conflict of interest, Green states, that hinders advertising on these platforms.
“We’re looking at a concentration around a handful of players that lack objectivity,” Green said in that same Axios article. “We think we’re in a unique position to make the ecosystem better.”
Ventura OS Seeks to Maximize ‘Relevant’ Advertising on Smart TVs
The Trade Desk bills Ventura as a more intuitive and engaging user experience that includes cross-platform content discovery, personalization, subscription management and fewer but more relevant ads.
It also promises a cleaner supply chain for streaming TV advertising, minimizing supply chain hops and costs to maximize ROI for advertising dollars. The platform will leverage OpenPath and Unified ID 2.0 to enable advertisers to value and price ad impressions across all platforms more accurately while finding target audiences more efficiently.
Green has gone on record saying that the company has no intention of developing its own hardware, however, and intends to remain strictly in the software space. When asked why the company opted to not work with another company to develop the OS, Green stated that the market would be more likely to adopt a solution created solely by The Trade Desk due to its reputation in the advertising space.
Green has even stated that the goal of the OS isn’t to profit directly from it, but instead to profit from the more transparent ad ecosystem that it creates on connected TVs (CTVs), something that he claims manufacturers, publishers and consumers stand to benefit from.
Trade Desk CEO Says Streaming Needs Content Agnostic Options
The focus on maximizing smart TV (or CTV) ad-revenue has been a topic of recent conversation among many manufacturers, with the most notable example entering public notice when Walmart bought out Vizio specifically for its advertising business. Manufacturers, such as LG and Telly, have even floated around the idea of ad-supported TVs, with LG going so far as to suggest a subscription cost for an ad-free TV experience.
This has largely been a result of the raw potential smart TVs offer for data collection and interactivity with viewers. The growing popularity of FAST channels–free, ad-supported streaming services that offer more curated content akin to a traditional broadcast network–also points to a provider ecosystem where understanding and catering to a specific audience through targeted content is going to be highly desirable for manufacturers.
This is further backed up by the fact that CTV or smart TV ad spend is projected to total $38.3 billion in 2024 and is currently expected to overtake linear television in ad sales come 2029.
Jeff Green, founder and CEO of The Trade Desk, said in the statement that the streaming TV market is at an evolution where the supply chain of streaming TV advertising must be competitive and transparent so advertisers can maximize performance, publishers can fund content, and consumers have a better experience.
“This innovation has to come in the OS, and it has to come from a company that brings the objectivity of not owning any streaming TV content,” Green says. “At The Trade Desk, all we want is a fair marketplace, where supply chain costs are minimized, and advertiser trust can thrive.”
