Let’s get something straight:
This isn’t a cordial rivalry.
This isn’t two titans clinking glasses over martinis, toasting “may the best ad-tech platform win.”
Nope. This is a street brawl behind the Applebee’s — Roku gripping a crown made of midwestern TV dominance, and Samsung showing up with a data-encrusted shiv, smiling politely like it didn’t just slash a chunk of your ad budget while you were streaming Murder She Baked.

Welcome to Connected TV in 2025, where you thought you were just binge-watching, but you were actually signing up for a battle royale between Big Purple and Big Screen

Roku didn’t get to 39% of the U.S. CTV market by accident.
It’s been playing the long con — quietly burrowing its OS into your aunt’s living room, your Airbnb bedroom, and half the TVs at Planet Fitness. It’s everywhere. It’s like glitter at a kindergarten craft table: omnipresent, impossible to clean up, and probably tracking your behavior.

Roku doesn’t sell you a TV. It sells you a user experience, wrapped in a smile and monetized six ways from Sunday. It’s less about the hardware, more about the ad-serving ecosystem disguised as a friendly home screen.

It’s also betting big on turning your casual viewing into QVC 2.0. Shoppable TV? That’s not an experiment — that’s the business plan.
Imagine watching a cooking show and — boom — a toaster ad appears with a buy-now button. Your remote is now your wallet, and you’re one accidental click away from owning a spiralizer you’ll use once.

It’s not just ads. It’s ads you can’t escape, layered over content that tricks you into thinking you're getting something for free — until you realize you've watched six trailers, bought a throw pillow, and still haven’t found the movie.

Roku is the friendly drug dealer of adtech:
First taste is free. The next one costs your attention, your wallet, and probably your dignity.

Samsung, meanwhile, didn’t come to dance.
It came to colonize.

While Roku charms America with its cute purple remotes and nostalgic interface, Samsung is slipping inside living rooms across the globe with the subtlety of a Bond villain and the efficiency of Amazon Prime.
It controls the hardware. The interface. The ad stack.
It is the stack.

Samsung has 72 million smart TVs in the U.S. alone, and every one of them is quietly learning what you watch, when you watch, and how often you rewatch that one Great British Bake Off meltdown.

Their Samsung TV Plus FAST platform shows up like a houseguest who brought their own furniture. It’s pre-installed, un-deletable, and vaguely unsettling — like waking up to find your fridge recommending protein bars.

But the real weapon? Automatic Content Recognition (ACR).
Samsung doesn’t just know what you're watching on its apps — it knows what you’re watching everywhere. It’s like if your TV were a jealous ex who never stopped following you on social media and definitely still knows your HBO login.

And they’re not here to gently suggest an ad. They’re here to inject it directly into your visual cortex, personalized, optimized, and delivered with all the nuance of a laser-guided missile.

Where Roku is leaning into shoppable ads, Samsung is turning the entire TV into a data extraction terminal. The ads don’t just appear — they understand you, like a horoscope written by your therapist’s stalker.

This isn’t about whether you prefer Roku’s nostalgic UX or Samsung’s shiny hardware.
It’s about $30+ billion in projected CTV ad spend.
It’s about control of the last non-doomscrolling screen left in your life.
It’s about who gets to whisper “buy now” into your ears while you’re just trying to watch reruns of Law & Order: SVU in peace.

Let’s look at the numbers:

But here’s the twist:
This war isn’t just about who shows more ads.
It’s about who owns the ecosystem — the OS, the device, the data, the content, the transaction, your soul.
It’s retail media on steroids. It's Google vs. Facebook, but you can’t adblock your TV.

Today? Roku. It owns the living room and knows how to milk it.

Tomorrow? Samsung. It’s playing a longer, smarter game — with global reach, deeper data, and a smirk that says, “You don’t even know we’re here yet.”

The rest of us?
We’re collateral damage.
Just trying to find the HDMI input while five autoplay ads tell us about insurance for dogs, artisanal vinegar, and a crypto wallet shaped like a Tamagotchi.

📌 TL;DR (Too Long; Definitely Read):

Stay Bold. Stay Curious. Know More Than You Did Yesterday.
And if your remote starts suggesting products mid-episode, don’t panic. It’s just the future trying to close the sale.

Let’s talk market share.
The battle for your eyeballs — and advertisers’ wallets — is being fought in living rooms around the globe. In 2025, Connected TV isn’t just another screen. It’s the screen, and the numbers don’t lie. But they do whisper some wild stories.

📍 U.S. Market Share: 39%
Roku continues to rule American couches like it’s still 2018 and everyone’s pretending to cancel cable. The purple empire is sitting pretty with nearly 4 out of every 10 U.S. CTV devices running Roku’s ad-friendly OS — a fact that should have every linear exec reaching for the scotch.

🇲🇽 Mexico: 74% Market Share
Yes, you read that right. In Mexico, Roku isn’t just dominant — it’s a one-party system. The brand practically installed itself in every TV south of the border like it was a telenovela subplot.

💸 Revenue Outlook:

📍 U.S. Market Share Growth: +51% YoY
Samsung’s no longer content being the glossy frame around your Netflix addiction. It's now a full-blown adtech beast, chewing up market share like it's got a cheat code.

🇬🇧 U.K. Market Share: 30%
Across the pond, Samsung leads the CTV pack, sipping tea and selling ads with ease. Roku trails at 20%, watching nervously from the second-place balcony.

🇨🇦 Canada: 8% Share… but Xiaomi’s up 156%?!
Yeah, Xiaomi — the budget brand people buy when they're tired of Amazon — somehow surged 156% YoY in Canada. File that under “things we didn’t see coming,” along with maple syrup NFTs and poutine-flavored protein bars.

💸 Revenue Outlook:

This isn’t a trend. It’s a category rewrite. Linear is fading faster than your high school yearbook quotes, and mobile — once the golden child — is now just that sibling who peaked too early.

Both Roku and Samsung are playing chess, not checkers. They’re investing in:

Roku will keep squeezing every ounce of value from its U.S. stronghold.
Samsung will keep blitzing the global market with hardware-first control.

And you? You’ll keep watching TV while silently wondering how your TV knew you needed new running shoes right after watching a pizza commercial.

📌 Bottom Line:

As the global connected TV (CTV) market continues to expand—expected to surpass $33 billion in U.S. ad spend by the end of 2025—the real power struggle is not about content libraries, distribution rights, or even user acquisition. It's about operating systems.

While most headlines focus on streaming services and consumer-facing apps, the infrastructure quietly dictating the future of TV advertising is buried in the silicon and software of smart TVs. In this new era of monetized attention, the companies controlling the operating systems—namely Roku and Samsung—are positioning themselves as the central gatekeepers of the CTV ecosystem.

Roku has long been viewed as the leader in CTV within the United States. Its footprint—comprising 39% of the U.S. CTV market—has afforded it unparalleled access to first-party data, viewing behavior, and direct-to-consumer monetization. But Roku’s real strength isn’t just hardware. It’s the operating system.

The Roku OS powers not only Roku-branded devices but also a swath of OEM televisions through partnerships with brands like TCL and Hisense. This allows Roku to maintain control over the home screen, app prioritization, and, crucially, ad delivery infrastructure. With the rollout of its Ads Manager platform—designed to resemble self-serve platforms like TikTok or Meta—Roku has democratized access to TV ad inventory for performance marketers previously priced out of the medium.

Additionally, the company has made strategic investments in shoppable television, partnering with Shopify and other ecommerce platforms to enable on-screen purchases directly from ad units. The goal is clear: turn passive viewership into active commerce.

Yet despite its domestic dominance, Roku has struggled to replicate its success internationally. In the United Kingdom, for example, Roku's OS penetration sits at just 4%, with market share largely limited to third-party brands. After early momentum in Europe, shipment volumes declined, prompting the company to refocus on North America and Mexico, where it commands a staggering 74% of the CTV market.

Samsung, by contrast, has taken a vertically integrated approach. Its proprietary operating system, Tizen, is embedded across its global lineup of smart TVs, including the 30% of devices it controls in the U.K. market. Unlike Roku, which relies on software partnerships to gain distribution, Samsung owns the entire hardware stack—granting it frictionless access to interface-level advertising, data collection, and app placement.

This position is bolstered by Samsung Ads, which has become a key player in the growing CTV ad market. The company utilizes Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology to gather real-time data on user viewing habits, not only within Samsung’s own apps but across all HDMI inputs—including game consoles, streaming sticks, and Blu-ray players.

Such comprehensive data capabilities allow Samsung to offer highly refined audience segments, enabling both brand and performance marketers to target users based on detailed behavioral insights. Combined with pre-installed access to Samsung TV Plus—a FAST (Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV) service that continues to scale internationally—the company’s ecosystem is poised for accelerated monetization.

Revenue reflects that strategy. Samsung is expected to double its CTV ad revenue from $1.35 billion in 2024 to over $3 billion by 2029, driven largely by its control of the OS and expansion of programmatic offerings.

Into this duopoly enters The Trade Desk, with an ambitious—but currently precarious—effort to create an alternative CTV operating system: Ventura.

Marketed as a neutral platform devoid of content ownership conflicts, Ventura was intended to streamline the fragmented CTV supply chain and offer greater transparency for advertisers. However, the company’s early plans suffered a blow when Sonos, initially expected to be Ventura’s flagship hardware partner, abandoned its plans to enter the CTV hardware market. Without a hardware footprint, Ventura faces steep uphill terrain.

The challenge is twofold: persuading TV manufacturers to adopt a third-party OS over entrenched incumbents like Tizen, Roku, Google TV, or Fire OS—and doing so without the leverage of controlling hardware, app ecosystems, or content distribution.

Despite these setbacks, The Trade Desk remains committed to Ventura. Executives argue that its lack of content or device ownership is a strength, not a weakness, allowing the platform to offer an unbiased approach to inventory management, measurement, and audience targeting. But unless it secures manufacturing partners, Ventura risks becoming a well-intentioned platform without a stage.

The implications of OS-level control go beyond user experience. Whoever controls the operating system also controls:

In short, the OS is the gateway to both monetization and influence—determining what gets watched, when, by whom, and with what commercial overlay.

As Roku and Samsung refine their strategies, the gap between media platforms and hardware manufacturers continues to blur. With shoppable ads, UI-level monetization, and direct performance integration on the rise, the line between viewing and commerce is eroding.

In this battle, content may still be king—but the operating system is the kingmaker. And the companies who own it may ultimately decide the future of streaming, advertising, and consumer behavior.

Think that CTV war breakdown you just read was juicy? That was the trailer. The director’s cut — unfiltered, unhinged, and full of secrets that PR teams pray we don’t publish — lives inside ADOTAT+.

👀 What’s inside?

📌 After that? It’ll cost you less than what you accidentally Venmo’d your lover last month.

Or don’t, and let your rivals out-maneuver you with information you could’ve had for the price of a bagel.