Reclaiming the TV home screen

The TV used to be the domain of telcos and public service broadcasters. Now it is dominated by hyperscalers and OEM platforms. RedSquid exists to reverse that shift.

RedSquid is a tech-led, next-generation TV OS platform that enables telcos and pay‑TV operators to reclaim the TV home screen, regain control of discovery, first‑party data and monetisation, and turn the TV into a primary digital interface for the household. Founded in 2025 by television industry pioneers, we combine three decades of experience in silicon, broadcast standards and operator devices with a platform built for edge AI and cloud-native delivery.

We believe the TV should be your strategic interface – not someone else’s operating system.

From shrinking bundle to primary interface

Over the past decade, value has shifted from the living room to global platforms that sit between operators and their subscribers. The traditional pay‑TV bundle has shrunk into “just another app” on someone else’s home screen, while discovery, data and advertising economics have moved to third‑party TV OS and app stores.

We see a different path. The real opportunity now lies in making the TV the central home interface again – the place where subscribers start their entertainment, communication, smart home and commerce journeys. RedSquid enables operators to present a single, operator‑branded experience on the biggest screen, orchestrating linear TV, streaming, cloud gaming and home services from one interface instead of competing app by app.

In that model, the telco is no longer a tile on a foreign home screen. It becomes the household’s starting point for everything on TV.

Strategic role for telcos

RedSquid is designed to turn TV back into a growth engine, not just a cost of doing business. By owning the home interface, operators control the full TV experience end‑to‑end instead of ceding discovery, data and monetisation to OEMs and global platforms.

This shifts the competitive narrative from “speed and price” to “value and engagement”. Operators can bundle differentiated services, surface their own propositions contextually on the TV, and use first‑party viewing data to drive smarter upgrades and cross‑sell – all within an experience that looks and feels like their brand, not a generic OS.

TV becomes an asset that supports ARPU growth, retention and data strategy, rather than a shrinking line on the P&L.

The value RedSquid unlocks

RedSquid focuses on the four levers that matter most to a telco P&L: revenue, retention, data and experience.

• Revenue: Financed TVs, incremental UI monetisation and privacy‑centric advertising unlock new income streams on top of subscription. Typical deployments can support 15–20% bundle ARPU uplift through a mix of higher‑value bundles, in‑UI promotion and new ad formats.
• Retention: Long‑term financed TV plans, such as four‑year terms, create a lock‑in dynamic similar to mobile handset contracts. Operators that fully integrate the TV into their converged bundles can see 25–35% improvements in retention across those households.
• Data: Operators own audience insights outright, with no hyperscaler in the middle. TV usage becomes high‑quality first‑party data that feeds segmentation, offer design and customer‑value strategies across the whole base.
• Experience: A seamless, branded UX rivals leading TV OS platforms while preserving full access to major SVODs and app ecosystems. Subscribers get the choice they expect, but within a coherent, operator‑controlled environment from power‑on to content playback.

RedSquid’s role is to let operators capture these gains while staying in control of the interface, the roadmap and the data.

Three decades of shipping television

RedSquid’s founders have spent the last thirty years in the parts of the television industry that quietly move the medium forward – silicon, middleware, broadcast standards and the operator integrations that put everything on the screen. They have watched television evolve from fixed channel grids and proprietary set‑top boxes into app‑driven streaming, cloud platforms and global operating systems, and have been hands‑on for many of the major shifts along the way.

• Digital terrestrial broadcasting: Team members helped launch DVB‑T in the late 1990s, moving millions of European households from analogue terrestrial to the digital streams that still carry most broadcast television today.
• The global rise of smart TVs: Senior leadership roles at MStar Semiconductor in the early 2000s – the SoC supplier whose chips powered a large share of connected TVs and set‑top boxes shipped across Europe, Asia and the Americas through the 2000s and 2010s, before MStar merged into MediaTek.
• Broadcast and connectivity standards: Direct involvement in DVB‑T2, DVB‑I, ATSC 3.0, HbbTV and OpApp as they rolled out across Europe, North America and Asia – the plumbing that lets a single screen carry linear, on‑demand and interactive content together.
• Operator‑supplied smart TVs: Design and launch of early operator‑branded TVs in the 2020s, moving telcos beyond the rented set‑top box era and onto panels they can finance, update and personalise over the air.

With RedSquid, the same team is now applying that experience to on‑device AI, cognitive television and an operator‑controlled UI layer for the next decade of the living room.

Why RedSquid exists: digital sovereignty for TV

Europe is losing control of the living room. Hyperscalers are on track to dominate the TV OS landscape and, as they do, they disintermediate pay‑TV operators’ current strategies, whether based on set‑top boxes or apps. Every time a viewer searches, receives a recommendation or sees an ad, the resulting data tends to flow to hyperscalers in the US or Asia – not to European operators, creators or households.

Digital sovereignty has become a top EU strategic priority. We believe that for operators, sovereignty in TV starts with the operating system that controls the home entertainment experience. If Europe wants to be sovereign, it needs digital products it actually owns – and in TV, that product is TV OS.

RedSquid’s mission is to help Europe’s pay‑TV operators claim back digital sovereignty in TV by acting together, not alone.

Four pillars of TV sovereignty

1) Open TV OS standards and federated alliances

The problem: Proprietary TV stacks from hyperscalers lock operators into walled gardens. Once a single OS becomes the default, operators lose meaningful control of their customer relationships, their UI, their monetisation and their data.

The RedSquid approach: Build a federated operator alliance around open standards and shared infrastructure that can match hyperscaler scale. Multiple operators pool their reach, share development costs and maintain interoperability across markets, so no single vendor controls the stack or extracts the data.

Federation, not fragmentation, is how European operators compete with hyperscaler‑scale infrastructure and subscription footprints.

2) Privacy‑first edge AI for TV OS

The problem: Traditional cloud AI centralises every search, recommendation and viewing signal in remote data centres, creating mass data flows into hyperscaler databases and making privacy an afterthought.

The RedSquid approach: Run intelligence on the device itself. Recommendations, voice and visual search, content discovery and personalisation execute locally on the TV or set‑top box, with only anonymised metadata – if anything – leaving the home.

This keeps viewing data inside the household, aligns with GDPR expectations and removes the data‑extraction model that underpins hyperscaler dominance in TV.

3) Critical scale through telco alliances

The problem: No single European pay‑TV operator has enough subscribers to rival major global streaming and device platforms. Fighting alone means losing content, advertising and technology battles over time.

The RedSquid approach: Pool scale through alliances such as ESTIA and other sovereign tech coalitions. When multiple operators combine their subscriber bases, purchasing power and engineering resources, they reach critical mass to negotiate better content, invest in AI infrastructure and build European streaming and TV platforms that genuinely compete.

Sovereignty is not isolation – it is the ability to act at meaningful scale.

4) Backing Europe‑based AI startups in TV

The problem: Hyperscalers either acquire the most promising startups or out‑innovate them from the cloud, consolidating power. European AI startups working on interactive TV, virtual product placement, advanced advertising and discovery struggle to scale or end up inside non‑European platforms.

The RedSquid approach: Direct EU funding and operator demand towards European AI companies building TV innovation. Operators integrate these capabilities into their TV OS, creating a pipeline of European‑owned IP and features that strengthen the sovereign stack instead of leaking into foreign ecosystems.

This creates a virtuous cycle: startups gain funding and distribution, operators get cutting‑edge features without building everything in‑house, and Europe retains ownership of strategic technology.

The bottom line

Digital sovereignty in TV is not about protectionism. It is about empowerment – giving households control over their viewing data, giving operators the tools to compete on equal terms with hyperscalers, and giving European content creators a platform that does not extract their value by default.

RedSquid exists because Europe has catching up to do, but that gap can be closed through concrete action: federating around open TV OS standards, running AI on‑device, pooling scale through alliances and backing European AI startups. If operators move now, they can reclaim the living room before hyperscalers lock in the TV OS layer and permanently disintermediate the set‑top box model.

The question is not whether European TV sovereignty is possible. It is whether operators will act in time – and what they will choose to run on their most important screen when they do.