The Trade Desk wants to build a… Roku competitor?
In a week of interesting news, this might be the most interesting. DSP The Trade Desk, according to a report by Janko Roettgers, is “building its own smart TV OS.” Yes, you read that right — The Trade Desk wants to compete with Google, Amazon, Roku, Samsung, Apple, LG, and I’m sure others.
Why This Matters:
The Connected TV Marketing Association released a report in June and confirmed the obvious — the smart TV landscape is growing a lot, with annual sales eclipsing 120 million devices across 600 different TV brands, all of which rely on licensed operating systems. The smart TV OS market, like the hardware market, is highly competitive.
With that in mind, Janko reports that The Trade Desk has been building the OS to offer an alternative to device manufacturers. It sort of feels similar to UID in that The Trade Desk is working to create an alternative ecosystem spine, but this time for smart TV versus the web.
Former Roku staff are working on the project, which started during the pandemic and is a kind of Android AOSP (Android Open Source Project), similar to Amazon’s Fire TV OS. The Trade Desk would also offer up better monetization for the OEMs, and it would give The Trade Desk some major benefits including direct access to a huge first-party dataset that they simply don’t have right now. The OS could arrive next year, according to the report.
Experts React:
Streamr’s Jonathan Moffie tweeted that a Trade Desk OS “will be VERY tough to pull off but the OEMs are definitely trying to create CTV walled gardens so not a bad bet IMHO.”
Our Take:
This could be a huge win for The Trade Desk, which doesn’t have its own data; this would fix that while making it possible for them to have more data across the medium/channel they view as the future in CTV.
But there are likely issues here. How are partners like Roku, for example, reacting to this news? Can The Trade Desk, which is a leader in adtech, build a consumer-facing operating system? If they can, will it be good enough to warrant a manufacturer picking them over a more established OS provider with a consumer legacy? Moreover, do advertisers who’ve already been struggling to navigate an opaque and fragmented smart TV landscape truly benefit by having another OS player in market?
All TBD.
