The idea of independent or neutral TV OSs has gathered force quickly over the last year and is likely to be a big story in the field during the rest of 2025, with at least one major launch still to come. This has come about with growing appreciation of the various roles a TV OS can have, drawing some major players into the game. This includes some large companies not traditionally associated with TV OSs, such as US retailing giant Walmart, which in December 2024 acquired TV maker Vizio for $2.3 billion, in large part for its SmartCast TV OS.

Walmart did not buy the company to serve TV users primarily, but to enhance its eCommerce platform and advance its ambition to compete with Amazon, which in turn has been edging into bricks and mortar retailing, with several hundred physical stores across Europe and North America. Walmart also aims to connect its growing base of online advertising customers more readily with end users via streaming platforms.

This exemplifies the widening scope of the TV OS, another major axis of growth being as the hub of the smart home for control of consumer electronic devices and appliances, a natural direction for the likes of Samsung and LG. For the most part though the emerging breed of independent TV OSs is focused on the traditional TV UI, with the aim of establishing a platform independent of the major operators.

This can be seen as the latest chapter in a story dating back around a decade ago to the time it looked like the world of TV OSs was converging around Android TV. The debate then was over whether Google was allowing pay TV operators and smart TV makers enough freedom to innovate around the core functionality and be sufficiently independent of Google’s vast armory of apps.

But then several factors conspired to reverse or at any rate halt this trend, as The Broadcast Bridge explained in Nov 2024. First 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.

Another key factor was that the OS was becoming 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, even if there is more national alignment than before.

Against this background, momentum has been building behind independent TV OSs. TiVo can be seen as a cheerleader and has gained some early mover advantage as a result.

The name TiVo itself will be a blast from the past for many as the pioneer of the DVR (Digital Video Recorder) in 1999, with some of its models still available today. But TiVo itself faded from view after several events, notably its acquisition in 2016 by TV technology company Rovi, even though the better-known TiVo brand was retained.

Then in December 2019 came a key move when TiVo merged with Xperi, a semiconductor technology licensing firm which also owned several AV (Audiovisual) brands, in a $3 billion deal. TiVo itself was making most of its money from licenses, and that deal finally marked the end of the original DVR era.

But it also heralded the beginning of TiVo’s reinvention as an OS company, introducing the TiVo operating system in August 2022. TiVo announced ongoing collaboration with Turkish TV maker Vestel at the same time to incorporate the OS into some of the latter’s TVs. Since then, TiVo has added some other big names, starting with Panasonic, which in May 2024 confirmed adoption of the OS for its then new W60A and S45/40 TVs.

Sharp and JVC were among others to follow, while some such as Bush came in through the Vestel connection. Vestel makes TVs sold under various brands, while Bush TVs in turn come in from a variety of manufacturers, Vestel being one.

Vestel TVs, whatever the brand, are sold mostly in Europe, which was TiVo’s market for its OS in the immediate term, just hinting at plans to expand in the US in partnership with as yet unspecified companies. Then in January 2025 TiVo made the first concrete announcement of US expansion by confirming its OS platform would be in new Sharp TVs arriving there in February 2025.

TiVo’s cause has also been boosted by support from some streaming providers. One of these is Tubi TV, a FAST (Free Ad Supported TV) platform now owned by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation. Having amassed a big library of 250,000 titles and about 70 million US subscribers by then, Tubi launched in the UK in July 2024. This was primarily pitched at attachable devices like Amazon Fire Sticks and mobiles at first, but also targeting the growing number of TVs with the TiVo OS inside.

Other contenders have come in, such as Singapore’s Whale TV, which despite first launching in 2011 gained little traction until the recent rise of the neutral OS. The cause was not helped by the original choice of Zeasn as the company name before changing to Whale TV, which now boasts over 400 TV brands, including Philipps, JVC and Telefunken.

Whale TV only really came onto the world stage at IBC 2024 with the announcement of the 10th version of its OS, Whale TV OS 10. The selling point, in keeping with the general ethos of the neutral OS, was simplicity of navigation and search, with fewer menu levels and delegation of personalization to new machine learning algorithms. Indeed, simplicity at the UI level was achieved with greater sophistication beneath the hood, and so far has elicited generally favorable reviews.

This comes at a time when multiple OS platforms are all trying to jump into a limited pool of TV real estate. This includes not just these emerging neutral or independent TV OSs, but also some of the proprietary ones designed initially in most cases just for the particular vendor’s own TVs.

Some of these proprietary OSs, it is true, have remained hitched to the maker’s hardware, such as Samsung’s Tizen. But Samsung has plenty of diverse devices within its own ecosystem to address.

That said, LG’s WebOS has spread its wings onto other makes of TV, admittedly more middle ranking brands such as RCA, Ayonz and Konka.

LG is now pushing WebOS harder as a quasi-independent OS, having made it Bluetooth compatible so that it can link up with keyboards, mice, and other useful peripherals. It is more flexible than it was, with native support for Alexa and Google Assistant, enabling voice interaction.

It can now 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.

Indeed, ever since becoming the first major smart TV OS off the ground commercially in 2014, Web OS has been a pace setter, and quite a lot of Samsung’s Tizen seems somewhat derivative of it even today.

It is hardly surprising that Google TV is distributed across many TV brands, including Sony smart TVs, as well as some TCL and Hisense models. After all, Google’s ambition was to dominate the TV ecosystem and not to become a major supplier of TVs themselves.

Google has focused from the start on achieving a high level of personalization, being early to recruit AI to help curate content selections. It is also, again not surprisingly, well placed for those with many Android devices around the home, and its search function is among the best.

While most of these proprietary OSs are heavyweight systems, a major defining characteristic of the new TV OS breed is that they at least appear relatively lightweight. That is a deliberate approach to court the lower end of the TV market, serving consumers demanding simpler and quicker access to whatever they want to watch at a given time from a sometimes-bewildering array of content.

One conundrum here is that people do not always know what they want to watch and yet might yearn for the simplicity of early TVs with their small number of channels. That point has been made more or less by some of these new breeds, with an emphasis on employing AI more effectively to make recommendations a user is likely to want, taking account of recent selections as well as known preferences, but not adhering to any theme too religiously.

This has been the TV UI challenge from the start, but the neutral TV OS seems based on the premise that consumers can be partitioned between those that are more sophisticated, prepared to engage more deeply in their quest for content, and those that just want it laid on a plate. This has led some TV makers to adopt neutral OSs just for their lower end models, those tending to lack say high-end OLED and mini-LED displays.

Most of TiVo’s customers tend to be at the affordable end of the spectrum in any case. Philips though has deployed a neutral TV OS called Titan OS, developed by the eponymous TV technology and advertising company, only on its lower end TVs. This came after a period of flux for Philips, starting in 2023 when it moved away from its longstanding arrangement with Android TV for Google TV.

This meant the second migration from Google TV to Titan OS less than a year later looked surprising until Philips clarified this was only for some lower end models. It was retaining Google TV for premium models, having chosen Titan OS because it was quite similar at the UI level. There is a tendency, as observed before, for visual aspects of TV OSs to converge, with differentiation then occurring increasingly under the hood.

As if this is not enough, there is another major TV OS waiting in the wings for release later in 2025, although that has a rather different bent to the others. Called Ventura and still under development, this comes from a seemingly unlikely source, the giant US specialist in automated programmatic advertising and content delivery platforms called The Trade Desk.

This conglomerate has been motivated by the growing ubiquity of streaming and therefore ability to attract advertising. Ventura has been designed from the ground up with streaming advertising in mind, aiming to reduce friction between content publishers and brands.

So, while it promises, like other TV OSs, to dissolve barriers between linear TV and multiple streaming sources, the main focus is on lubricating the supply chain for advertising, as far as possible eliminating hurdles and reducing the number of hops. This involves incorporating the Trade Desk’s own streaming advertising innovations, such as its OpenPath, developed to give advertisers direct access online to streaming publishers.

Ventura is almost certain to take off, given the pedigree of its launch partners, which include Disney, Paramount, and Tubi. There is also Sonos, a maker of high-end audio equipment, which has decided to develop a streaming TV box of its own with Ventura inside.

The neutral TV OS field then is already looking cluttered, with some serious players among them. It looks unlikely all can survive, so we can anticipate some consolidation occurring. But the TV OS field as a whole looks like fragmenting further before it contracts.