SME#37: Meet the challengers determined to take on the TV OS leaders
Streaming Made Easy #37 - "The Battle For The Living Room" Summer Series
Welcome back to Streaming Made Easy. I’m Marion & this is your weekly European take on the Global Streaming Video Business.
This week brings the 8th blog (and final) of the Summer Series “The Battle for the Living Room” with an edition dedicated to the pool of challengers determined to take on the big guys.
If you missed the previous editions, head over here → Summer series.
Enjoy today’s read and don’t forget to subscribe, comment and share.
The Summer Series is coming to an end.
For the last 7 weeks, I’ve covered Roku, Google, Samsung, LG, TCL, Hisense, Apple and Amazon 😅
I couldn’t leave you without talking about Vizio, ZEASN / Foxxum, TiVo / Xperi and Philips / TP Vision.
Vizio
In the 2nd edition of this Series, you saw how the CTV ecosystem operates from different parts of the world:
European brands (Philips, Grundig, and Thompson)
Japanese brands (Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba, Sharp)
American brands (Vizio, Magnavox - now Philips owned)
Korean brands (Samsung, LG)
Vizio is a US-based TV manufacturer who has been growing in the footsteps of Roku.
Why this comparison?
→ Both focus heavily on the US (Vizio only ships in the US though while Roku is active in 10+ markets);
→ Their platform businesses share a lot of commonalities (WatchFree & The Roku Channel, On platform Advertising).
Meet Vizio and its 17.6M active users:
ZEASN / Foxxum
It’s great to see consolidation taking place in the market. ZEASN, a Singapore based company, bought Foxxum, a German based company, last month.
The pair will be stronger together.
Their reach
→ 85M CTVs worldwide with a goal to grow to 200M within 3-5 years.
→ An AVOD/FAST service (Relaxx TV) accessible on 1.2B devices in 27 countries.
Their OS
Whale OS 3 from ZEASN and Foxxum OS 4 will merge into the new Whale OS 4.
Their licensing business model
OS licensees (understand TV brands looking for a new OS) get 80% of the platform revenues (understand monetisation across the App Store, On Platform Advertising, Rlaxx TV).
Their brand partners
TiVo / Xperi
TiVo is not new to the Living Room Entertainment game. They got famous with their digital video recorder (a TiVo) and later on streaming dongles.
In 2016, TiVo was acquired by Rovi Corporation, which was later renamed Xperi.
Their OS
In 2022, they bought Vewd to get into the TV OS ecosystem.
Vewd’s OS is used by over 30M set-top boxes, media players, and other connected TV devices annually. This gives Xperi a significant foothold in the smart TV market.
Xperi plans to use Vewd's OS to power its own line of smart TVs. However, it will also offer the OS to other TV manufacturers (deals were announced with Vestel and Sharp).
This will allow Xperi to compete with other major players in the smart TV market, such as Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and Google TV.
The OS is Linux based.
Their reach
The first TVs are expected to ship in 2023 with Vestel in Europe (which powers brands like Daewoo, Regal, Hitachi, Telefunken and JVC) and in 2024 with Sharp.
"We expect to have a footprint of at least 7 million TVs powered by TiVo within three years, which would yield an annualized revenue run rate of approximately $140 million, while delivering meaningful margin expansion over time," - CEO Jon Kirchner.
TiVo+
is TiVo’s own and operated platform with 160 channels, 100K+ movies and series to stream.
There cannot be a TV OS play without your own and operated streaming platform. You build inventory which you control and can monetize versus only taking a piece of the action through commissions.
Philips / TP Vision
The company needs no introduction. The Philips brand has been part of our daily lives since 1891.
In 2011, Philips announced its intention to sell a majority stake in its HDTV business to TPV Technology headquartered in Hong Kong.
TP Vision develops, manufactures and markets Philips branded TV sets in Europe, Russia, Middle East, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and selected countries in Asia-Pacific.
In Q1 2023, Philips had a 5% market share (of TV shipments) in Western Europe and a 5.1% in Eastern Europe according to Omdia.
Historically, their TVs ran on Android TV but a shift to their Linux based OS has been taking place.
Eager to see what they have in store for us.
Series wrap up
As you saw across the Series, the CTV ecosystem is not short of stakeholders. This level of competition spurs innovation on and off platform but it also presents challenges to the wider streaming ecosystem.
For a streaming service to grow, it needs to develop and maintain applications across all these different technical ecosystems. Netflix and the likes can cope with this level of fragmentation but Tier 2 and Tier 3 streamers find it challenging especially as having an app is one thing, driving traffic to it is another.
Over the next few months, I’ll touch on the subject again through the lens of video streaming services.
Until then, if you’ve enjoyed this series, let me know in the comment section below.
I’m also keen to hear your thoughts on topics you’d like to see covered in Streaming Made Easy.
That’s it for today.
Enjoy your weekend and see you next Friday for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!
By night, I write Streaming Made Easy and post on Linkedin.
By day, I run The Local Act, a streaming video consultancy.
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