An ad giant wants to run your next TV’s operating system

Sonos is rumored to be building a streaming box running The Trade Desk's OS.

An ad company’s foray into TV operating systems (OSes) illustrates a significant shift for TV hardware toward products that are increasingly focused on ad sales and tracking.

With more people using web-based streaming for TV, smart TV OSes have become the most lucrative part of the TV business. OS owners accumulate valuable data on how people use their smart TVs and streaming sticks, which is helpful for OS operators as well as third parties, like companies paying for ads distributed via TV OSes. Meanwhile, the smart TV ad business is growing rapidly, with GroupM, the world's biggest media investment firm, expecting ad revenue to reach $38.3 billion this year, a 20.1 percent year-over-year increase.

That trend has pushed TV OS operators, from Vizio and Roku to Samsung and LG, to seek new ways to incorporate ads and tracking into their TV software. Now, an ad tech giant is planning to become a TV OS provider itself.

The Trade Desk, which was founded in 2009 and sells one of the world's most popular demand-side platforms (that enables advertisers to purchase real-time automated digital ads across various publishers), plans to launch the Ventura TV OS in the second half of 2025, CEO Jeff Green told Axios this week.

The Trade Desk told Axios that it has been working on the OS for three years. Its announcement of Ventura painted an image of software designed to cater to advertisers and didn't detail specific user features that represent improvements over the TV OSes available today. The company claimed that it would improve the user experience with features that many TV OSes already offer, like "cross-platform content discovery, personalization, subscription management, and ultimately fewer (more relevant) ads." The Trade Desk has also suggested that Ventura would be a more impartial content referrer since it doesn't own content, unlike other TV OS providers such as Amazon and Roku.

Per The Trade Desk, Ventura's other top "benefits" will include a "cleaner supply chain for streaming TV advertising, minimizing supply chain hops and costs—ensuring maximum ROI for every advertising dollar and optimized yield for publishers" and improved ad targeting.

TVs sold at a loss in order to bolster ad businesses

The Trade Desk plans to sell Ventura to TV manufacturers and distributors, plus other types of companies, like airlines, hotel chains, and "gaming companies," Axios reported.

The ad tech firm says it isn't looking to make money off of the OS directly and doesn't plan to make hardware.

Instead, Ventura is supposed to benefit The Trade Desk by helping its advertiser customers reach more people. Differing from how TV owners traditionally view TV software's purpose, Ventura will prioritize the ability to show TV owners the most appealing type of ads. Green will consider Ventura a success "if it drives more pricing transparency and stronger measurement for the CTV advertising ecosystem writ large," per Axios.

Ventura has reportedly garnered interest from Sonos already, CEO Patrick Spence told Axios. Sonos is rumored to be developing a streaming set-top box. The audio company's serious and public consideration of something like Ventura hints at the type of business approach it may take with streaming hardware.

The Trade Desk's interest in creating a TV OS centered on being helpful to advertisers indicates how important ads have become to TVs and/or TV software companies. Some, like Vizio and Roku, have embraced this shift so much that they're selling TVs "at somewhere between -3 and -7 percent margin" in a scramble to attract users, Paul Gray, Omdia’s research director of consumer electronics and devices, said at a CTV industry conference earlier this month, per Broadband TV News. Then there's Telly, a startup that has given TVs away for free so it can sell and track ads. (Telly TVs also have a secondary screen that can show ads when the TV is off.)

As companies continue to leverage TV software to sell ads and gather user data, TV owners will likely continue seeing fewer options for an ad-free TV viewing experience.

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