Among the 74% of U.S. TV households who own a smart TV, 88% of them use the native TVOS in that device to stream video.
And according to Hub Entertainment Research, among that latter group, 56% use Samsung's Tizen OS.
Roku (44%) ranks second, followed by LG's webOS (38%), Amazon Fire TV (29%), Android TV (28%) and Vizio SmartCast (21%).
This data seems to undermine Roku's year-old marketing claim that it's the No. 1 provider of smart TV OS in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. (That assertion is based on units-shipped data.)
In emailing out this Q3 excerpt from its "Quarterly Connected Home Tracker" Tuesday morning, Hub didn't cite its methodology or regional focus. But the research company says it interviews 5,204 U.S. consumers age 16-74 for its annual "connected home" report.
Notably, many smart TV homes appear to be using more than one TVOS. This suggests that many TV households have multiple smart TVs, and the consumers in them watch whatever TVOS powers that particular set.
Also worth noting: As smart TV proliferation grows, the native software operating systems provided by TV manufacturers themselves continue to expand.
As it is in Europe, Samsung has quietly emerged as a dominant gatekeeper to the connected home. This comes after the Korean consumer electronics maker learned a hard lesson with smart phones, having sold hundreds of millions of devices globally, only to watch Google -- the maker of the Android software that powers most of these devices -- recoup most of the monetization.
