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 on 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.