LG Ads Solutions, the advertising arm of TV manufacturer LG Electronics, has launched its own smart TV operating system.River OS-powered smart TVs will begin shipping in India by the end of 2021 and in the United States and across the world in 2022. In a statement, LG Ads said “Major content streaming services and apps will be readily available” on the platform.
LG ads has OEM agreements with LG, Sharp, Hisense, Toshiba, Seiki, Skyworth, Tivo, and Sling Media. LG itself has since 2009 used webOS as its operating system.
Functionality will include personalised search, discovery, recommendations and viewing across live linear and on-demand sources. River OS uses natural language processing to understand who is watching TV, and delivers recommendations catered to each individual in the household, without the need to manually switch between profiles.
Universal content recommendations and program listings are served up in a personalized home page rendered dynamically for the specific person watching.
John Gee, chief business development officer for LG Ads, said: “With streaming dominating viewing time today, it’s still too hard for people to find, discover and enjoy the programs they want to watch, across literally thousands of content sources available. River OS solves that challenge in an elegant way and delivers new, fully voice-controlled smart TV features that consumers will find innovative and essential.”
LG Ads is promising content partners and brand advertisers a rich array of interactive native ad formats, including home screen takeovers.
Rival Samsung has its own Tizen operating system, while others such as Sony have so far operated into Android TV.
