TiVo

LG Ads Preps New Smart Television OS; With TiVo In Tow?

TiVo clearly has their sights set on Smart TV, yet at the same time partnered with LG Ads… a company that’s just unveiled a new smart television platform. And “River OS” seems to share a lot of similarities with TiVo’s approach:

River OS delivers seamless and highly personalized search, discovery, recommendations and viewing across live linear and on-demand sources.  Through advanced machine learning, individual preferences are matched to the vast world of content available across the television universe, to present each viewer the programming that is most appealing to their tastes.

As with Xperi’s stated 2023-24 TiVo goals, LG Ads pitches a smart television OS to hardware manufacturers as a means of those companies generating additional and ongoing ad revenue beyond set sales. Except LG Ads is launching their platform in 2021 (India) and 2022 (US). So 2-3 years earlier than TiVo, with a number of identified OEM partners:

Our current OEM partners include LG, Sharp, Hisense, Toshiba, Seiki, Skyworth, Tivo, and Sling Media, with over 10 more OEMs committed to joining us in 2021.

With limited detail beyond the name drop, we’re forced to speculate on the nature of the LG Ads & TiVo relationship. As reflected in the comments below, it could be specific to aggregating viewership metrics vs actively partnering on hardware — which would be a curious move. In that scenario, the best case may be TiVo once again relying on a 3rd party to power their solution, a la TiVo Stream 4K (riding Google’s Android TV). But worse case may be TiVo actively competing against themselves by licensing a variety of TiVo and Rovi patents and approaches.

Published by
Dave Zatz