More people are using their smart TVs only to stream content, eschewing antennas and cable hookups, according to a new report from Inscape, set-maker Vizio’s data unit.

At the same time, more of the big-ticket tentpole programming from broadcast and cable is being streamed using smart TV apps including virtual multichannel video programming distributors — like YouTube TV — that can access live, linear broadcast and cable networks 

Nearly 25% of the content viewers “must see live” was streamed in Q1, according to Inscape’s 1Q Trends Report.

The number of smart TVs used only for streaming jumped to 58% in Q1 from 55% in Q4 2023, the largest quarterly increase since Q2 2023.

TVs that only accessed content via cable or satellite or over the air remained steady quarter over quarter at 5%.

“To put it bluntly, more than half of smart TVs included in the data did not access any content via cable, satellite or over-the-air antenna (OTA),“ Inscape said. “But that doesn’t mean people are only watching in an on-demand fashion.

“With a variety of apps and devices, smart TVs can access live, linear TV airing on broadcast or cable networks,“ the company added. “In Q1 2024, nearly a quarter of that ‘must-see-live’ content was streamed.”

Although the broadcast and traditional pay TV platforms continue to own the bulk of live, linear viewing, streaming’s share has increased to 24.4% from 15.2%, Inscape said.

Still, traditional TV is still where the bulk of sports (72.3%) and news (79.9%) got watched in Q1.  For March Madness specifically, 72.7% of viewing time of the women’s basketball tournament was watched over the air, on cable or satellite. For the men’s tournament, 68.6% was watched via traditionally-delivered TV.

In Q1, 94% of total streaming time was driven by smart TVs that only (66.8%) or mostly (27.1%) streamed content.

After a twofold increase in the average number of apps used per smart TV from 2021 to 2023, usage has leveled off in the last few quarters, with about 5.5 apps being used per TV. 

Inscape said this signals a stabilization in TV viewing behavior and a clear limit to how many apps people are willing to use. 

The Inscape report is based on data from more than 23 million opted-in Vizio devices.

The explosive growth of smart TV proliferation globally has arrived hand-in-hand with consumer adoption of video streaming, but that growth is slowing. 

According to data provided by TrendForce, global smart TV shipments are projected to decline for a fifth consecutive year, dropping below 200 million units for the first time in a decade. 

TrendForce estimates that shipments will tally at less than 197 million TVs in 2023, a 2.1% decline from the research company's 2022 tally (which was off nearly 4% from 2021). 

"Consumer budgets are still constrained due to the current high-interest-rate environment, and the real estate bubble in China has suppressed TV demand," TrendForce said in its recent report. "Moreover, a significant increase in TV panel prices this year has led brands to scale down promotional events." 

Notably, the report also includes interesting market share statistics, revealing that the long-gestating moment at which Chinese upstarts Hisense and TCL run down Korean incumbents Samsung and LG is at hand.

"Both Chinese brands have successfully raised their shipment volumes and market shares through low-cost export market strategies and localized production," TrendForce said. "Conversely, LG Electronics faced a downturn in OLED TV sales, with a nearly 30% YoY decline, leading to a 7.4% decrease in overall shipments to 22.91 million units."

Samsung, which has led in smart TV market share for the last 17 years, has seen its annual shipments decline nearly 15% from five years ago. Meanwhile, Hisense and TCL have nearly doubled their global shipments over that span. 

Of course, market share trends directly affect the important global gateway OS market, the closely associated battle between platform giants Samsung, Roku, Google and Amazon, among many other software suppliers. 

By now, the smart TV revolution is well underway and advertisers across the board have recognized that viewer behavior has changed dramatically.

Some of these changes have manifested as challenges to advertisers. One change is the fact that many viewers are streaming TV in premium, ad-free environments. Another is that even among viewers using platforms with ads, they often jump between services, resulting in a fragmented landscape that makes targeting and frequency difficult to achieve. 

But other changes have emerged as solutions to these challenges, top among them is the ascension of the smart TV home screen as the center of the streaming TV experience. 

Savvy advertisers recognize that the home screen is the one place where they can reach all viewers regardless of content or platform choice. The question many are asking today is, how? 

It’s a valid question, but the answers won’t be found looking at what’s worked in the past. Instead, advertisers need to really think differently and pivot their strategy, budgets and content choices to today’s CTV environment. 

Opportunity

First, let’s examine just how different the smart TV home screen is as an advertising vehicle. The home screen offers a different kind of reach, engagement and measurement potential than what TV ad buyers typically expect from a traditional 15-second or 30-second video ad. That means home-screen ad opportunities need to be evaluated differently. 

Let’s start with reach. Many home screen visitors are hard-to-reach viewers who go right to an ad-free environment that brands miss with standard CTV or linear ad buys. The home screen is the only place where brands can reach these viewers as they begin their streaming journey. 

Then there’s engagement. The home screen is, by design, a lean-in experience. It’s the new channel surfing, an active process where viewers are at their most engaged and focused on the screen itself. That’s much different than the passive lean-back posture taken once they start streaming. 

And finally, we have measurement, the ability for the home screen provider to more granularly measure not only reach and awareness but also lower-funnel key performance indicators (KPIs) like sales and even store visits for a level of custom reporting that can better validate and optimize campaigns. 

Taken together, the home screen offers the scale of linear with the efficiency of digital with no wasted impressions. But just because the home screen is on the TV doesn’t mean we should treat it like a traditional TV ad. 

Content and Creative

Ask any brand how they’d like to advertise on the smart TV home screen and the first answer you’ll get is a streaming video ad similar to the kind you’d see between show programming breaks. 

But one must be very careful about how ads work in the home screen environment. Video ads in programming are interruptive by nature. They have to be. Watching TV is a lean-back experience. You need interruptive ads to get attention. You need frequency to ensure the message gets across.

But the home screen is different. Viewers on the home screen are far more engaged. It’s a lean-in experience. That requires a different kind of advertising. Interrupting the content discovery experience with a video ad is not the best experience, and could very easily backfire. 

For media companies advertising programming it’s pretty straightforward — feature a title in one of many featured or curated programming themes and let the viewer click to watch. But for general-market brands, it takes a bit more creativity.  

This creates an unprecedented opportunity to build brand affinity by helping viewers find what they want, presenting it in a way that creates a better user experience, and in some cases even contributing to the creation of the content at the start. These solutions build not only awareness, but goodwill when brands are seen as aiding the discovery experience and not hindering it.

Brands can sponsor a specific program, or a collection of content, or even create their own branded content experience offered to viewers strategically alongside well-timed calendar milestones.

These opportunities place brands alongside not just one publisher’s content, but all the content people are seeking out or possibly looking for in a highly immersive environment. Sure you can place a CTV video ad in a cooking show, or even in multiple cooking shows airing at different times of the week on different channels. But now you can sponsor an entire curated discovery row dedicated to cooking and food. 

What’s more, it’s a way for brands to participate in and have a voice around TV tentpole events that they otherwise may be unable to penetrate with ads directly for either budgetary or other concerns. 

Artificial Walls

But — there’s always a “but” — the infrastructure of the ad-buying system has to catch up to these modern realities and formats. Ad buying is still very much based on format, on different types of media. You have TV media buyers, digital media buyers, print media buyers and so on. 

The TV home screen resides on a TV. The community buying CTV video inventory is looking at the home screen inventory through the same lens — gross ratings points (GRPs), 15- to 30-second videos, etc. It’s a paradigm they can’t get out of due to outdated strategies, outdated budgets or a little of both. (The same can be said for Wall Street analysts.)

The home screen opportunity is not your typical connected TV buy. It’s not even display. It’s a new medium that the infrastructure hasn’t adapted to yet. Most people get it, they’re just literally not empowered to buy it. 

The TV buying team has a TV buying budget to do one specific thing: buy video ads. Display ad teams have their budget for website ads. That’s largely because this is a new format disrupting a status quo that hasn’t changed much in decades. Of course the industry needs time to readjust. 

But this period of adjustment also presents an opportunity for the early adopters to snatch a huge slice of the “share of voice” pie, and do so at the same cost as advertising in a crowded linear market. As they succeed, these artificial walls impeding the adoption of home screen advertising will fall.

Ultimately, advertising content and budget follow the consumer. They go where viewers go. But sometimes, they get there a little late. 

Today, TV viewers are going in many different directions, but they’re all starting from the same place — the smart TV home screen. Advertising technology, budgets and strategies need to catch up to meet viewers where they now live. 

TV has changed. It’s not going back. So TV advertising has to change with it. 

The market for peripheral speakers that connect directly to smart TVs via Bluetooth, which still feels kind of newish, has already peaked, according to Hub Entertainment’s latest Evolution of the Smart TV Set report, which surveyed 2,504 U.S. consumers in May.

Hub said only 30% of U.S. smart TV owners have a smart speaker device connected to their set, “down significantly from 2021.” 

As this graphic from Hub's report shows, smart speaker penetration hasn’t really moved all that much in three years (although voice remote usage does seem to be on the uptake).

Globally, the “smart speaker” market is led and defined by Amazon’s Alexa and Google Voice-powered gadgets. But vendors including Roku and Vizio moved aggressively into a sub category of the market four years ago with peripheral speaker devices designed to be connected directly to smart TVs via Bluetooth.

And it’s that latter category we're kicking the tires on here — the Hub survey, smallish as it is, indicates these devices haven't reached mass appeal and that’s a bit counterintuitive, based on other survey results.  

With 47% of survey respondents saying they use their smart TVs to stream music (up from 27% in 2020), it would seem these Dolby 5.1-capable gadgets would have captured greater market demand by now. 

Overall, the report said smart TV penetration is closing in, but hasn’t arrived yet, upon saturation of the U.S. market, with 74% of homes now equipped with such a device, up from 61% in three years.

Sixty-four percent of those homes use their smart TV to stream video, up from 47% in 2020. 

Hub also said that 40% of U.S. smart TV's are controlled by the Roku operating system — a leading market-share statistic that hasn’t changed much over the past several years.

The research company said that “overall familiarity” with runner-up brand Amazon Fire TV is about two-thirds of that of Roku.

A decade ago, with their gaming consoles serving as the nexus for the nascent but fast-emerging streaming habit, both Microsoft and Sony hatched ambitious plans to blend subscription video into walled gardens of entertainment. 

But just like PlayStation Vue, those days are over now. 

According to a survey conducted by Aluma Insights gauging the streaming device preferences of 2,000 heads of U.S. households, use of Xbox or PlayStation consoles to stream video account for only 6% of total streaming time. This is down from 26% in 2015. 

Traditional pay TV set-tops are now only used for 9% of streamed viewing, and -- this is surprising to us -- smart phones or tablets account for just 6% of streaming. 

Not surprisingly, the smart TV now rules streaming, with Aluma reporting smart TV penetration into 64% of U.S. households, and TVs now accounting for 50% of streaming time.

As for actual streaming pucks, dongles and sticks, now handle just 21% of streamed viewing.

“This is an example of a well-worn migratory pattern,” said Michael Greeson, founder of Aluma Insights. “The newest, most feature-laden television goes to the living room and the set it replaces moves to the primary bedroom, then to the second bedroom, and so on. As this happens, the use of bridge devices to watch streaming video in all rooms of the home is further diminished.”

The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement said it has launched a study looking at opportunities to enhance the value of smart-TV data as part of television measurement systems.

As cord-cutting reduces the number of homes with set-top boxes, smart TVs have become an increasingly big source of data and information about TV viewing.

“Available from tens of millions of households, Smart TV data captures viewing behavior on a second-by-second basis, and can support both content and advertising measurement use cases,” said Jon Watts, CIMM’s managing director.

“However, the ecosystem is fragmented with limited standardization, content identification reference libraries are rarely comprehensive and measurement vendors have to determine how to deal with unidentified or unmatched fingerprints,” Watts said. “Many industry participants believe that there are opportunities to address these issues and we’re excited to work with our members to assess the various options, bringing together networks and programmers, CTV OEMs, agencies, measurement providers and other industry participants in a truly collaborative and inclusive undertaking.”

Also Read: ANA, 4As, CIMM To Study Multi-Currency TV Market

Measurement veteran Caroline Horner and will be supported by three expert advisers — Jonathan Steuer, Bill Harvey and Tom Morgan — and a project steering group from CIMM’s membership, including Howard Shimmel, Janus Strategy & Insights; Brian West, NBCUniversal Media; Helen Katz, Publicis Media; and Albert Lau, Omnicom Media Group.

“With the increase in video app usage and addressable advertising inventory, data from Smart TVs is becoming an important indicator of content consumption and ad effectiveness,” Horner said. “If we can work to keep these dataflows as pure, complete and accessible as possible, the ecosystem can better quantify video consumption across linear and digital applications. It is the perfect time to consider practical steps that the industry can take to make the data more comprehensive, accurate, representative, interoperable and cost-effective.” ■

In the hours and weeks after Tuesday, April 19, when Netflix initiated one of the more notorious stock routes in Wall Street history by disclosing that it had actually lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter, the legion of equity analysts, tech influencers and reporters covering the company focused on what they saw as a flawed content strategy. 

"Just because one show works doesn’t mean subscribers need several others just like it," wrote TechCrunch's Lauren Forristal. "This formulaic model of programming feels too algorithm-reliant in its decision-making process."

Also read: Are Sluggish Smart TV Shipments Really Behind the Growth Problems for Netflix and Other Streamers? Just Look at This Chart

LightShed Partners' equity analyst Richard Greenfield blogged, "Management pointed to several explanations for the unforeseen loss of subs. Yet, the single biggest issue that really was not talked about is that Netflix’s content, especially its English-language content, is simply not resonating relative to the level of spend."

But it appears the supply chain-related explanation that Netflix prioritized first in its April 19 letter to shareholders might have actually identified the biggest underlying cause of the streaming company's temporary halt in customer growth -- the market for addressable streaming homes. 

Explosive sales of smart TVs in markets spanning U.S./Canada to Asia/Pacific drove streaming adoption -- and Netflix subscriptions -- to new heights during the pandemic. But as COVID wore on, big TV manufacturers including TCL and Hisense started having trouble finding components, just like automakers and everyone else. 

"It’s increasingly clear that the pace of growth into our underlying addressable market (broadband homes) is partly dependent on factors we don’t directly control, like the uptake of connected TVs (since the majority of our viewing is on TVs), the adoption of on-demand entertainment, and data costs," Netflix's Q1 letter reads.  We believe these factors will keep improving over time, so that all broadband households will be potential Netflix customers."

“Smart TV penetration growth has slowed dramatically, with Netflix sub growth heavily correlated to the growth in smart TV adoption,” Greenfield conceded. “Not only did smart TV penetration benefit from a COVID pull-forward, but it is now being pressured by supply issues including a resurgence of COVID in China.”

Over the summer, these factors did improved, as Netflix predicted they might. Despite a weak first quarter for global smart TV shipments, S&P Global Market Intelligence media research unit Kagan reported in August, declining panel prices and the coming World Cup in November 2022 were expected to overcome the negative effects of inflation to spark consumer demand by the end of 2022.

Also read: Netflix Stock Booms as Streaming Company Beats Forecasts on Subscribers and Revenue in Q3

As it reported last week, Netflix swung to a gain of 2.4 million subscribers in the third quarter (and 4.5 million predicted for Q4), the catalyst in the company's 23% stock price spike over the last 10 days. 

Revenue growth probably can't explain a recovery of more than $50 billion to Netflix's market capitalization. 

Netflix revenue growth further decelerated in the third quarter, falling to 5.9%, about a third of what it was a year ago when revenue expanded at 16.3%. 

As for content being the differentiator, there were massive hit shows in Q3, with Stranger Things: Season 4 and Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story gathering the platform's largest English-language audiences ever. 

But Netflix had big hits in the first quarter, too, with season 2 of Bridgerton and another Shonda Rhimes sensation, limited series Inventing Anna also winding up on the company's all-time audience rankers, along with Ryan Reynolds film The Adam Project. 

In Q3, Netflix didn't experience a global event that caused it to lose a chunk of subscribers all at once, as it did when it had to suddenly pull out of Russia, and abandon 700,000 customers, amid that country's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

But it's hard to pinpoint another factor beyond improved supply chain dynamics that reignited customer growth. The cheaper, ad-supported tier Netflix has been developing won't debut until November. And its crackdown on account-sharing won't bear fruit until next year. 

Notably, Netflix hasn't talk about the supply chain in investor letters subsequent to Q1. However, the streaming company -- which has been more conservative and out ahead in terms of issuing guidance since April 19 -- will no longer be forecasting customer expansion, either. 

This seems to indicate that outside of initiating a tier with limited ads and cracking down on password sharers, little is different from the Netflix priced at $161 a share back in June and the one valued at more than $287 today. Netflix has simply upped its investor relations game ... and global factors beyond its reach have improved. 

Could it be that six months of pearl clutching, which saw a swing in Netflix market capitalization of more than $100 billion, came down to a simple, temporary market dynamic ... that no one in the room had any control over?

Could be ... ▪️

Shipments of smart TVs powered by Android TV and its predecessor TVOS, Google TV, have more than doubled since the beginning of 2019, accounting for only 10% of the market to a current level of more than 20%, according to research company Omdia. 

At a presentation delivered last week ahead of the IFA conference in Berlin (and covered by FlatpanelsHD.com), Omdia analyst Paul Gray called the European smart TVOS market a three-horse race between Google, LG and its webOS software, and Samsung's Tizen.

The analyst even described Android TV's proliferation as a "consistent growth story." 

In North America, Roku remains the dominant TVOS natively installed into smart TVs, followed by Amazon Fire TV. But based on expanded product availability, Google appears to be gaining ground here, as well. 

More than 90% of the smart TVs shipped globally now include a native TVOS vs. only around 80% back in 2019, Omdia said. 

Gray added that the global smart TV market is entering its "third streaming wave" -- not only are video streaming pucks and dongles being displaced by smart TVs with natively installed TVOS, but cloud gaming capabilities on these smart TVs now threaten the viability of external gaming consoles such as Xbox and PlayStation, as well. ■

Streaming television continued to grow in the second quarter, according to Conviva’s State of Streaming Report.

Global streaming time was up 14%. In the more-mature North American market, streaming was up 5% after posting a similar gain in Q1. In Asia, streaming was up 90% and Latin America saw a 70% gain.

The majority of streaming hours are happening on big screens, either via smart TVs or connected devices. Smart TVs — up 31.4% — were the fastest-growing device type globally for the eighth-straight quarter, accounting for 35.3% of global viewing. Connected TV devices handled 34.6% of streaming, up 2.8%.

In North America, 37.6% of viewing comes on smart TVs and 37.6% happens on connected devices.

Among device makers, Roku had the highest share of global streaming at 23.1%. Amazon’s Fire TV followed with 12.1%. Then came Samsung, Android TV, Apple, LG, Android, PCs, Apple TV and Apple tablets.

Roku’s hours were up 3.8%.

In the U.S. Roku’s share was 32.6% to lead the industry. It was followed by Amazon Fire TV, Samsung TV, Apple iPhone and LG TV.

Conviva said streaming video quality showed improvement in some metrics, but degraded in others. Bitrates were up and there was less buffering, but it took longer for videos to start.

Minutes per video play averaged 20.8 globally and 22.3 in North America.

“The race is on to see which publishers will meet these expectations, including providing the best experience when it’s most important. Those that do will quickly eclipse the competition,” Conviva president and CEO Keith Zubchevich said.

“For long-form VOD content watched from the couch, that means improving bit rate,“ Zubchevich said. “For live content, that means decreasing VST and buffering to provide a similar experience to linear TV. For mobile devices, where bitrate is less important, publishers may want to think about optimizing VST and buffering. And as streaming ads become a way of life, optimizing their performance will separate the leaders from the pack.” 

To prepare its report, Conviva analyzed data primarily collected from the company’s proprietary sensor technology, which is currently embedded in 3.3 billion streaming video applications. It measures in excess of 500 million unique viewers watching 180 billion streams per year and nearly 2 trillion real-time transactions per day across more than 180 countries. ■

The quarantine portion of the pandemic had a profound impact on the consumption habits of consumers, TV/video being among the most affected.

No surprise there. But what's striking is how quickly the phenomena matured the U.S. market in terms of video streaming.

According to the latest report from Leichtman Research Group (LRG), 87% of U.S. households now have a connected-TV device of some kind — for example, a Roku, an Amazon Fire TV player, a smart TV or even a connected Blu-ray player.

Also: Streaming Penetration Rises to 80% as Smaller Services Grow: Analyst

That penetration rate stood at just 80% two years ago and 69% as recently as 2017. It was just 38% in 2012.

Notably, LRG also found that smart-TV penetration has reached 71% of U.S. homes, up from 58% in 2020.

Across all U.S. households, the research company added, there is a mean of 3.9 devices per TV household, compared to 3.2 in 2020, and 2.4 in 2017.

Overall, 46% of adults in U.S. TV households watch video on a TV via a connected device daily, compared to 40% in 2020, 25% in 2017, and 4% in 2012.

The upshot of all of this: As more and more U.S. homes adopt the streaming habit, there are simply fewer new adopters available for companies like Netflix and Roku to assimilate, at least domestically.

LRG polled 1,902 U.S. consumers for its Connected TVs 2022 survey. ■

Following Netflix's "Black Tuesday" announcement on April 19 that it had lost streaming customers for the first time in more than a decade, a consensus quickly emerged among the many pundits scrutinizing the company's business that flawed content strategy was behind the sudden growth woes. 

Perhaps overlooked was a factor that Netflix ticked off first in its quarterly shareholder letter -- the "uptake of connected TVs," which has slowed significantly worldwide due to the global supply chain problem. 

Roku also tried to highlight the issue in November, when CFO Steve Louden told investors that U.S. smart TV pricing had gone up 42% and sales had correspondingly declined 31%. "Supply chain disruptions that I mentioned are impacting a lot of industries," he said.

It was overlooked by this publication -- and perhaps many others -- when the Consumer Technology Association released figures in February predicting that smart TV shipments would fall 13% in 2022 to just under 40.4 million units. This was after declining nearly 6% last year to just over 46.6 million TVs. 

Smart TVs are the way that 70% of U.S. consumers access connected TV, according to figures released earlier this week by Samsung. Fewer smart TV shipments means less consumers adopting streaming and subscribing to services like Netflix. 

"Because of supply chain concerns, manufactures have had to focus more of their priorities on large full featured TVs, where the margins are best. Until costs decrease, many consumers may hold off upgrading the value televisions in their living rooms,” CTA said.

The supply chain problem, of course, far exceeds the U.S. market. By many accounts, the chip shortage is easing, but its effects on the bottom line of streaming adoption worldwide are perhaps just now being experienced. 

Consumer electronics industry tracker Trendforce expects global TV shipments to reach around 217 million units this year, up 3.4% over 2021. But that projected shipment count is only flat with 2017 levels. 

The dongle is dying, declares oft-quoted media business pundit Evan Shapiro.

Rolling through a deck during Samsung's NewFront presentation in New York Tuesday, the former Seeso chief (among many other video biz titles) showed a slide that caught the attention of other video-industry gadflies on Twitter. 

According to Shapiro, 61% of U.S. streaming video consumers are using connected smart TVs to stream vs. only 39% using HDMI dongles and hockey-puck-style players. And that disparity is only predicted to grow in the coming years.

Elaborating on his presentation after his slide got retweeted by TV[R]EV analyst and Next TV contributor Alan Wolk, Shapiro wrote that 1 billion smart TVs will be sold over the next four years. Not one of them, he noted, will need a dongle to connect to the internet.

"As fun as it is to say the word 'dongle,' in five years we won’t ever need to *again," Shapiro tweeted, including an asterisk to exempt "Boomer"-age consumers from this prediction.

Shapiro's declaration was seconded by LightShed Partners analyst Richard Greenfield, who re-tweeted it with the hashtag, #goodluckdongles. ■

Vizio is offering users of its smart TVs discount and promotions so they can try out Apple TV Plus, Discovery Plus and fuboTV in April.

Vizio is offering users a three-month promotional trial of Apple TV Plus from April 25 through May 30. Viewers can take advantage of the offer through a banner on the home screen.

A 30-day promotional trial is available for Discovery Plus to people who purchase and register new Vizio TVs. The offer is available via email from April 22 to October 22.

Vizio Smart TV owners can get 20% off their first month of fuboTV via a promotional banner on screen. 

“Vizio’s mission is to bring the best possible entertainment experience to the millions of people that use our products every day. Working with our content partners to extend discounts on their subscription services so that Vizio audiences can access premium programming helps us deliver on that mission,” said Liz Buhn, senior director of partner marketing at Vizio. ■

LG Ads Solutions has announced a deal with Omnicom Media Group to bring LG smart TV and cross-screen ad inventory to clients of the world's second largest advertising agency. 

LG Ads data, culled from a network of more than 20 million LG smart TV U.S. households, will be integrated within Omni, Omnicom’s suite of proprietary applications, which in turn will mesh with clients’ first-party data and technology to orchestrate media campaigns. 

OMG agencies will now be able to run TV campaigns across all addressable LG smart TVs in the U.S.

LG Ads notes that connected TV adverting revenue is expected to reach $19.1 billion in 2022. 

New York-based Omnimedia is the world's second-biggest ad agency, with projected 2022 revenue of $15 billion, placing it only behind London's WPP ($16.9 billion), according to Insider Intelligence. Omnimedia's client roster includes McDonald‘s, Apple, Unilever and Johnson & Johnson.

“Omnicom’s vision for bringing more transparency and quality consumer experiences to CTV is directly in line with our initiatives for more open access to high-value smart TV data and for guaranteed outcomes for advertisers, where CTV media is only paid for when campaign objectives are met,” LG Ads Solutions CEO Raghu Kodige said in a statement. 

Added Slavi Samardzija, CEO of Annalect, the data and analytics division of OMG that developed and manages Omni: “LG Ads Solutions brings one of the industry’s largest observed TV data sets to the Omni platform, as well as access to its premium CTV media inventory. This partnership is a natural continuation of our efforts to transform the effects of data and analytics on media, while giving our clients access to the best view of both consumer behaviors and media inventory, paired with the highest level of precision.” ■

Roku, the leading supplier of smart TV OS in North America, is looking at possibly building its own TV sets.

According to Business Insider, Roku convened a focus group earlier this month in which participants were shown "different models, feature sets and names, sizes, price points," of smart TVs. For sourcing, Business Insider cited an individual "familiar" with the event. 

The report cited an additional unnamed executive source as saying Roku is exploring the possibility of "going it alone" with its own "manufacturing operation," and not merely attaching its brand to an existing smart TV manufacturer's product line. 

Speaking during Roku's Q4 earnings call Thursday, Roku CEO Anthony Wood refused to comment on what he called "rumors," but he did address the global supply chain challenges facing Roku's hardware business, which lost nearly $50 million in the fourth quarter. 

"What's been happening in TVs is that there's been a shortage of panels and it's also been much more expensive to ship televisions," Wood said. "It's been more expensive to ship players as well, but TVs are bigger. And so it impacts that more. So the result of all that is TV prices have gone up a lot for consumers, and that's reduced demand for TVs."

Why Does Roku Want to Build Smart TVs?

Roku has steadily evolved into much more of a media and advertising company and far less of a maker of gadgets, for which it derives only around 14% of revenue. But Roku still has very good reasons for controlling its own destiny with smart TVs, which drive the majority of its sizable active user base.

Roku, which touts more active users in the U.S., Canada and Mexico than any other supplier of connected TV OS, achieved that lofty position hand and hand with the emergence of Chinese electronics company TCL, which starting in 2017, undercut Korean market leaders Samsung and LG with relatively inexpensive TV sets featuring licensed versions of Roku's software.

TCL, however, started building sets powered by Google's Android TV operating system in 2020. And in January, TCL revealed that it's now selling 10 million TVs a year powered by the Google OS.

Meanwhile, in September, Amazon debuted two product lines of its own branded smart TVs powered by Amazon Fire TV. The sets appear to be the work of an OEM partner, with technology analysts speculating it be ... TCL.

So not only has Amazon appeared to have gotten into business with Roku's top OS licensing partner, it has the vast financial might needed to also maintain -- or even slash -- its price points at a time when global supply chain issues have driven up smart TV prices by around 35%.

For its part, Roku doesn't have the almost unimaginably powerful e-commerce and cloud business of Amazon to underwrite a loss leader strategy intended for the sole purpose of consumer connected TV platform adoption, but it does seem willing to sell its gadgets at a loss for the sake of maintaining its active user growth -- a factor that has decelerated a bit in recent quarters.

In fact, in the third quarter, Roku reported a $14.6 million loss for its technology hardware-based "player" sector. 

But while Roku might be willing to go into the red for the sake of platform proliferation, this strategy might not line up with its OEM partners, which have very different sales goals. 

For example, last year, when Roku entered a protracted impasse with Google over support of YouTube and YouTube TV apps for the Roku platform, it was revealed that a key driving factor was Roku's unwillingness to support a video compression codec, AV1, favored by Google. 

Supporting AV1 drives up the manufacturing costs of Roku hardware, an unpleasing prospect for Roku OEM tech partners. 

So cutting out the third-party tech supplier allows Roku more consumer pricing flexibility. 

Mobile gadget mavens have urged Samsung to ditch its proprietary smart TV operating system in favor of Android TV, a move which would be in line with Samsung smart phones and their allegiance to the Android mobile platform. 

But the latest version of Samsung's Tizen OS, being presented at the intrepid live CES 2022 event in Las Vegas this week, reveals that the No. 1 supplier of smart TVs is still more interested in beating Google than partnering with it. 

Case in point is the new "Media Screen," a Google TV-like feature that Samsung says is designed to "put all of your streaming service content into one, easy-to-browse place." 

Also read: All You Need to Know About Samsung TV Plus

Not only does the new content hub display all of the user's SVOD and AVOD options, it also surfaces relevant content from the services they have access to. 

The OS upgrade includes several other features:

> Gaming Hub aggregates all of the user's gaming options, much the way Media Screen does with streaming.

> Watch Together splits the screen up to let users video chat with family, friends and hangers-on as they watch the same content together in different locations. 

> NFT Platform features an  integrated platform for "discovering, purchasing and trading digital artwork through MICRO LED, Neo QLED and The Frame."

Beyond software features, Samsung is also showing off a nifty new remote control that charges itself with built-in solar panels, as well as a feature called "RF harvesting." The latter takes ambient radio signals from devices like Wi-Fi routers and turns them into low-volt electrical power. 

Samsung has yet to make clear if the new remote will be packaged with its smart TVs or sold separately as an accessory. ■

The UK’s Sky TV satellite TV service, currently owned by Comcast, rolled out a very interesting product this month that is likely a harbinger of what we can expect the future to look like for American MVPDs.

The product, called Sky Glass, is an actual smart TV set, made by TP Vision, the company that now owns Philips. 

Also read: Comcast and Sky Ditch Set-tops in Europe with 'Sky Glass' Smart TV Initiative

The TV is meant to replace both the set top box and the satellite dish. It features a generally well-reviewed interface from Sky and some features that should have great consumer appeal, including a built-in five-channel Dolby Atmos sound system, complete with subwoofer. Next year it is due to get a 4K smart camera for gaming, workouts and Zooming.

In addition to Sky’s cable lineup, viewers can subscribe to a range of streaming services like Netflix, Disney Plus and BBC iPlayer. Other services like Peloton and Spotify are available as well.

Also read: Vewd Looks to Take on Comcast's Sky Glass with Euro Smart TV Play for Pay TV

But the most interesting innovation of all is one that allows viewers to pay a monthly “subscription” fee to lease the TV via a 48-month (four year) contract. This mobile phone-esque plan allows viewers to get a new TV without much of a monthly outlay while cementing a four-year customer relationship for Sky.

Why the Sky plan makes sense for American MVPDs

U.S. MVPDs are at a crossroads.

Cord-cutting is picking up, but it’s still nowhere near the level that would cause larger operators to get out of the pay TV business altogether. 

That said, these days maintaining a pay TV service has largely become a customer retention play for the MVPDs, who make the bulk of their revenue from selling broadband service.

More than that, the smart TV OEMs and companies like Roku and Amazon whose OS powers smart TVs, are assuming the gatekeeper role the MVPDs once had.

This means that they are the ones who are striking the streaming equivalent of carriage deals with the various Flixes, FASTs and niche providers. Not to mention the vMVPDs.

To counter this, the MVPDs have tried a variety of tactics. They’ve gussied up their set top boxes and added in access to streaming services. They’ve rolled out their own streaming devices. They’ve even made noise about rolling out their own branded TV sets.

Which is what Sky did, but the “leasing it like a cell phone” piece is genius.

It acknowledges the state of the market, which is that the television is now the cheapest screen in the house. By offering TVs on a monthly lease basis for 48  months, Sky will also be able to speed up the replacement cycle, which is now at around every seven years, and, absent any major innovations, likely to go even longer.

Leasing TVs will be a good play for American MVPDs who, at some point in the next five years or so, will be looking at audiences of around 30 to 40 million households or around one-third of the total television audience. 

Those pay TV households are likely to skew older and less affluent than streaming only households, and so the ability to lease a new smart TV that provides some mixture of traditional pay TV channels and streaming services via an interface designed for the tech un-savvy, should be a win all around. 

It also locks those households into a broadband and pay TV contract for the next four years, which means the MVPDs can slow down all those “MVPDs shed 1 million customers last quarter” headlines, which cause nothing but hurt for their share prices.

It’s a good deal for the remaining MVPD consumers too. 

They’ll get a brand new TV, access to their favorite linear and streaming channels via a provider they trust, and, more crucially, can call when something goes wrong.

This is a variation on the TiVo versus MVPD DVR scenario twenty years ago, where consumers often went for the less technologically sophisticated MVPD set top box/DVR combo over TiVo because they could lease it month by month and a tech would (eventually) show up when something went wrong.

Will the new MVPD TVs be enough to knock current market leaders Samsung, VIZIO, LG and TLC (Roku) off their perch? 

Probably not. 

To begin with, the audience for the new sets will be limited to those remaining MVPD subscribers who are in the market for a new TV, which is going to be pretty small to begin with. 

In addition, it would actually make sense for the MVPDs to partner with one of the big OEMs and vice versa. The OEMs all have their own FAST content which they could white label for the MVPDs (e.g., “WatchFree on Charter”) and they have the sort of strong name recognition which would make convincing customers to upgrade to a new TV that much easier.

What will be interesting to watch is whether licensing smart TVs becomes the norm. 

It’s easy enough to imagine the aforementioned OEMs offering a monthly subscription package that gives consumers a brand new TV along with a bundle of four or five Flixes ... provided they signed up for a full 48 months. 

That would change the pay TV business significantly and would likely raise issues of how much MVPDs could charge for standalone broadband if consumers were not buying a bundle from them. 

It’s all just speculation now, it’s a future that could be here sooner than you think.

Hockey-puck-like streaming devices, along with HDMI sticks and dongles, are on their way out. And the leading U.S. smart TV original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are about to “have their moment” with huge ad revenue growth.

That’s the conclusion of a new report from OTT-focused research company TV[R}EV, which predicts collective 4.5x growth in advertising coin for the three biggest U.S. smart TV OEMs, Samsung, LG and Vizio. With all three developing their own video operating systems that are natively integrated into their sets, TV[R]EV predicts their collective ad revenue will grow from $1.37 billion in 2021 to $6.17 billion in 2026. 

“All three OEMs have done a phenomenal job of updating their interfaces,” said TV[R]EV co-founder and lead analyst Alan Wolk. “People are starting to notice and realizing they don’t need a third-party dongle anymore. That’s going to drive up viewership numbers on smart TVs, especially as viewers buy the latest sets.”

As smart TV OEMs continue to improve the user experiences delivered by their interfaces and remote controls, and Roku continues to proliferate through its OEM relationships, TV[R]EV predicts that dongles will "disappear." 

According to TV[R]EV, Samsung says that 90% of its smart TV users don’t deploy an external streaming device. 

We did have some questions … which were answered as we read through the report. 

For one, why isn’t China’s TCL a “fourth Beatle” in the discussion of leading smart TV OEMs? And isn’t Roku, whose OS powers most TCL TVs, a major factor in the business of automatic content recognition (ACR)-based advanced advertising?

“We have chosen not to include Roku and TCL in the same category as Vizio, Samsung and LG,” Wolk wrote. "While they are most definitely helping the smart TV market to grow, they have a different business model —the interface is licensed, which means that TCL could choose not to renew the contract and/or hand it over to a rival. Given that Roku’s success is mostly limited to the U.S. market, this is a legitimate concern.”

Amazon is very quietly talking to consumer electronics company about putting the Amazon brand name onto smart TVs, according to Business Insider. 

The report says Amazon has talked to companies including China's TCL about selling the makers sets in the U.S. under an Amazon brand, where they would compete with top Korean brands Samsung and LG. 

The TVs would be powered by Alexa Voice and be focused on large-screen formats of 55 inches and above. They could be available as soon as October, the report said, if "logistical bottlenecks" can be worked out. 

Business Insider, however, didn't mention Amazon's Fire TV as being the exclusive OS for these TVs. 

Amazon has worked with Toshiba and Hisense in the past to produce smart TVs powered by the Fire TV OS. 

Amazon remains one of the biggest retail platforms for selling smart TVs, along with Walmart and Best Buy. 

Even as consumers continue to lament the scarcity of 4K programming, prices for next-generation 8K TVs are descending within reach. 

China’s TCL, which has a history of undercutting its Korean and Japanese CE rivals in the smart TV arena, just announced the addition of 8K sets to its popular 6-Series line of Roku-powered QLED TVs, starting with the 65-inch 65R648 model, priced at $2,199. 

That’s about $800 less than Samsung’s least expensive 8K TV, the QN800A 65-inch 8K model. New 8K TVs from LG and Sony are in the same price range. 

TCL’s 75-inch 8K TV, the 75R648 model, is priced at $2,999. Prospective buyers can pre-order TCL’s 8K sets on Amazon and Best Buy now. 

Television sets with 8K resolution deliver a 7680 x 4320 resolution, which is four times as many pixels as 4K’s “Ultra High Definition” 3840 x 2160 native resolution. 

As of March, only around 44% of U.S. homes even have a 4K TV. And we remain a long way away from 4K programming becoming ubiquitous, with only big sports events such as the Super Bowl and the ongoing Tokyo Olympics providing live 4K content. 

Notably, TCL’s mini-LED-enabled 8K sets can upscale 4K and HD content to 8K resolution. 

Beyond struggling to find 8K programming—Japanese broadcaster NHK is presenting the Tokyo Games in 8K, but only in Japan—consumers will need high bandwidth. Over download connection speed of more than 200 Mbps is recommended. 

And a 65-inch set is decidedly entry-level for the resolution tech, with only super-large displays able to deliver a discernible experience difference over 4K sets. 

Smart TV penetration into North American households will meet and surpass 90% by 2024, according to data just released by Strategy Analytics. 

The research company said that more than 665 million homes worldwide, around 34%, owned a smart TV at the end of 2020. This figure is set to increase to 1.1 billion homes globally, or 51%, by 2026. 

“Smart TV is a standard fit feature of most flat-panel TVs sold today and so smart TV household penetration will inevitably continue to grow as consumers replace old sets with new modern smart-enabled versions,” said Edouard Bouffenie, senior analyst, connected home devices, for Strategy Analytics. 

Notably, the research company said Korea's Samsung, which makes its own operating system, remains the top shipper of internet-connected televisions worldwide. However, China's TCL--which licenses Roku for many of the sets it ships--has usurped Korea's LG for the No. 2 position globally. 

“Smart TV usage is growing and is on a path towards becoming the preferred platform for accessing online video content,” added David Watkins, VP, media and intelligent home practice for Strategy Analytics. “However, the current connected TV landscape in the home is incredibly complex and consumers may have multiple devices in multiple configurations to choose from. Factor in different viewing habits amongst different members of the household and it’s clear that TV streaming platform providers face a significant challenge in driving engagement and ensuring that TV viewers remain on their platform and do not switch to another source. Smart TV OS providers must look to influence the TV viewer’s journey through improved content discovery capabilities, advanced analytics and advertising platforms and the development of an intuitive and user-friendly UI.”

FuboTV said its app has been launched by LG Electronics on its smart TVs.

LG Smart TV users are eligible for a free trial of fuboTV by scanning the QR code on the fubo TV app.

Also Read: Apple TV App Arrives on Android TV

The fuboTV app on LG sets running webOS lets users set up as many as six users per subscription and create a customized guide, putting favorite channels at the top of the list. User can also choose to record games played by favorite teams and fuboTV’s Watch Next feature makes it easier to binge series.

Also Read: LG Debuts Major WebOS Upgrade

The fuboTV app runs on LG’s OLD sets, which have self-lit pixels which can be individually controlled to produce perfect black levels, and ultra-sharp and realistic picture quality.

There’s been general agreement in the video industry that the most noteworthy part of Vizio’s first post-IPO earnings call announcement was how quickly the company’s data and advertising business has grown, especially in comparison to its device business.

While Vizio’s device business grew revenue by 47%, its advertising and data arm, called Platform+, saw gross profit more than double while revenues rose a whopping 120%.

Vizio made $38.4 million from its Platform+ business in the Q1, vs. $48.2 million from devices. It’s not hard to imagine a not-so-distant quarter in which most of the company’s money comes from selling ads. 

Fueling that revenue boost is a 70% increase in time viewers spent with the platform, along with a  57% increase in the number of actual accounts, which now stands at 13.4 million. 

For those of us deep in the weeds of the Streaming Revolution however, Vizio’s numbers were not all that surprising.

There’s been a quiet revolution-within-a-revolution going on in the streaming world these past few years, as smart TV OEMs like Vizio, LG and Samsung have all launched their own content, advertising and data businesses, in what until now has been a fairly under-the-radar development.

The impetus for this is pretty clear. Roku, which licenses its OS to various smart TV OEMs, was the first to shift from a hardware-based business model to an advertising and data-based one, and as their until recently soaring stock price indicates, they have been most successful.

The smart TV OEMs saw this, realized that they had an even bigger advantage in that they owned both the hardware and the software, and pounced.

To begin with, they took a hard look at their user interfaces. In the early years of streaming, interfaces were an afterthought, as the assumption was that the TV would be hooked up to a cable box, which would provide the primary interface, and so anything else was just icing on the cake.

That all but ensured that early days smart TV interfaces were confusing, outdated and otherwise sub-par. It also ensured that a device like Roku, which made interface a priority, would have an easy path to gaining market share.

Roku’s interface won’t win any design awards, but the iPhone-like design is clean, intuitive and easy to use. You click on a tile, the app launches and you’re in. 

The smart TV OEMs soon realized they needed something to put on their newly improved interface other than other people’s programming, the various Flixes, FASTs and niche channels that were fueling the streaming revolution. The solution was to create their own FASTs, free-ad supported streaming TV services that allowed them to offer the consumer hundreds of streaming channels for free the minute they took the television out of the box.

Having their own content also allowed the OEMs to sell ads against that content, thus launching their own ad sales business, one that could make use of their ACR (automatic content recognition) data collection business.

As hardware owners, the smart TV OEMs offer advertisers several key advantages, particularly around frequency capping.

Using their ACR data, which allows them to track whatever is “on the glass”, the OEMs are able to track what is being watched across linear, VOD and streaming and to know which ads the viewer has been served over the course of a day. That means they are able to institute frequency capping regardless of whether the viewer spent part of the day watching the local ABC broadcast station, part of the day watching Tubi, part of the day watching Hulu and part of the day watching the OEM’s own FAST. 

That’s a big advantage at a time when a major viewer and advertiser complaint about TV right now is that they’re seeing the same three or four ads over and over again, regardless of what they’re watching it.

The data the OEMs collect via their ACR capabilities is also quite useful to advertisers, as it gives them a clear view of who saw their ads on the OEM’s own FAST channels and which of those viewers they’ve been missing on traditional linear. In practice this has meant that the OEMs, with their advertising and measurement capabilities, have become a go-to source for advertisers looking to achieve incremental reach by targeting viewers they’ve missed on linear as well as viewers they want to double down on.

The OEM offering is still far from perfect. Some advertisers note that the programming at present is all library content which they feel is great for filling in reach, but not at the same level as the original programming available on ad-supported Flixes like Hulu and Peacock.

There’s also the limited audience, a problem that’s cited across the board with CTV, but is important for advertisers looking to make a big national buy. While OEM ad sales units have access to some inventory outside of their own FASTs, it’s limited and advertisers still need to go outside their ecosystem to create a full CTV buy.

Still, many are excited by the possibilities the OEMs offer. “The OEMs are going to be the MVPDs of the streaming world.” one agency executive told me recently. “They control which content owners get to be on their distribution platform and they have advanced ad platforms with access to ad inventory from their own content as well as inventory from many of the apps they carry.”

It’s a logical call and OEMs as gatekeepers for the new streaming TV ecosystem seems an increasingly likely development. As such, watch for them to strike deals with broadband providers, either MVPDs or the new fixed-wireless 5G internet to the home.

Comcast Cable CEO Dave Watson said offering the company’s broadband-only Xfinity Flex product outside of its coverage footprint to other operators and even as a standalone service are all options that are being explored.

Comcast launched  Xfinity Flex about two years ago originally as a $5 per month service that gave broadband customers access to more than 10,000 free movies and TV shows as well as access to subscription services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and others through a small Roku-like digital box.  The service became a free add-on to broadband-only service a few months later and has grown quickly.  During its Q1 conference call with analysts, Comcast said in March that it had about 3 million Xfinity Flex customers across its footprint. 

At the MoffettNathanson Virtual Media & Communications Summit conference Wednesday, Watson said that Flex has about 3.5 million Flex customers and added the company continues to explore its options for the service, including licensing the product to other distributors or offering it as a standalone product out of footprint. Comcast already licenses Flex to Cox Communications and Canadian operators Shaw Communications, Rogers Communications and Videotron.

“It’s potentially all of the above,” Watson said at the conference. “We do today, we have great partners like Cox, Canadian operators, and we continue to expand the relationship with them; giving them a roadmap toward Flex capabilities is absolutely something we’re very focused on.  That’s one path. If you think about Flex today, we deliver it to the customer through a very small advanced device -- our XFi devices that are 4K-capable. But over time, it’s essentially a software solution. We’re looking at and testing and talking to potential partners down the road, that you’re focusing on smart TVs and having a position. Others have done it. It’s absolutely doable to figure out how to get an advanced software stack into a Smart TV. And then, you talk to retailers, other partners, it is possible to go beyond the footprint. We’ll take a look at how things evolve, but we want to be in position and that is a great opportunity either with ourselves, other partners, we’ll see.”

Watson added that Flex has been a great business as well as a retention too for broadband service. At the conference, Watson said about half of Flex customers engage with the service regularly, and the product has resulted in a 15% to 20% improvement in overall broadband churn. Flex also generates revenue for Comcast, which also could grow substantially . 

Watson estimated that Flex generates about $2 per month, per active user account from pay-per-view, video on demand and revenue shares from streaming apps on the service. It doesn’t account for any advertising, which the company said has additional revenue potential.

“We’re very focused on that too,” Watson said.  “Our team, our advanced technology team at Effectv and Freewheel are extremely focused on helping us deploy capabilities of advanced advertising through Flex. We think that will be additive to it over time. But we’re pleased with the early start, $2 of revenue per account.” 

With smart TVs now found in 70% of U.S. homes, the two OTT platforms that power the majority of those sets are more dominant than ever. 

According to Hub Entertainment Research’s third annual “Connected Home” report, 57% of U.S. TV households now have a TV powered by either Roku or Amazon Fire TV, vs. just 51% at the end of the first quarter of last year. Forty percent of homes have Roku, either through a peripheral device like a player, smart speaker or streaming stick, or via a smart TV powered by the Roku OS. Roku’s infiltration into the U.S stood at only 35% as of the end of the first quarter of last year, and 30% in Q1 2019 

Twenty-nine percent of homes have Amazon Fire TV vs. 26% in Q1 2020. (Some homes have TVs powered by both operating systems.)

The increased proliferation of the top two OTT platforms comes amid markedly increased smart TV adoption—52% of TVs in the U.S. are now smart TVs vs. 45% at the end of Q1 2020. Two out of five of those sets are powered by either Roku or Amazon Fire TV. 

Fifty-six percent of those smart TV homes use their TV to stream video at least once a month vs. 48% a year ago. 

Altogether, 77% of U.S. TV homes reported streaming video in the first quarter vs. 74% a year ago. 

“The wider adoption of smart TVs and replacement of non-smart TVs turns up the pressure on connected devices like streaming boxes, streaming sticks, and video game consoles,” said David Tice, senior consultant to Hub and co-author of the study. “This ‘eliminating of the middleman’ will have a direct impact on how future revenue is split on advanced TV businesses like streaming, interactive shopping, and addressable advertising.”

Hub said it surveyed 5,000 U.S. consumers in February and March. 

Roku said it has surpassed Samsung as the No. 1 supplier of smart TV operating system software in the U.S. and Canada.

“Roughly one in three TVs sold in the U.S. and Canada is running the Roku operating system,” said Steven Louden, speaking at the Citi 2021 Global TMT West Virtual Conference Wednesday. 

Roku has made that one-in-three claim before. However, sometime in the third quarter, the company—which licenses its OS to 15 OEM brands, including No. 2 U.S. smart TV seller TCL—surpassed No. 1 smart TV seller Samsung in terms of sheer OS distribution, according to what it said is NPD Group ranking data. 

Roku said 38% of smart TVs sold in the U.S. are powered by its OS, while the number stands at 31% in Canada ... eh. 

“We’ve gone from no market share to No. 1 in five years, and we’re making tremendous progress in Mexico,” Louden added. 

Roku is also seeking to expand its sound bar technology, announcing a new reference design for the OEM market. 

The reference design uses Roku’s proprietary audio technology to connect wirelessly with any Roku-powered smart TV model, offering audio and video synchronization. It will also seeks to ensure simple set-up and easy operation with one Roku TV remote.

Roku also announced that Element will launch a sound bar and subwoofer later this month enabled with Roku TV Ready, a partnership program designed to ensure simple setup, easy access to sound settings, and compatibility with Roku TV remotes. Element joins TCL, Hisense, Enclave, Sound United and Bose, which all released Roku TV Ready-certified audio products in the U.S. in 2020.  Roku aims to expand the availability of Roku TV Ready program internationally and will announce partners and products by country at a later stage.

 With 2020 mercifully winding down and a virtualized version of CES about to ramp up, it’s a good time to look at the gadgets and software platforms that will matter most in the year ahead.

At this time last year, Multichannel News predicted relevance for 5G-capable smartphones and WiFi 6-compatible home network gateways, and of course, the obvious ramped-up competition for subscription streaming, all of which became manifest over the past 12 months. 

If we were truly prescient, we might have devoted a paragraph or two to remote conferencing software. But hindsight is 20/20.

So what will the big technology topics be this year? Here are five we think we’ll be covering quite a bit. 

The ‘Platform Wars’ will only intensify: We heard a lot about the so-called streaming wars in 2020, and how the inclusion of Disney Plus, Apple TV Plus, Peacock and HBO Max were going to put competitive pressure on Netflix. 

It soon became apparent that the race for platform supremacy was just as intense, with all of the relevant subscription VOD, AVOD and vMVPD combatants relying on Roku, Amazon, Google, Apple and other over-the-top gatekeepers to reach their consumers. 

ALSO READ: Discovery Plus to Explore Challenging SVOD Biz with Lofty 70 Million Subscriber Goal

The competition among the streaming gatekeepers will only heat up in 2021. Roku has seen its market capitalization double in recent months to surpass $40 billion, and it’s now making more money selling advertising than hardware, Roku can now afford to turn its OTT gadgets into loss leaders at retail, selling them on the ultra-cheap (below $20) and further proliferating its leadership position in the connected-TV device world.

Hot on Roku’s heels, touting a similarly robust 40 million active users worldwide, Amazon will continue to integrate its Fire TV OS into almost every home control and automation device it sells, while also peddling inexpensive OTT gadgets such as HDMI streaming sticks.

The wild card will be the emergence of Google and its Android TV/Google TV OS. Google plans on investing heavily in 2021 to join Roku and Amazon at the table of serious global OTT device platform operators. 

“What makes Google such a dangerous entrant into the TV OS/device space is that they do not need to make money (at least today) on taking a cut of connected TV ad inventory or a share of new SVOD subscriptions,” LightShed Ventures general partner Rich Greenfield said in a recent analyst note. 

More OTT ‘carriage’ disputes:  With their growing clout, and decreased neutrality in terms of what gets streamed on their platforms, Roku and Amazon will certainly be involved in more distribution skirmishes in 2021.

Roku added HBO Max just last week, while Amazon Fire TV still doesn’t offer NBCU’s Peacock. Roku also just made the Spectrum TV app unavailable to its users, as it is still negotiating a new distribution deal with Charter Communications. 

Notably, Discovery didn’t specifically say it had deals with Roku, the No. 1 OTT platform, or No. 2 Amazon when it announced its new Discovery Plus SVOD Platform.  And with CBS All Access just as entrenched in the channels business of Roku and Amazon as HBO ever was, what are the chances that ViacomCBS will launch the broadened Paramount Plus with ubiquitous app support?

Expect big, surprising new smart TV partnerships: If you think gateway operators like Roku and Google wield a lot of power now, just wait until one of them reaches what Liberty Media chairman John Malone recently said is the magic number of subscribers to truly control the market — around 100 million active users. 

The key to achieving that benchmark is tie-ups with smart-TV makers. Roku, for example, emerged as the No. 1 OTT ecosystem in the U.S. thanks mainly to its highly successful marriage to China’s TCL, whose cheap 4KTVs have sold like gangbusters in the U.S. since 2017. Roku is now working with TCL to establish similar smart TV beachheads in Europe, but TCL is seeing other tech companies, evidence by a recent U.S. Android TV deal.

And there will be plenty of big smart-TV announcements in 2021. 

Comcast, for example, is looking to get its X1 platform into the smart-TV game with a potential collaboration with Walmart. And TiVo plans to leverage the established smart TV OEM business of its new parent company, Xperi, to put its Stream TV platform into sets starting in the latter half of 2021. 

4K/UHD will become ubiquitous:  Amid all the movement among platforms and service providers, emerging next-generation playback formats, such as 4K/UHD, HDR, Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos will become more standard. 

ALSO READ: HBO Max Gets WarnerMedia’s Entire 2021 Film Slate Day and Date

Lost in all the hubbub about WarnerMedia releasing its entire 2021 theatrical slate day-and-date on HBO Max: All 17 of those movies will include each of the aforementioned technology features. 

To keep up, ops will invest in broadband: Controlling around 70% of the U.S. wireline internet service provider business entering 2020, cable operators were largely ready when the pandemic suddenly spiked broadband usage, with the amount of digital video sent over the internet — vocational and recreational — vastly increasing. 

Operators, who’d spent billions on DOCIS 3.1 upgrades, largely implemented tweaks and node splits that were part of the technology they already owned, and they kept up with demand. 

Analysts expect these companies to circle back to earlier planned broadband infrastructure upgrades in 2021, transitioning networks to software virtualization and distributed access architecture (DAA). Dell’Oro Group predicts that global spending on broadband access equipment will rebound by around 5% in 2021. 

Nokia is in the process of rolling out a line of Android TV-powered smart TVs, as well as an OTT device powered by the Google video operating system, in Europe. 

Pricing hasn’t been announced yet. But according to AndroidAuthority, the smarts TVs will be “affordable.” Another online enthusiast hub, Nokiamob, said the Austria-based Nokia will be rolling out the devices in its home country, as well as  Germany and Switzerland. 

Nokia previously only sold its smart TVs in India. 

The news is interesting, given that Roku, through its partnership with Chinese manufacturer TCL, is also making a play for European smart TV dominance in the fourth quarter. Google, meanwhile, is making a concerted push to bolster Android TV’s global market position as an OTT device ecosystem. (Google is also in the early phases of rebranding the video OS as “Google TV.”)

Nokia's "StreamView"-branded smart TVs reportedly arrive in 43-inch - 75-inch iterations, they’re 4K/HDR-capable, and there’s a degree of “interoperability” with Nokia smart phones. The Android 9-powered sets are reportedly equipped with four HDMI inputs and “game-friendly” response times of 9.5ms. 

There’s also a super-affordable 32-inch 1080p model

“Affordable” means the product line doesn’t include high refresh rtes (they’re capped at 60Hz).

In addition to smart TVs, Nokia is also importing its Android 10-powered 4K device, the Streaming Box 8000, which reportedly includes remote control shortcut buttons to Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, YouTube and Google Play. 

“Bringing the Nokia brand to Smart TV products in Europe is a significant milestone and we are excited to have StreamView representing our brand in these categories”, said Vipul Mehrotra, VP of Nokia Brand Partnerships, in a statement. “StreamView will enable new experiences for new audiences across Europe by building on the Nokia brand experience principles and people’s expectations of a Nokia branded product.”

Chinese electronics company TCL has begun shipping 4K/UHD-capable smart TVs based on the Android TV operating system to the U.S., adding to sub-$200 MSRP HD Android TV sets that were introduced over the summer. 

As first noticed by 9to5Google, TCL has introduced its 4 series model sets in 50-, 55- and 75-inch configurations, priced respectively at $349, $399 and $799, exclusively at Best Buy. A 43-inch 4K/UHD Android TV iteration, priced at $199, has been introduced to Target shoppers. 

TCL is currently the second biggest shipper of smart TV to the U.S., controlling 14% of the market vs. 32% for leader Samsung, according to Statista figures released in September. 

Also read: Android TV Takes Major Step in U.S. Market With Integration into TCL Smart TVs

TCL has risen to that position based on popular low-priced TVs based on the Roku operating system. But in June, the manufacturer began also shipping sets based on Android TV. 

Until last month, those sets were 3-series iterations with HD resolution and fewer features (the more expensive 4K/UHD sets have three HDMI ports, for example).

TCL’s 3-series Android TV-powered HD options include a 32-inch, 720p set priced at only $130, and a 40-inch 1080p model priced at $200.

TCL hasn’t published any sales data on its Android TV product line. But as 9to5Google noted, Best Buy reviews of the more established 3-series sets have been as enthusiastic as the positively received Roku models. 

Google has had some success proliferating its Android TV OS into the homes of pay TV operator subscribers. And it has become a popular licensed OS for streaming device makers including Nvidia, TiVo and Dish Network’s AirTV. 

Google is now in the process of trying to rebrand Android TV—it’s now marketing a new Chromecast dongle based on the OS, which it now calls “Google TV.”

The hope is that Google TV can one day compete for global market share alongside more established brands including Roku and Amazon Fire TV.

Establishing a beach head with major smart TV brands is a vital step towards achieving that goal.

Haystack News said it has launched a new version of its personalized Newsline news ticker and that the feature is now available on all smart TV platforms as well as Android TV and Fire TV.

The Newsline ticker was originally rolled out on Roku. 

Newsline is integrated into the Haystack News ad-supported streaming experience. The new version offers more graphics, interactivity, enhanced weather forecasts and financial market information.

“Haystack News is surging with millions of new users, tallying 145% user growth year over year thanks to the introduction of innovative new features, such as Newsline, as we reinvent the news-watching experience. With Newsline, watching news on your Smart TV is now superior to that of traditional cable television,” said Haystack TV president and co-founder Ish Harshawat. “Haystack’s investment in Newsline is yielding increased levels of engagement for your users and increased monetization for our content partners.”

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts confirmed reports that his company is looking to expand its X1 video operating system into smart TVs. 

“We're early days, but we're looking at smart TVs on a global basis,” Roberts said Tuesday, speaking during Goldman Sachs’ virtualized Communacopia Conference. “And we're wondering, can we bring our same tech stack or certain capabilities in aggregation to consumers who are relying more and more on smart TVs? We’ve done that with X1 when we syndicated it to Canada and to other operators in the United States. And we see a similar road map possibly for that.”

Also read: Comcast Looking to License X1 to Smart TV Makers (Report)

Comcast developed X1 a decade ago and introduced the platform back in 2012. In the more formative years of X1, the cable giant billed it as a “churn buster,” a means of countering the impulse to cord cut with a powerfully intuitive video platform equipped with advanced voice control features. 

But Comcast now sees X1 as an aggregation tool, enabling assets like new streaming service Peacock to proliferate beyond the cable company’s Xfinity-branded pay TV services. Comcast is also experimenting with new forms of TV advertising using X1, such as voice-interactive ads that leverage X1's Voice Remote.

“Let's talk about aggregation. That gets to the heart of what we do,” Roberts said. “I go back to when my dad started Comcast back in the 1960s, they were aggregating broadcast television signals in rural America. Today, we're aggregating whatever a consumer wants. It's traditional television, a sea of apps, streaming and it started for us and for Sky with having the best aggregation platform. And that's called X1 here in the U.S. and Sky Q.”

Peacock is driving heavy usage within the X1 ecosystem, Roberts said. On native X1 set-tops, it’s the third most used streaming app behind Netflix and YouTube. And on Xfinity Flex—the thin-client version of X1 handed out free to Comcast’s broadband-only customers—it’s second only to Netflix in usage. 

Also read: Peacock Signups Jump to 15M, Roberts Says

So Comcast wants to expand the profile of X1. 

It’s not an entirely new impulse, of course. 

Comcast already has “white label” deals to license X1 hardware and software to other cable companies. Notably, Cox Communications calls its iteration of X1 “Contour.” In Canada, Rogers Communications, Shaw Communications and Videotron each license the platform, as well. 

Comcast has had talks with smart TV makers, dating back to CES in January, to integrate the cable company’s X1 video operating system into new TV sets, Protocol reports. 

Citing unnamed inside sources, the technology pub said it's unclear how far the talks have progressed Protocol also said that Metrological, the Dutch tech vendor acquired by the cable conglomerate last year, would lead the prospective software integration.

Comcast isn’t commenting on the report.

Developed in Silicon Valley and introduced in 2012, Comcast billed X1 as a “churn buster” for several years, noting significantly decreased customer losses for the portion of its video footprint that had the advanced X1 video software and hardware. But with Comcast having lost 1.27 million video customers in the 12 months ending Jun 30, the platform’s magic ability to stem cord cutting seems to be on the wane. 

Still, Comcast seems intent on proliferating its OS, perhaps beyond the pay TV business.

The cable company already has “white label” deals to license X1 hardware and software to other cable companies. Notably, Cox Communications calls its iteration of X1 “Contour.” In Canada, Rogers Communications, Shaw Communications and Videotron each license the platform, as well. 

Several years ago, Comcast initiated its “Xfinity Partners” program, which enabled consumers to use devices like Roku to enjoy at least a portion of the X1 experience. And Comcast recently began integrating X1 into its own OTT device, Flex, which it gives away for free to customers who only take broadband. 

Comcast has solid business reasons for making X1 immortal amid the backdrop of a fading pay TV business, advanced advertising being front and center. 

Also read: Peacock Ushers in Era of Voice-Activated Ads

As reported by Next TV Thursday, the cable company is using its X1 platform, and its new streaming service, Peacock, to experiment with new advertising formats and measurement systems. 

Earlier this month, for example, Comcast began a collaboration with sponsors including Unilever and Target to create interactive TV commercials on X1, with Peacock users interacting with the brands via the X1 Voice Remote. 

Indeed, from Peacock to its $100 million acquisition of AVOD platform Xumo in February, Comcast has a lot of moving parts, as it braces for the streaming video future. 

And in addition to advanced advertising, Comcast sees X1 as a way to have some gatekeeper control in streaming world that is largely controlled by the new biggest connected TV platforms, Roku and Amazon Fire TV. Notably, the Peacock app isn’t supported by either of these platforms. 

Meanwhile, native integration into smart TVs is increasingly viewed by the video industry as the means to proliferating gate control. For example, Roku—which controls about half of U.S. connected TVs—largely established that position through an OS integration deal with Chinese manufacturer TCL. That company has quickly become the U.S. market leader in smart TVs, undercutting Samsung with aggressive pricing, and Roku has enjoyed the ride. 

But smart TV makers have plenty of options besides Roku—and X1—for native operating software. 

TCL, for example, recently started making TVs for the U.S. market powered by Google’s Android TV. Samsung and LG, TCL’s powerful Korean rivals in the global smart TV market, have their own OS software. In fact, Samsung is also looking to expand its OS, Tizen, beyond its own sets. 

Vizio’s ad sales unit launched True Incremental Reach to show advertisers how many extra viewers they get when buying commercials directly from the TV set maker.

Vizio Ads said True Incremental Reach enables brands to use data in real time to understand the overlap of audiences and the percentage of ad investments that are seen by households that don’t receive traditional TV but are watching programming on Vizio smart TVs supplied via Vizio’s SmartCast platform.

The reach calculations are designed to encourage marketers to buy ads directly from device makers if they want to reach the growing number of connected TV viewers. The data comes from Inscape, the Vizio unit that gathers tune-in and other information from 15 million opted-in smart TVs in the U.S.

Related: Peacock Adds Vizio and LG for National Rollout

“Viewers who are shifting away from linear TV aren’t abandoning television, they’re just shifting their viewing towards over-the-top connected TV viewing — younger viewers in particular,” said Travis Hockersmith, VP platform services at Vizio. “Because of Vizio’s ownership of glass-level data, combined with a best-in-class ACR data company in Inscape, we can deterministically confirm net new audiences on the SmartCast platform for brands looking to capture a previously unreachable audience.” 

The Vizio Ads business is part of a broader Vizio investment to improve the TV viewing experience. Since the launch of its direct advertising business in December 2019, Vizio said TV viewers have benefited from more relevant and better-personalized ad experiences. 

The company is also looking to build relationships with DSPs and other tech vendors so that advertisers can come directly to Vizio and use a familiar system to buy inventory.

Smart TV’s are becoming more popular than streaming boxes, sticks and dongles as the primary mechanisms for enjoying connected TV in the American home.

Citing Parks Associates data, subscription digital publication The Information today noted that smart TV adoption is up to 54% in the U.S. vs. 47% a year ago. Meanwhile, U.S. adoption of HDMI-connected streaming devices from brands like Roku, Amazon and Apple has only reached around 42%.

According to Consumer Technology Association predictive data, the gap will get wider—consumers are forecasts to buy 35 million smart TVs this year vs. 22 million streaming devices.

Also read: Roku Expands Vital TCL Partnership to Europe and South America

The emergence of Asian smart TV manufacturers as drivers of the global connected TV market has major implications for the media-technology business. It comes at a time when the biggest streaming platform operators, Roku and Amazon, have evolved to the point to which they are no longer neutral players, and are now competing against third-party streaming services that have traditionally programmed their platforms. 

Within the last 90 days, two new big-media-backed streaming services, HBO Max and Peacock, have launched without support on Roku and Amazon Fire TV, largely due to this negotiating tension. 

Together, Roku and Amazon control two thirds of the U.S. connected TV market, but the quickening emergence of smart TV manufacturers threatens that dominance. 

For Roku, It's Complicated

Korea’s Samsung, which integrates its own streaming OS into its smart TVs, was the U.S. marketshare leader. But China’s TCL, which began selling feature-rich smart TVs at a significantly lower price only a couple of years ago, usurped Samsung in 2019 as the leading shipper of smart TVs to the U.S. market, according to IHS Markit. 

Indeed, TCL’s U.S. marketshare went from only 1% in 2017 to 27% last year. It’s fast rise mirrors the proliferation of Roku, whose operating system TCL has used to power its smart TVs since 2014. On Wednesday, during its Q2 earnings call, Roku revealed that it reached 43 million active users in the second quarter, up 41% over the last year. 

Indeed, one in three smart TVs sold in the U.S. is powered by Roku. But TCL is the catalyst. 

And in May, TCL threatened to upend Roku’s growth momentum, announcing a separate OS partnership with Google to begin selling smart TV’s powered by Android TV. 

Also read: Android TV Takes Major Step in U.S. Market With Integration into TCL Smart TVs

Since Google is known for sacrificing short-term revenue for longterm adoption goals, this partnership threatens to undercut Roku. But the market whiplash continued Wednesday, when Roku and TCL announced an expansion of their partnership to begin selling Roku-enabled smart TVs in Europe and South America this year. 

Roku’s dominant position as a supplier of streaming OS seems secure for now. But with smart TV manufacturers driving greater and greater influence, some key questions are emerging in the increasingly important connected TV platform business:

> Will other smart TV manufacturers begin integrating Android TV? The streaming OS only has a small share of the market right now. But Google is committed to its proliferation, and major smart TV tie-ins could catch it up to Roku fast.

> Will Amazon’s relatively smaller infiltration into the smart TV market reduce the influence of Fire TV?

> Will streaming service operators like AT&T/WarnerMedia and Comcast/NBCUniversal work with smart TV makers to reduce the market power of Roku and Amazon?

Given the quick evolution of the connected TV technology market, we should have answers to these questions in relatively short timeline. 

ViacomCBS’s Pluto TV streaming service said it reached a global distribution deal with LG Electronics. 

The agreement will make 99 of Pluto TV’s channels available later this year via the LG Channels experience on smart TVs made by LG

Financial terms were not disclosed.

“We’re thrilled to be able to bring Pluto TV and our leadership in free, ad-supported streaming television to LG’s lineup of critically-acclaimed smart TVs,” states Brendon Thomas, VP, distribution, Pluto TV. “Through this partnership, we are excited to have another opportunity to accelerate our mission to entertain the planet by bringing an unparalleled lineup of programming, with instant discoverability through the LG Channels experience, to millions of LG users, for free.” 

Pluto TV is available now in the U.S. on 2020 LG models. Pluto TV will be available on sets made from 2016 to 2019 in the fall. Expansion plans for other areas of the world will be announced later, the companies said.

LG’s LG Channels give users 200 channels to watch for free.

“In the highly unusual times we are living in, people are turning to home entertainment in even larger numbers than ever before,” said Matt Durgin, director, North America Partnerships at LG Electronics. “With the debut of Pluto TV on LG smart TVs, our customers now have access to an even more expansive and diverse roster of free streaming content that will keep everyone entertained and engaged at home.”

Channel surfing has been a staple of linear TV for decades, with viewers jumping around from show to show constantly in search and discovery mode. Now, that experience is starting to make its way to the streaming environment, with 66% of younger viewers (18-34) choosing OTT for channel or program surfing.

And during current lockdowns, reports show that the average American is watching more than 8 hours of total TV per day, with the majority of that viewing spike occurring on streaming. But many households -- due to ongoing economic uncertainty, which is only accelerating the current cord-cutting movement -- are increasingly turning to free TV options. To dig deeper, AVOD services like Pluto, Tubi, Xumo and WatchFree continue to see exponential increases in viewer consumption as the stay-at-home advisories go on (up 108% in the first week of April compared to the first week of March).

At the same time, linear is currently lacking programming staples like live sports and tentpole events, resulting in the competition with the streaming environment heating up even more during quarantines. And even with sports slowly starting to come back, many networks are now asking themselves a much bigger question: “how can we entice TV viewers back?”

Linear’s Last Chance

You’ve likely heard of the term “death-scroll,” and chances are even higher that you’ve engaged in this behavior. It’s signified by that “interminable amount of time spent deciding what to watch” — before finally coming to an agreement with friends and family after two hours that you will just watch The Office for the 100th time. And once viewers get into that streaming environment, then click and start scouring Netflix for something to watch, linear has lost them.

To combat this, advertisers are increasingly turning to Smart TV home screens, which enable networks to showcase their content and trailers in attractive ad units. It also provides granular, deterministic measurement capabilities that pinpoint exactly how many people saw the ad and actually did flip back over to linear to watch the program.

Smart TV home screen units are increasingly becoming the last opportunity and touchpoint for an advertiser in the linear space to express their value prop, and actually get somebody to go back to the linear environment before they most likely get lost for five hours in the streaming environment. In other words, Smart TV home screens are the last gas station for 40 miles.

The Difference is in the Device

OTT has seen undeniable growth in the past few years, with more than 74% of U.S. households subscribing to at least one of the major streaming services. But many players in the space are solely focused on streaming TV, and are not going to send someone back into linear because there's a good chance their whole pitch and revenue model is about cord-cutting.

But the future of TV -- at least for the next 10 years -- will rely heavily on a holistic, cross-platform look at both the linear and streaming environments. And when everything's blended and scattered, the Smart TV home screen is the best option for search and discovery, whether that be the linear or the streaming environment. Additionally, leveraging the device home screen for search and discovery will benefit both advertisers and content providers by driving audience curation for specific genres, which creates premium environments for networks (high CPMs) and brands (passionate viewers).

There’s no denying that linear plays an essential role in the TV advertising landscape, accounting for more than $70 billion in ad spend last year. But with nearly 25% of U.S. households expected to cut the cord by 2022  (a trend that is only being accelerated by the current coronavirus pandemic), traditional TV has an uphill battle trying to attract viewers back to linear programming. The best way for linear to reverse this trend is by connecting and communicating a value prop to consumers as soon as they power up their Smart TV. Otherwise, those viewers are lost for good.

Author Adam Bergman is VP of Vizio's Platform Business. He is responsible for the go-to-market strategy of Vizio Ads, a platform with one of the largest connected TV footprints in the U.S. His role includes building brand and agency partnership strategy, as well as informing product and marketing decisions.

Inscape, which harnesses the data from smart TVs made by parent company Vizio, said it now is getting viewing information from more than 15 million smart-TVs whose owners have opted-in.

Inscape also said it was launching a National Representative Panel of 3.5 million sets. Data from those sets is being indexed against Experion data for clients that want to know precisely how they compare to average homes.

“We’re extremely confident in the efficacy of our new NRP model and believe that being open about how we’ve constructed it will further drive confidence within the ecosystem both for the value of our new offering as well as the role smart TV data is playing across the industry,” said Zeev Neumeier, president of Inscape. “We’ll be looking to make ongoing extensions and enhancements and continue to invest in making it the gold standard for our licensees and their customers.”

Neumeier said that with Vizio sets mostly aimed at mid-market buyers, the data from them is very representative of American viewers. Vizio historically indexed its data against other sources. Now, the indexing of those 3.5 million homes makes it easier for clients demanding more accuracy. 

“We’re proud to work with Inscape on their currency-class NRP, which leverages our background in TV measurement and combines our advanced data models with the industry’s largest commercially available ACR data set to provide advertisers with granular viewing data on even niche, hard-to-reach targets,” said Tom Weiss, CTO and chief data scientist at Dativa. “The Inscape NRP addresses one of the toughest challenges in the TV measurement space today—namely, how to create a dataset that is both granular enough to represent viewing in a fragmented TV landscape, and that accurately represents the broad range of demographics and targets that advertisers are interested in. We look forward to sharing our approach with the industry and applying feedback to make it ever better.” 

Inscape also extended local affiliate attribution of major broadcast stations to all 210 local markets in the United States. That change gives users information about local content start times for live and time shifted viewing. It also tells which connected devices or apps within the TV were used to play content, contributing to better attribution and measurement.

FourthWall Media said it has launched a new Adapt platform for onboarding cross-platform campaigns and added smart TV data to its Reveal analytics tools.

The company said with the enhanced data and the new ability to ingest campaigns from any source will extend audience-based analysis of content and advertising across viewing platforms.

“Adding ACR data from Smart TVs to FourthWall’s established cable set-top box data gives us a unique opportunity to fuel Reveal with two carefully-curated datasets covering different viewing modes,” said Ellen Dudar, Chief Product Officer at FourthWall Media. “Adding Smart TV viewership data to Reveal is exciting and delivers valuable cross-platform insights to our customers. In addition, we’ve extended our ability to import ad campaign data from linear as-run logs to now include addressable and digital exposure files. All the ingredients necessary in automating cross-platform media analytics are now brought together within Reveal.”

FourthWall’s Reveal is adding Nielsen Smart TV viewership data to the second-by-second set-top box data already in its analytics platform. The platform will now be able to generate information about tune in, optimal frequency and attribution for audience segments. 

“In today’s complex media environment, marketers need a simple and clear view of where and how their customers interact with media,” said Matt Reid, senior VP, Product Leadership, Nielsen. “With Nielsen Smart TV data as one of the components that helps fuel FourthWall’s Reveal platform, marketers will have more robust and actionable analytics to identify their audiences across viewing platforms in a seamless and efficient way.” 

Like the cure for cancer and Mars exploration, video search and discovery is a science that has a long way to develop. But at least in the current state of the art, smart TVs seem to have the edge. 

According to the Q4 iteration of TiVo’s quarterly Video Trends Report, it takes a smart TV user about 10.3 minutes to find a new movie or TV show, and about 9.2 minutes to find a movie or show they’ve already seen before. 

This compares to an industry worst 12 minutes for new content on Apple TV. 

Notably, Roku (10.5 minutes) and Amazon Fire TV (11.2 minutes) rank Nos. 2 and 3. That’s probably not surprising, given that the two device ecosystems also power a high percentage of smart TVs sold in the U.S. 

For its Video Trends Report, TiVo surveyed 6,145 adult TV consumers in the U.S. 

Among other interesting data from the report

> The average number of streaming services subscribed to per household reached 6.9 in 2019, compared to around 4 in 2016 and 6.3 in 2018. 

> The most popular combination of programming services used by respondents (38%) is a bundle of Facebook, YouTube and pay TV. 

> Just as Jeffrey Katzenberg’s mobile-first service Quibi gets ready for launch, TiVo reports that nearly 70% of its respondents said they have no mobile apps from their favorite networks on their phones for tablets. 

Streaming pioneer Roku is launching a “Roku TV Ready” program that will certify home-theater products that are easy to hook up to devices using the Roku TV operating system.

The first products to carry the Roku TV Ready logo are from TCL North America and Sound United, whose brands including Denon, Polk Audio, Marantz, Definitive Technology and Classé.

Roku also announced that 15 device makers have agreed to license and make smart TVs with the Roku TV operating system. The new TV brands with Roku TV include ATVIO, Element, Hisense, Hitachi, InFocus, JVC, Magnavox, Walmart’s onn.,  Philips, Polaroid, RCA, Sanyo, TCL and Westinghouse.

Users who buy home theater products certified as Roku TV Ready will be able to set up their systems quickly and use just the remote from their Roku devices to control all home theater settings and functions.

“Our goal is to make the TV experience incredibly simple, accessible and fun. Roku devices continue to delight millions of consumers for these reasons. And now with this new program we hope to make it super easy to setup and control soundbars and audio/video receivers using just a Roku TV remote,” said Mark Ely, VP, retail product strategy at Roku. “Meanwhile, consumer electronics brands benefit by offering their products in a more appealing way to our large and engaged audience of millions of active accounts.”

Ely noted that more than one in three smart TVs sold in the U.S. came with the Roku operating  system last year. “As TVs get bigger and thinner there just less and less space for speakers and as a result of that the sound can really suffer,” he said. “If you’ve our Roku TV in your living room, we’d like to see it connected to a great audio system. It makes a difference in how much you enjoy the content."

Sound United will make some Denon sound bars Roku TV Ready using a software update later this year. 

“Denon is consistently at the forefront of technology trends and services. Our joining the Roku TV Ready program demonstrates a continued dedication to this ethos while offering consumers an incredible value, endless entertainment and new features delivered over time,” said Brendon Stead, senior VP, product development at Sound United, parent company to Denon. “The Roku TV Ready program enables Denon users to easily access Denon product features via the Roku TV Remote, among other features. In the name of seamless entertainment, this is a boon for watchers everywhere.”

TCL is expected to announced its rollout plans for Roku TV Ready products later on Monday at CES.

“TCL and Roku have been working to deliver incredible home entertainment innovation to consumers for many years and we’re thrilled to be extending our partnership to home audio compatibility,” said Chris Larson, senior VP, TCL. “As America’s fastest-growing TV brand, we’re focused on providing a first-class home theater experience and a big part of that is ensuring consumers know their TCL television will work well with other products throughout the home.”

CBS and LG Electronics have made a deal that adds the CBS All Access streaming service to LG’s smart TV platform.

The integration means viewers with LG smart sets don’t need an additional streaming device to watch CBS All Access programming.

“Smart TVs and connected devices continue to be a significant driver of CBS All Access viewership,” said Rob Gelick, Executive VP and general manager, CBS Entertainment Digital. “Bringing CBS All Access to the popular LG webOS Smart TVs introduces more consumers to the fantastic offering of live programming, original series, CBS hits, classic series and so much more that the service provides.”

Financial terms were not disclosed.

CBS All Access costs $5.99 with limited commercials and $9.99 a month commercial free. 

Consumers with LG smart TVs running webOS 4.0 and higher from 2018, 2019 and 2020 can find CBS All Access at the LG App Store.

Programming on CBS All Access includes original series such as Star Trek: Discovery, The Good Fight, No Activity, Tell Me a Story, The Twilight Zone and Why Women Kill. Upcoming originals include Star Trek: Picard, Interrogation and The Stand. 

Music video platform Vevo has become the latest OTT platform to be added to the Samsung TV Plus ecosystem.

Five genre-curated Vevo channels will be added to the smart TV programming platform, themed around pop, country, hip-hop, R&B and Latino.

The add-supported Samsung TV Plus ecosystem, which runs on Samsung smart TVs and touted 10 million users as of January, now offers more than 70 channels, with CBS’ 24-hour news streaming service, CBSN, also recently added.

“With over 2.3 billion monthly global views on TV, we are hyper focused on our OTT packaging and distribution strategy,” said Kevin McGurn, Vevo’s president of sales and distribution, in a statement. “With the largest library of ad-supported music videos we continue to re-define the return of music videos to the living room for our audience and customers. As a global leader in TV, Samsung is an ideal partner for us to enhance our offering; with their scale and reach the Samsung TV Plus service represents enormous opportunities for our clients and partners.” 

AVOD platform Xumo announced renewal of its agreement to integrate an enterprise version of its streaming service onto LG smart TVs in the U.S. and Canada.

The Irvine, California-based streaming company’s service is also now powering the LG Channels platform in France, Germany, the UK, Spain, Italy, Brazil and Mexico.

Related: Xumo Expands to Comcast X1, Android TV

LG’s so-called “Channel Plus” platform, which includes Xumo’s enterprise service, is available on webOS-enabled 2012-2018 LG smart TVs. It has been rebranded for 2019 LG smart TVs as “LG Channels.” It’s currently available in 45 million U.S. households.

Xumo has powered Channel Plus for the last three years, offering 180 free-to-consumer, curated channels across 12 programming genres. Hours streamed on the service have been increasing at a clip of around 10% a month, Xumo said.

“Our initial and ongoing partnership with LG has laid the groundwork for Xumo to deliver what has become the next generation of television programming,” noted Colin Petrie-Norris, CEO at Xumo, in a statement. “We’re thrilled to continue powering a wealth of streaming content to not only existing Channel Plus viewers in the U.S. and Canada, but to consumers the world over who demand wide choice and premium, live and on-demand streaming entertainment.”

OnePlus, the Shenzhen, Guangdong-based smartphone maker set to enter the competitive global smart TV market in September, will deploy what it calls an "optimized" version of the Android TV operating system.

Speaking to Indian tech pub Gadget 360, OnePlus CEO Peter Lau said his company’s new TV’s will feature QLED displays and compete in the high end of the market. Amazon will be a major distribution hub for the insurgent brand, which will undercut the competition significantly on price.

“In terms of pricing, we want to benchmark against the most premium products available in the market, which means we are benchmarking against Samsung and Sony,” Lau said. “Because of the strategic partnership with Amazon, our price may be slightly cheaper than their [Sony and Samsung] products, but it won't be half the price.”

The use of Android TV as the primary interface is notable, given that the native operating system of the smart TV tends to be the dominant OTT ecosystem for the home. Currently, Roku and Amazon Fire TV are battling for supremacy in the smart TV interface market, but Android TV is emerging fast.

“One more key selling point that I want to highlight is that we are really optimizing the Android TV system, which I don't see a lot of brands in Indian market [doing],” Lab said” Because of our great partnership with Google, not only do we use their Android TV system but we also optimize it very deeply.”

Roku shares dropped almost 12% Wednesday in the wake of an exclusive, multi-year deal between Amazon and Best Buy that will result in a large lineup of 4K and HD smart TVs powered by Fire TV’s platform for the U.S. and Canada.

RELATED: Amazon, Best Buy Strike Exclusive Smart TV Deal

Roku’s smart TV licensing partners include three Funai Electric brands (Sanyo, Philips and Magnavox), RCA, TCL, Element Electronics, Hitachi America, Sharp, and Hisense. Roku’s smart TV partners had also included Insignia (Best Buy’s Brand), up until the Amazon-Best Buy deal was announced.

The deal announced between Amazon and Best Buy today includes Fire TV Edition sets from Best Buy/Insignia as well as Toshiba. Amazon also has a Fire TV Edition agreement with another Roku partner, Element Electronics.

Roku’s fast growing Platforms business includes advertising, subscription revenue sharing as well as licensing fees from TV makers that have integrated Roku’s operating system. That piece of Roku’s business soared 129%, to $85.43 million, in Q4 2017.

Smart TVs integrated with Roku’s platform have become a key way for Roku to attract consumers to its platform. In its Q4 results, Roku said more than half of new accounts came way of licensed sources during the period.

Roku shares closed down $4.26 (11.84%) to $31.72 each Wednesday. 

Roku is scheduled to release Q1 2018 results the afternoon of Wednesday, May 9. 

Roku said Sanyo is the latest brand to join its Roku TV licensing program, and that the TV maker expects to start shipping its first Roku-powered models in Canada later this quarter.  

The agreement ties into a broader relationship Roku has with Funai Electric, as Philips and Magnavox, two other Funai brand, also have agreements to make and sell TVs outfitted with Roku’s platform.  

RELATED: Philips Launches First Roku TV Model 

TV-maker licenses are a component of Roku’s Platforms business. That unit, Roku’s fastest-growing, also includes advertising and subscription revenue sharing. 

In Q1, Roku’s Platforms-related revenues rose 129%, to $85.43 million. 

Others Roku TV partners include RCA, TCL, Element Electronics, Hitachi America, Sharp, Insignia (Best Buy’s in-house brand), and Hisense. 

Roku ended 2017 with 19.3 million active accounts, up 5.9 million, or 44% year-on-year, while streaming hours for the year jumped 55%, to 4.3 billion. 

Thanks in part to Google’s Android TV, Roku and platforms from Samsung and LG Electronics, the market for smart TV operating systems is already pretty crowded. Vewd apparently thinks there’s room for at least one more.

Read More: Complete coverage of #CES2018

Vewd, formerly known as Opera TV, used this week’s CES to introduce a smart TV OS of its own, and will look to carve out differentiation with a system that doesn’t require individual downloads of apps by instead tapping into a platform that loads from the proverbial cloud. Vewd holds that this approach enables it to surface video faster while still providing a conduit to the wide, wide world of OTT services.

RELATED: Opera TV Rebrands as 'Vewd'

Among other claims, Vewd said its OS for smart TVs also provides a guide that unites VOD, live TV and thousands of apps, and will include support for voice-driven navigation. That will be matched up with a data-driven analytics platform.

Vewd did not announce any partners for the new OS at this week’s show, but promised that it will announce some soon from “leading manufacturers,” noting that TV makers/original equipment manufacturers don’t tend to discuss those details until they have a device that’s ready to ship.

However, Vewd also said that the new OS builds on its Core SDK (software development kit), which it claims has in install base of about 30% of the world’s smart TVs. So, in that sense, perhaps it will have a rolling start.

Las Vegas -- Westinghouse Electronics is broadening its smart TV horizons with a new family of 4K-capable TVs that are powered by Android TV.

The 43-inch model will carry an MSRP of $325, while the higher-end 65-inch version will fetch $799, according to an official here at CES, where Westinghouse was showing off a model at Sunday evening’s CES Unveiled event.

The new Android TVs will support apps from Google play, as well as voice search/navigation and integration for Google Cast and Google Assistant. Westinghouse’s Android TV models will also build in 3 GB of memory, WiFi, three HDMI ports, component/composite connections, and an optical out connection.

The deal expands the number of TV makers that have adopted Android TV. Other examples include Sony and Sharp.

Westinghouse (along with Seiki and Element Electronics) used last year’s CES to announce it would launch a line of “Fire TV Edition” 4K models that use Amazon’s platform.

Westinghouse also makes a more basic smart TV with a small set of apps that uses its “Muse” platform.

An official said it the company is also open to the possibility of developing TVs that run the Roku operating system, but Westinghouse has not announced any plans to do so.

Poland is steadily leaving the “emerging market” phase of its development, matching or exceeding its Western European counterparts in the use of digital entertainment and boding well for U.S. programmers that made investments in the region, according to SNL Kagan.

According to Kagan, not only have Polish consumers have been buying smartphones and tablets, they are more likely to use them for digital entertainment than consumers in other countries.

A few U.S. companies have dipped their toes in the Polish market in recent years, with Scripps Networks Interactive purchasing one of the country’s leading cable networks – TVN – last September.  Time Warner Inc., has a presence in Eastern Europe with its interests in Central European Media Enterprises and other programmers have shifted their focus to that part of the world to capture a part of the growing TV ad  market.

According to a study conducted in late 2015 by Consumer Insights, 83% of Internet adults in Poland own a smartphone, which is in line with France, Germany and the United Kingdom. At 53%, tablet ownership in Poland is comparable to adoption levels in Western Europe and the country has one of the highest penetration rates for smart TVs in Europe.

Polish consumers are also big users of on-demand content. According to SNL Kagan, 60% of Internet adults in Poland reported using broadcaster or pay TV operator VOD services over the past 30 days, a level exceeded only by consumers in the U.K. (69%). But VOD usage lags those consumers in Western Europe at only 18%. But Polish consumers exceed other regions in their usage of digital content on personal computers. According to Kagan, 41% of PC owners in Poland report using the device to stream video content from an online service, more than twice the level in the U.K. (16%) and Italy (20%) and three times the rate of consumers in Germany (13%) and France (13%). Poland also exceeds the other countries surveyed in streaming video from a pay TV operator’s website (28%), the use of transactional video rental/purchasing services (28%/29%) and streaming online music (49%).

Xumo, an aggregator of ad-supported OTT video for smart TV and mobile platforms, has expanded an agreement with Jukin Media that will set the debut of two more channels on Xumo: The Pet Collective and People Are Awesome.

They said the two brands, which will launch of Xumo this week, represent more than 8 million followers and 325 million monthly views.

The addition of People Are Awesome and The Pet Collective (The Pet Collective is a joint venture of Jukin Media and Freemantle Media) follows Xumo’s recent launch of Fail Army, another Jukin property, on its smart TV platform. They timed the announcement with VidCon (June 23-25) in Anaheim.

Xumo noted that it will also show off its smart TV platform and unveil its new iOS mobile app at VidCon.

Xumo said it reaches nearly 20 million devices in the U.S. via native smart TV app integrations/partnerships with LG, Vizio, Panasonic and Funai Electric, which makes Sanyo-, Magnavox- and Philips-branded TVs in North America.

Other announced content partners for Xumo’s platform include Time Inc., Condé Nast Entertainment, Bloomberg, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed, PopSugar, Mitú Network, Machinima, TYT Network, Reuters, Field & Stream, PBS Digital Studios, Mashable, Network A, Fandor, Outside Television Shorts, Bonnier, Saveur, Cycle  World, and The Onion.