TVs, like cars, phones and even some domestic appliances, have become computers and therefore increasingly dependent on their operating system (OS). The OS has continued climbing up the agenda since the advent of connected or smart TVs around a decade ago, driven by the rising prominence of streaming and need to integrate ever more numerous and diverse sources of content within UIs amid elevating expectations of the experience.

At one time smart TV operating systems looked like converging, with speculation they would all end up being Android based, as various proprietary offerings from the likes of Sony withered on the vine. But then came the schism between the US and China, and sanctions over technologies the latter controlled. This led to Huawei reviving its Harmony OS, having previously been tending towards Android.

But that was just one factor. Another was the OS becoming seen as a source of competitive differentiation, occasionally at the national as well as company level, as in India. Most recently, India’s Reliance Group has developed its Jio TV OS, so we are heading back towards the original fragmentation around major vendors, although with more national alignment than before.

The country’s Make in India campaign was set up to encourage home grown manufacturing and technological development, with a view to exporting as well as national reliance. Reliance developed Jio TV OS in that spirit, having first established the software for its own set top box, incorporating home entertainment features such as Ultra HD with 4K and Dolby Vision.

Reliance did not go back entirely to the drawing board though, since it built Jio TV OS on Android, so that it is related to Google TV, albeit with freedom to take the OS in whatever direction it wants, more than just customizing an existing system. Reliance saw this as the best of both worlds, exploiting a mature underlying code base, but still with scope for innovation on top.

Reliance has folded the software into a platform called Jio TV+ set up to compete with proprietary offerings from major consumer electronics firms and TV makers such as Samsung’s Tizen OS and LG’s WebOS. Reliance hopes to follow in the footsteps of those two companies by having Jio TV OS adopted by third party TV makers.

Indeed, the TV OS field is now a market in its own right, distinct from the boxes themselves and ranked by analysts. The market is split between a few significant players, none of which holds a dominant share, although Samsung’s Tizen OS is a clear leader, accounting for 12.9% of the world’s smart TVs, according to the Connected TV Marketing Association’s 2024 Global Smart TV Operating System Market Share Rankings published in June 2024. That equates to about 120 million smart TVs. Next comes China’s Hisense with 7.8% for its VIDAA OS, followed by LG’s Web OS at 7.4%, the Roku TV and Amazon’s Fire TV at 6.4% each.

These five OSs have different backgrounds, with Tizen, VIDAA OS and WebOS all developed originally for CE makers’ own TVs before reaching out to other primarily smaller makers that are not considered direct competitive threats.

LG’s WebOS was the first to emerge as a leading smart TV operating system in 2014 and has since failed to capitalize fully on its early window of opportunity. Nonetheless, it has been deployed by at least 20 smaller TV manufacturers around the world, including RCA, Ayonz and Konka.

WebOS is now poised to mount a strong challenge on the back of more aggressive promotion by LG. It is Bluetooth compatible, so that it can link up with keyboards, mice, and other useful peripherals. It has native support for Alexa and Google Assistant, enabling voice interaction.

It can also pause live content in one app, while switching to another, allowing later resumption by users, as well as having 360-degree video playback. Most recently, in October 2024, LG promoted the OS as its vision of the TV future at its Summit 2024 in South Korea.

Almost inevitably, the theme was “Empowering web OS with AI,” aiming to make it more intuitive and able to customize automatically to the user’s viewing habits, behavior and content preferences.

Samsung has also been extending its UI capabilities in the latest version of its OS, Tizen 8.0, unveiled in October 2023. The most notable advance was its multi-modal interaction framework, designed to support the various user communication modes, including voice and gesture as well as traditional manipulation of a remote, through one coherent UI. It enables third party TV makers to create their own UIs through workflows incorporating multi-modal combinations, embracing core functions such as navigation, search and recommendation.

Samsung is in a different position to its principal OS rivals by dint of its strength in the overlying TV market, accounting for about 30% of total global sales, not just smart TVs. As a result, most of its Tizen OS users have Samsung TVs, such that LG’s webOS is actually widely deployed on TVs made by others.

Indeed, Samsung only started licensing TizenOS to smaller third-party TV brands in 2022, and to some extent it looks like a slimmed down version of WebOS. It is designed as much with the smart home hub in mind, with fast boot up compared with some of the heavier weight systems such as Google TV, as well as WebOS, which it somewhat resembles.

To some extent TV OSs, and certainly the UIs they present, are like cars with a tendency to follow the herd and stand out just enough for a little differentiation but not so much as to risk being outcasts.

It is also worth noting that while there has been a trend towards proprietary OSs among the major TV makers, some smaller ones have gone in the opposite direction and switched to one of the established multi-platform OSs. This makes sense because they can then tap into a wider base of investment, still with some scope for customization and focus on the TVs themselves.

Panasonic is the most prominent example, having begun the switch from its own My Home screen to Amazon’s Fire OS. This first showed up in January 2024 when the company announced its latest flagship Z95A TV featuring Micro Lens Array (MLA) OLED technology would run Fire OS. It now looks likely Fire OS will sweep through Panasonic’s whole TV range as new models emerge, at least as the default platform.

This was greeted with surprise and even disdain by some TV watchers, and yet it had become clear for a while Panasonic was struggling to adapt its OS for the full range of streaming services it needed to embrace. It was a case of either investing more in its own platform or running with a proven OS confident that this would tick the required boxes as they emerge.

Panasonic’s secret sauce in any case is its display technology, as one of the MLA pioneers. While opinions differ at this stage over whether MLA TVs are worth the extra money, prices should fall, and there is no doubt the technology addresses quite successfully one deficit of OLED compared to LCD-based TVs, relative lack of brightness. Driving the OLED elements harder to atone for this deficit shortens the TV’s life through burn-in, and MLA avoids this by instead imposing multiple lenses on top of the elements to focus light and provide the apparent brightness that way, without increasing power.

Panasonic may also be less interested in making its TVs the hubs of emerging smart digital homes, which is a direction of focus for some of the others, and also for the OS in general. There is overlap here with the aspirations of service providers in the pay TV and broadband space, for which the TV OS can provide a gateway into the smart home, with scope for additional services and revenues.

That is the case for Reliance in India with its Jio TV OS, which the company is offering open source to smaller indigenous smart TV brands. As a conglomerate offering a range of consumer products, Reliance is targeting control of the home, which is why it emphasizes compliance of the OS with the Matter standard gaining traction amongst consumer IoT (Internet of Things) product makers.

Matter was launched in December 2019 by Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung and the Zigbee Alliance, initially as Project Connected Home over IP, with the objective of developing a common IP based connectivity and interoperability protocol for devices in the home. A key objective was to avoid the need for internet connectivity in every smart home component, allowing for small and low-cost devices.

This plays into the idea of a connected central hub, with the TV as a serious contender. The TV OS is then pivotal by virtue of its control over the UI and local connectivity.

Google and Amazon have a head start here since they already have devices and technologies established in the home. Google TV, which succeeded from Android TV in 2022, has Google Assistant built in, so that smart home devices such as lights, speakers, thermostats, and electrical sockets, can already be controlled through voice commands.

There is no need for Matter, although Google does support that and it is likely to become ubiquitous overarching IoT standard for connectivity across the cloud, as well as locally within the home. By operating up at the application level, Matter can operate as an umbrella layer of connection and interoperability across any underlying network built with IPv6, which now accounts for almost 50% of global internet nodes or connections, driven largely by the need for a larger address space to cater for the IoT.

There is another way of regarding the TV OS, as a cry for attention by smart TVs themselves, and part of a battleground between CE makers and video or pay TV service providers. The latter still tend to issue customers with a set top box for control of their TV service, and possibly also home devices.

But the smart TV OS is positioned to be in control and keep the consumers hitched to its OS, served by a different remote. The OS then plays into this tension between smart TV makers and service providers, with the tide flowing towards the former.

This is apparent from the latest data. According to a study of just over 2500 US TV viewers published by Hub Entertainment Research in August 2024, smart TVs have become the dominant viewing devices for streaming content, on the back of improved OSs.

Now 60% of primary TV sets have service from a streaming platform against 38% from a linear pay TV service. On top of that, two thirds of the most heavily used TV sets show a TV OS home screen first when the TV is turned on, from a smart TV, streaming stick or box.

It is true that survey was confined to the US and that smart TVs are currently less dominant over viewing in most other markets, but the underlying trend is the same. So the TV OS has become increasingly influential over what people watch, including adverts, even if it rarely decides which TV sets consumers buy.