A ‘fair, scaled market’: Why The Trade Desk is launching a TV OS

Smart TVs have quickly become the go-to for TV viewing. According to a new Parks Associates report, which surveyed 8,000 U.S. households with internet access, 68% of respondents have a smart TV, up from 54% in 2020.

And their proliferation is prompting the evolution of the TV operating system opening a brave new world for connected TV (CTV) advertising. It’s a world The Trade Desk is ready to enter.

The company announced today that it’s developed a new streaming TV OS called Ventura, and it will partner with smart TV makers and other aggregators to deploy it as early as 2025.

The Trade Desk, which owns and operates The Current, is entering the fray to fix a broken CTV supply chain, make advertising more effective and improve the overall TV advertising ecosystem, according to Founder and CEO Jeff Green.

“Ventura is an innovative new streaming operating system that that represents the most significant upgrade for advertisers, content owners, viewers, OEM [original equipment manufacturers] and any companies that offer content,” Green told employees during a company event on Tuesday. “Ventura will usher in the most advanced CTV advertising ecosystem ever by creating the most advanced operating system.”

As the CTV space rapidly evolves, some industry observers have floated that the next stage of streaming dominance could come down to the TV OS.

“The television, once a simple device for passive entertainment, has evolved into a complex ecosystem of software, hardware and content,” wrote analysts Alan Wolk and Jason Damata for a TVREV report. “At the heart of this transformation is the TV’s interface, the gateway through which viewers access a world of mostly digital content.”

But Green argues that major players like Amazon and Google have stifled ad effectiveness in the marketplace with “taxes” that inhibit other content owners. The big players have a bias toward their own content, which Ventura aims to mitigate and enable content owners to participate in a “fair, scaled market,” he says.

“As the streaming wars have escalated, the cost of content hasn't gone down, but discovery has become much more difficult,” Green told The Current Podcast in an interview released today.

“It is much more difficult for content owners. And they need CPMs to go up. They need the ad experience to be good. And if the other operating systems, especially Google, increase the rate of tax, it will make it so that the content-generation machines that they all are — very expensive machines — will not be able to thrive the way they have,” he said.

Ventura isn’t just aiming to improve the streaming environment for advertisers and publishers, but consumers, too, by making discovery easier, according to Green. Ventura will aim to improve the streaming user experience with cross-platform content discovery, subscription management and fewer, more relevant, ads.

Green said during Tuesday’s event that most operating systems have two major pain points: content discovery and content cost.

“The way to solve both of those is through something like The Trade Desk, where you have objectivity at the core of it,” Green said Tuesday. “The only way to be successful is for us to not own content, and for us to continue to underline what has been one of our most valuable strategic possessions, which is our objectivity.”

Matthew Henick, SVP of Ventura, reiterated that point during Tuesday’s presentation: “We want to give everybody control, not just of the content that they're watching, but how they're paying for it as well.”

Regarding discoverability, a Nielsen study last year found that consumers spent an average of 10.5 minutes searching for something to watch. That’s a problem given 20% of survey respondents said they gave up and did something else instead.

Still, streaming usage has made important gains: According to Nielsen’s latest Gauge report published on Tuesday, streaming accounted for 40.5% of TV viewing in the U.S. in October, up from 36.5% during the same time last year. That’s creating a need for innovation and a healthy ecosystem.

“We see this as an opportunity for us to make things better for everybody,” Green says.

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc.