The Trade Desk's 'Ventura' TV OS may never dominate the market, but an exec says a generous revenue model for TV makers and publishers could give it an edge over Google, Amazon and Roku.
The Trade Desk likely won't dominate the already large and competitive market for TV operating systems comprising large players such as Google, Amazon, Roku, Samsung and even Xumo, the Comcast-Charter national joint venture. But the ad-tech specialist believes there's still plenty of room for a new, independent player to join the fray and deliver more value to advertisers and content players.
The Trade Desk entered that arena last November with the introduction of Ventura, an operating system for connected TVs and other types of devices. Taking a page from the TV OS strategies of other players, such as TiVo and Whale TV, The Trade Desk views itself as an independent option that will put all content, such as free, ad-supported television (FAST) channels, on equal footing.
"Ventura is our entry into that space to build a more fair and transparent TV ecosystem so publishers can monetize their media better, fund more media. Advertisers get better bang for their buck and users can have a better experience as well," Matthew Henick, SVP of the Ventura TV operating system for The Trade Desk, said last week at the NAB Show's Summit.
Consumers, he argued, "can't trust most of the pixels on their television anymore." He held that others in the TV OS sector, such as Google, Amazon and Roku, are incentivized to "steer" or "nudge" users to their own owned and operated content services.
Matthew Henick (left), SVP, Ventura TV operating system at The Trade Desk, speaks with Dan Rayburn, chairman of the Summit at NAB 2025 in Las Vegas. (Source: Jeff Baumgartner/Light Reading)
"Every single OS has a conflict of interest in terms of actually giving their users what they're looking for," said Henick, an exec formerly of Epic Games, Facebook and BuzzFeed. "We think the OS is the best layer to try and fix that and create something that is more fair and transparent to compete on a level playing field."
The Trade Desk, he declared "will never make content."
With Ventura, he added, The Trade Desk wants a "fair shot" at winning advertising business for premium content and to hand more of those dollars back to the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and to the content publishers.
Alongside advertising, Ventura will also generate revenues from subscriptions and transactional content (such as movie and TV show purchases and rentals) made on the platform, but will give the "bulk" of that money to publishers and OEMs that are selling TVs at razor-thin margins.
"Our goal is to push all of the advertising back into the ecosystem and maintain just enough of the subscription and the transaction to keep the lights on," Henick said.
Ventura's success, he added, won't be judged by becoming the dominant TV OS in the world. "We're looking at what minimal, viable distribution can we get where we're seeing the change that we want to see elsewhere in the ecosystem," Henick explained.
It's not clear how well this message is being received among makers of connected TVs and media players.
Henick was not asked for an update on Ventura's progress in the market at NAB. However, The Trade Desk's new OS reportedly was dealt a setback after Sonos put plans to develop a video player powered by the Ventura OS on the back burner. The Verge reported last month that the team at Sonos focused on that product, codenamed Pinewood, had been reassigned to other projects.
But Henick believes Ventura is well positioned as more services gravitate to ad-supported models and adopt automated, programmatic advertising systems. Both segments are poised to accelerate over the next 18 months as services expand globally and look for new ways to drive more value out of advertising, he said.
He believes more services will lean into programmatic advertising to help balance pre-sold/upfront sales with more efficient real-time platforms. By way of example, he said a TV ad in a close Super Bowl matchup is far more valuable than it would be in a blowout.
"There's a risk tradeoff, but they want to sell everything at the best possible price for them and for their content providers," he said.
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