The news: The Trade Desk’s connected TV (CTV) operating system, Ventura, is entering a crowded market dominated by giant tech players like Amazon—but TTD views the operating system as a yearslong bet on increasing transparency in the CTV market, senior vice president of Ventura Matthew Hennick told EMARKETER.

Why Ventura, why now? The CTV landscape is a morass of hardware manufacturers, content producers, and operating systems—and lines between each discipline blur further by the day. Hennick said TTD sees Ventura as a way for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to unify a fractured content landscape for users while avoiding software partners with conflicts of interest.

• Unless OEMs want to develop their own operating systems, their choice is generally to partner with a Big Tech company. “Whether they’re Google or Amazon, you’re getting offered the exact same thing,” Hennick said. “‘Here’s a free bit of software, but in exchange we’re basically going to own the customer relationship for the rest of time. And by the way, you may be trying to build an ads business, but we have our own that’s going to win every jump ball and then some.’”
• “When the operating systems launched, [Big Tech platforms] said they wouldn’t have their own content service. And surprise—now they do,” Hennick said. “There’s no conflict of interest [with Ventura] because we will never own a content service or ad inventory ourselves, so publishers can compete with each other on an equal playing field that ultimately benefits users.”

Navigating the market: Smart TVs are the most common CTV devices in US households, per an April Comscore survey. That means TTD is entering a market with a complex web of yearslong contracts between OEMs and operating systems. But Hennick framed that dynamic as an opportunity for Ventura to read the room. “Because those deals are so long, it gives the OEM time to really evaluate it,” he said. “By the time these deals are ready to renew, the retailer or OEM has a pretty good idea of what they’ve given up in exchange.

Early partnerships are already stacking up. TTD is developing a custom version of Ventura for DirecTV, preserving the latter’s user interface. While not a dominant CTV player, the DirecTV partnership could be a powerful proof of concept for TTD and its plans to make Ventura fully customizable. “That’s something OEMs don’t really have access to with the Big Tech platforms; if [an OEM] takes Fire TV, it’s going to look like the same Fire TV that’s everywhere else,” Hennick said. “If the OEM has their own FAST service, for instance, and they want that to be privileged to start, that’s fine with us.”

What this means for CTV: Big Tech’s hold on the CTV operating system space will persist for some time, but Ventura hints at trends that could disrupt that dominance. TTD’s push to improve transparency and addressability for both publishers and advertisers taps into a growing discontentment with the Big Tech status quo, and results from early partnerships could pressure the industry’s largest players to take note, potentially resulting in a CTV ecosystem where advertisers enjoy less pressure from Big Tech-owned advertising systems.