As part of our upcoming series of Special Reports on the Emerging Smart TV Ecosystem, we sat down with Raghu Kodige, CEO at LG Ads, to discuss why owning both the hardware and the software makes smart TVs a perfect vehicle for content discovery, something that benefits programmers and viewers alike.

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RAGHU KODIGE: In order to discover connected TV content, you really need to start using the smart TV functionality. which was not happening before. Even though three years back, a lot of people had smart TVs, they used it more like a display rather than a smart TV. But in the last 18 months, I think that shift has taken place significantly where people use these TVs to actually discover content. And with that, these sort of TVs became more prominent in how people are using them. 

I think the second shift that happened was a lot of new streaming services, paid streaming services, got introduced and people realized that they cannot be paying for all of those. So there is a huge appetite for advertising supported premium content, which is where the AVOD services and the FAST channels became more and more prominent. 

And who best to bring all this together than the OEMs themselves, because they are building the interfaces. They are understanding what consumers are asking for. With ACR embedded, they actually know what people are watching much better than anybody else. 

So all these factors, if you put them together now, you suddenly see why smart TV OEMs have gotten a lot of interest, because it allows them to serve consumers better as well as get a new revenue stream. which was not there before. 

It used to be just sell the TV and forget about it. But now you have a perpetual revenue stream that they can generate by being the most prominent entertainment device in the living room.