For most of the connected-TV era, Europe’s smart-TV operating-system order has been a Korean duopoly with a long Chinese chase pack. That order is breaking. Omdia forecast on April 15 that V, Hisense’s smart-TV OS (rebranded from VIDAA at CES), will pass LG webOS in European TV shipments, with Android TV holding the lead and both webOS and Samsung Tizen in gradual decline. A second Omdia release six days later, drawn from the firm’s TV Design & Features Tracker, modeled the cohort of operating systems that did not exist in 2022 (V plus Titan OS plus TiVo) moving from 21 percent of the European market in 2025 to 28 percent by 2030, while Google TV slips from 32 percent to 26 percent. Omdia’s Head of Media and Entertainment, Maria Rua Aguete, called it “a structural shift.”
For European ad buyers and sellers, the more useful question is who collects each marginal euro of CTV ad spend on a Hisense television versus an LG one. The answer changes the day a webOS install becomes a V install, and that answer routes through a different ad stack than LG’s.
The other Teads exclusive
The cleanest read on what’s actually being re-routed comes from Teads’s customer book. Teads (NASDAQ: TEAD) is the exclusive global seller of LG HomeScreen, a partnership renewed last week and now covering more than 20 countries across Europe and Asia Pacific, including the new additions of Italy, Greece, and Cyprus. Teads is also the exclusive global seller of native CTV homescreen and Channels FAST inventory on V-powered smart TVs across the U.S., Canada, and 27 markets in Europe and APAC, under an extension signed in December 2024 when the company was still styled VIDAA USA. The same reseller sits on both sides of the OS-share trade. Teads’s commission line is largely indifferent to whether a German viewer’s home screen is webOS or V.
The pressure lands somewhere narrower. LG’s owned-and-operated demand business, LG Ad Solutions, sells direct in the United States, where webOS still has scale, and routes through Teads in Europe, where the share is now forecast to slip. The U.S. moat is intact. The European inventory pool LG controls behind that exclusive shrinks at the rate the Omdia forecast plays out. And the parent’s TV business is already absorbing the squeeze: LG Electronics’ Media Entertainment Solution segment, the TV unit, posted a 750.9 billion won (about $511 million) operating loss on 19.43 trillion won of FY2025 revenue, the company disclosed in late January, with webOS-based advertising and content named as the explicit growth lever expected to offset hardware-margin pressure.
V’s footprint is already programmatically wired
The reason an Omdia shipment forecast matters this quarter, rather than in 2030, is that the demand-side machinery to monetize V’s marginal European install is in place now. Nexxen International (NASDAQ: NEXN) launched first-to-market programmatic native Smart TV activation last fall, with VIDAA inventory available exclusively in Nexxen DSP at launch. Five months later, The Trade Desk (NASDAQ: TTD) launched its Ventura Ecosystem with V and Nexxen as the first-named collaborators, disclosing that V powers more than 50 million connected devices worldwide. Joining Ventura grants V access to OpenPath, UID2/EUID, OpenAds, and OpenPass: the supply-path and identity stack TTD has reframed away from running its own OS and toward layering beneath whichever OSs win.
The marginal V install in Frankfurt or Milan therefore routes through better-developed ad-tech rail than the marginal webOS install. The marginal webOS install routes, mostly, through the Teads exclusive our piece earlier this week called architecturally singular, and through LG Ad Solutions’ own recent programmatic opening of HomeScreen via Programmatic Guaranteed and PMP deals, which closed the moat-by-direct-only argument LG had been making. LG Ad Solutions CMO Tony Marlow told Digiday last fall, in remarks tied to the Nexxen-V launch story, that programmatic adoption “[is] not likely to be the majority any time soon.” That position now competes with LG’s own programmatic Home Screen pipeline and with Omdia’s call on share direction.
VideoWeek’s reading of the April 21 Omdia release frames the demand-side prize cleanly: V, Titan OS, and TiVo all share advertising and data revenue with their OEM and publisher partners; Google TV largely keeps that revenue inside Google. For an OEM looking at flat hardware margins, that gap is why the platform calculation has tilted, and it’s why hardware partners beyond Hisense itself have started moving. Loewe, the German premium-TV brand historically on Tizen for its flagship lines, adopted V Home OS last month for its 2026 Vega 4K LED series, keeping Tizen for the flagship Stellar OLED but voluntarily handing a new range to a Chinese-developed OS. That’s the OEM-momentum data point Omdia’s shipment forecast can’t directly produce.
What the buyer-side question actually is
Hisense’s hardware push tracks the OS push without quite explaining it. The company reported #2 globally in TV shipments for the third consecutive year at 14.06 percent of 2024 global volume, and Hisense Europe told China Daily late last year it ended 2025 at 9.1 percent European TV market share, third in the region, on €4.8 billion of revenue, with a 2026 target of €5.5 billion at 10 percent combined share. Those are hardware numbers. The OS shift adds a layer on top: Connected TV Marketing Association data Digiday cited last September put V at 7.8 percent of global smart TVs against Samsung Tizen at 12.9 percent, the only public global benchmark on what V’s footprint already represents.
For European ad buyers planning 2026, the question isn’t whether to keep treating webOS and Tizen as the default smart-TV reach buy. It’s how much of the marginal European CTV plan now needs to price in V-stack inventory routed through Nexxen DSP, the Trade Desk Ventura Ecosystem, and Teads’s V exclusive, and whether the LG HomeScreen exclusive Teads just expanded into Italy, Greece, and Cyprus is a sturdier 2026 pipe than the underlying webOS share trajectory implies.
The first read is The Trade Desk’s Q1 earnings call on May 7, the first since Ventura’s launch and Rob Caruso’s first as the executive responsible for the framing. After that, Hisense Visual Technology’s interim disclosures and LG’s MS-segment commentary are the next places the Omdia forecast gets tested against print numbers.
