Tivo OS: New TV operating system presented

Xperi launches its own operating system for smart TVs. Tivo OS enters a hotly contested market – and has some unique selling points to offer.

Problems for TV operating systems

Numerous TV operating systems have faced major problems in recent years. With the ascendancy of cross-platform solutions such as Fire OS or Android TV, and the proliferation of streaming services, it has become easier for streaming providers to focus almost exclusively on them. Panasonic impressively demonstrated what this can lead to last year. The company had to work hard to convince Disney+ to provide an application for its own operating systems. Panasonic only succeeded in doing so more than a year after Disney+’s market launch in Germany – which must certainly have made Panasonic devices less attractive for some potentially interested buyers.

Nevertheless, Xperi ventures into the hotly contested market that is increasingly centralized around a few providers. With its own operating system, Tivo OS, the company wants to primarily target smaller TV manufacturers as well as users who value compactness and simple search options.

Tidy and compact

Tivo OS offers TV manufacturers the opportunity to present themselves prominently on the home page. The competition hardly offers these branding opportunities anymore. With Amazon or Google, the own brands are clearly in the foreground; the TV manufacturer hardly appears with its name, or even not at all. However, Xperi sees this as a crucial point for the manufacturing companies: They also want to be remembered and presented accordingly.

Beyond that, Tivo OS wants to score with its compact interface, which appears very tidy overall. For example, users can specify which streaming services they have subscribed to and are subsequently only shown these. The screen is thus much less cluttered than in Amazon’s solution, for example. For further individualization, it is also possible to hide paid Amazon Prime content. If this option is selected, only those offers that can be used with the existing subscriptions without additional costs are actually displayed and advertised.

Detailed search function

Tivo OS also stands out with a very detailed search function, which can also be used via voice control. Once a search query has been made, it can be specified afterwards, for example. If you have searched for romantic comedies, for example, you can specify that only movies from the 2000s or only movies with a certain actress should appear in the search results. Such restrictions can also be set from the outset when using voice control. For example, a search query can be “Show me romantic comedies from the 2000s with Kate Winslet” – and it is precisely fulfilled. The basis of the detailed search is an impressive stock of metadata that Xperi has collected over the past few years. This even makes it possible to find movies by entering particularly well-known phrases (“I am your father”, “Show me the Money!”).

It is not yet known when exactly Tivo OS will launch in which countries. Xperi has so far only announced that a market launch in a country would only be considered if a good user experience could be guaranteed – i.e. if the integration of all major streaming platforms was possible. Besides Xperi, Roku has also announced its own operating system for TVs.