The CEO of The Trade Desk is downplaying reports that said the company is planning to go head-to-head with Roku, Amazon and Google by developing its own streaming television operating system.
At a technology conference in London this week, Jeff Green did not confirm or dispute a report from the newsletter Lowpass that revealed The Trade Desk has been quietly developing its own streaming TV operating system over the past few months.
Instead, Green apparently took issue with the opening line in the first Lowpass report on the matter that said The Trade Desk “is getting ready to more directly compete with Roku, Google and Amazon.”
“They’re wrong,” Green flatly said, adding that industry experts should look to its various partnerships to see indications that The Trade Desk will continue working with others in the space.
Specifically, Green referred to a partnership forged between The Trade Desk and Roku in April that allows marketers to leverage insights from Roku Media in order to help them better strategize their ad buying through The Trade Desk’s platform.
Connected TV (CTV) advertising has become a bigger part of The Trade Desk’s business, accounting for a “high-40s percentage share” of revenue, according to recent comments from an executive. (The Desk is not associated with The Trade Desk.)
The development of its own CTV operating system is intended to help grow that part of the business, by offering marketers additional advertising inventory to purchase across differentiated platforms. At the same time, The Trade Desk is hoping to cut device makers in on a higher share of revenue than they might otherwise get by licensing similar CTV operating systems like Roku OS, Amazon’s Fire TV or Google’s Android TV. Sonos is reportedly the first partner to bring The Trade Desk’s future CTV operating system to a forthcoming device.
Greer referred to some of these streaming platforms as “walled gardens,” saying The Trade Desk needed to “make certain that the supply chain of the open Internet” rises above them.
“That’s the one thing those walled gardens have going for them: By controlling the whole supply chain, you can make it short,” Greer remarked. “That’s how Amazon became successful. Jeff Bezos was obsessed about supply chains. We have to obsess about that.”
