• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

I think a lot about what happens on screens, and how advertisers can use them to capture attention and engage an audience. When Fox announced it was buying Roku for $22 billion, I didn’t see it as a content or streaming deal; I thought of it as a real estate deal. Fox had just bought the most valuable piece of real estate in your living room: the operating system that decides what you see when you turn on the television.

That’s the lead story emerging from the last 18 months of media consolidation. The industry keeps describing these deals in the old language of content and distribution. The real prize is the entry point of the screen itself.  That’s where the engagement starts, where the data lives, where the ad gets decided, and where the engagement gets measured.

The ownership of the glass is the story. Roku has the largest operating system footprint in American homes, and now it belongs to Fox. Samsung sells more televisions than anyone, and runs its own ad business on top of Tizen (its proprietary OS). Amazon has Fire TV, Prime Video, and the shopping data to connect them all. LG bought an automatic content recognition company to make webOS smarter about what you watch. Google has Android TV, Chromecast, YouTube TV and YouTube. 

Even Walmart spent $2.3 billion to buy Vizio. Walmart doesn’t want to be in the television hardware business. It seemingly wanted SmartCast, the operating system, so it could connect what you watch on the couch to what you buy in the aisle. That is another step forward, in which a retailer owns the screens where you consume the majority of your content, and your data becomes fuel for its retail business.

The buy side is trying to do the same thing in reverse. The Trade Desk launched its own television operating system, Ventura, earlier this year. The company you pay to be your independent advocate in the market now wants to own the screen it buys through.

Even Pinterest quietly bought a connected-television ad server (TVScientific) to bring its targeting into the living room.

All the major players are converging on the same square of glass, because that glass is a window into consumers’ behavior in the home, and a conduit for delivering the story they want to tell advertisers.

The layers that used to belong to different companies, the screen, the content, the buying platform, the data, and the ruler that measures whether the ad worked, are collapsing into a series of single owners. That consolidates insight and actions, enabling a more streamlined, albeit siloed, set of ad partners.

The most interesting tell is Apple. Apple owns one of the most premium screens in the house, and it built its brand on the promise of no ads. That’s nice, but Apple already sells ads in the App Store, Apple News, and even Apple Maps.  It’s hired television ad executives, and it’s reportedly been preparing a cheaper ad-supported tier while publicly saying it has no plans for one. Even the supposed purist is wiring the building for the day it decides to flip the lights on. If Apple is inching in, you can count on it happening, and happening big.

I don’t believe this consolidation is bad. Some of it will make buying simpler and targeting sharper. It’s just worth calling out the strategy for what it is: land grabs. The companies buying screens aren’t buying shows. They’re buying the right to decide what ads you see, where and when you see them, and how to measure what happens because you saw them.

The next time you turn on your television, notice who greets you before the show ever starts. Somebody paid a great deal of money to be the first thing you see. That was the whole point.