The Trade Desk is muscling its way into the TV operating system business with its Ventura OS – but the real story isn’t the product itself. It’s what TTD’s ambitions reveal about conflicts of interest within the industry and the inherent mismatch between consumer and advertiser needs.
Ventura launched in November 2024 to try and capture some of the ad dollars flowing to smart TV makers reinventing themselves as ads businesses. TTD sells the idea of Ventura to device manufacturers as a way to boost monetization, while the pitch to publishers and buyers is the offer of a transparent ad model without any favoritism. Or so the story goes.
“We do not have our own content service, nor do we re-bundle and aggregate other people’s content,” which would create a conflict of interest between publishers and distributors, said Rob Caruso, Ventura’s SVP of consumer products, speaking on a panel at StreamTV Show in Denver this week. I was there.
Caruso’s remarks are a shot fired at Google, Amazon and Roku, all of which operate video distribution, content and advertising businesses simultaneously. If a brand buys media through Amazon’s DSP, for example, Amazon is arguably incentivized to funnel more of those dollars toward Prime Video and Fire TV Channels to grow its owned-and-operated properties.
These conflicts of interest could also exist in deals that distributors strike with streaming platforms. During an unrelated session at StreamTV, analysts from Hub Entertainment Research and TVRev acknowledged that the unique relationship programming distributors broker with streaming services may start to affect how and where distributors steer ad budgets.
So how exactly is The Trade Desk, a demand-side platform, staying neutral when running an operating system with advertising? And is it possible that The Trade Desk’s relationships with individual publishers could influence how Ventura manages ad commitments for its OS?
“Emphatically, no,” Caruso…