PASADENA, Calif.—A new report from tvScientific finds performance TV is the No. 1 channel for marketers’ ad investment, accounting for 24% of total media spending and tied with social media as the most effective channel for delivering results.

The “2026 State of Performance TV Report” finds that budgets are shifting away from YouTube, Meta and TikTok and that artificial intelligence is turning television into an always-on experimentation engine for marketers, allowing them to accelerate ad targeting, creative development and optimization.

Performance TV is an advertising model that combines the reach and impact of traditional TV with the precise targeting, real-time data and measurable outcomes of digital platforms, through the use of connected TV platforms, including Roku and Apple TV.

“Performance TV is no longer an experiment,” tvScientific CEO and Co-Founder Jason Fairchild said. “It has matured into one of the most reliable and accountable growth channels in modern marketing.

“Performance marketers are no longer testing TV at the margins,” he continued. “They are moving the budget to make room for it and putting it at the center of their media strategies. Performance TV delivers the scale of television with the precision, transparency, accountability and fully transparent ROAS [return on ad spend] measurement marketers need to drive real business outcomes.”

The report also found:

• Performance TV delivers full-funnel value, driving sales growth and brand lift.
• More than half of markers cite measurement clarity as critical to success.
• 77% of small and midsized businesses run performance TV campaigns.

“Performance TV is now foundational to modern marketing strategies,” Fairchild said. “It delivers the accountability marketers have always wanted from television with the scale and impact they still need.”

The “2026 State of Performance TV Report” analyzes channel effectiveness, budget movement, AI adoption, transparency expectations, and how performance TV is reshaping growth strategies.

tvScientific offers a performance advertising platform built for performance TV.

TV broadcasters are moving at an accelerating pace down the NextGen TV track,
well ahead of any opportunity to leverage ATSC 3.0 at mass audience scale.

Propelled by surging connected TV (CTV) penetration, the popularity of free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) and AI-enhanced workflows and monetization touching uniquely localized output to every type of device, station owners are discovering OTA conversion to 3.0 is far less of a barrier to getting where they want to go than it appeared at the outset of the next-gen transition. As E.W. Scripps President/CEO Adam Symson put it at the recent NAB Show New York, “We’re looking for every opportunity out there on an avenue we’ve never been on before.”

Fast-Growing
From multiple perspectives, i.e., the scale of CTV penetration, consumer viewing behavior, the pace of local TV ad spending and the importance of local TV, is as important to broadcasters as the connected television set. CTV penetration has hit 90% in the U.S., according to Statista, led by smart TVs at 68%, as measured by Parks Associates, with the rest connected via streaming media players.

An international study released in 2025 by Ampere Analysis reported that smart TVs—with 90 minutes of average daily viewing time, 27% higher than four years ago—consume 31% of internet users’ total content viewing time, the most of any device category. According to Nielsen, 82% of broadband-only U.S. households, meaning those not using MVPD or OTA services, are watching TV stations’ output on their CTVs.

Some of that viewing stems from the inclusion of linear broadcast channels in OTT bundles, but FAST channels have become the dominant means of delivering station groups’ expanded news and other local content to CTVs. Gracenote, Nielsen’s content-navigation unit, recently reported sports and news channels on the real-time broadcast side of FAST programming are now the platform’s second- and third-most prominent content categories, respectively, collectively accounting for 21% of all channels carried by the 10 leading aggregators it tracks.

FAST allows stations to deliver their most valuable locally produced content without the schedule limitations imposed by their linear channel lineups, noted Meredith McGinn, NBCUniversal Local executive vice president of digital networks and original production.

“We’re delivering news all the time on FAST, not just five to six on broadcast TV,” she said at NAB Show New York, noting that all NBCU O&Os have FAST channels with a good deal of additional coverage given to local events and personalities.

Not surprisingly, while local advertising on linear TV is projected to remain on a negative trend line, excluding the political advertising bumps anticipated for 2026 and 2028, CTV local ad spend is heading in the opposite direction. Speaking at NAB Show New York, Rick Ducey, managing director at BIA Advisory Services, said core (nonpolitical) ad spending on local TV dropped from $14.9 billion in 2024 to $14.3 billion in 2025, with a further decline to $13.9 billion expected this year. Meanwhile, the CTV share hit $2.2 billion in 2025, matching the local TV ad take in the MVPD market, he said.

Clearly, broadcasters are working in a vastly altered landscape than when the
NextGen TV strategy was formulated. Looking at the year ahead, they can operate in this environment with much-improved skill sets compared to where things stood a year ago, starting with their ability to reach digitally focused segments of TV viewing audiences with an expanded lineup of localized live news and other content that can’t be found anywhere else.

Speaking to investors on Nexstar Media Group’s Q3 earnings call in November, chairman and CEO Perry Sook cited the CTV impact on his company’s fortunes. The fastest­growing segment of Nexstar’s take from political spending in 2024 was CTV, Sook noted, and that’s likely to be the case in 2026. “We have rolled out CTV applications in the vast majority of our marketplaces and are producing alternative programming to fill the hours on those apps,” he said.

Follow the Advertisers
Of course, taking advantage of the CTV trends isn’t just an opportunity—it’s an imperative, given the pace at which ad dollars are flowing into the platform. FreeWheel, noting in a 2025 first-half marketing report that CTVs account for 85% of total streamed video ad views in the U.S., said stateside CTV ad spending was on course to reach $32.57 billion in 2025, with projections showing CTV surpassing traditional TV ad spending by 2028.

There are many reasons for this beyond the sheer audience numbers, starting with the fact, cited by FreeWheel, that 70% of marketers regard precise audience targeting, now accounting for 80% of the inventory, as CTV’s biggest advantage. As a result, CTV advertising ROI is averaging 4.5 times the level reached with linear TV, FreeWheel reported. Technology—especially advances combining programmatic selling and buying support with the use of AI—is playing a major role.

Moreover, as Amazon Web Services (AWS) is demonstrating with its In The Game (ITG) platform, streamed content distribution to CTVs creates compelling new ways to monetize sports, news and other live content through personalized ad messaging without the disruptive intrusion on viewing experiences common to traditional TV advertising.

“ITG is driving a fundamental shift in CTV monetization strategies by enabling nonintrusive advertising formats that maintain viewer engagement while maximizing revenue opportunities,” said Stephanie Lone, global leader for solutions architecture in media entertainment games and sports at AWS.

ITG utilizes Server-Guided Ad Insertion (SGAI) across all major CTV platforms to turn advertising into a value-added experience by programmatically placing messaging in formats like L-Band ads, split-screen ads, shoppable overlays and pause ads, Lone said. The platform, sold to AWS cloud users through the AWS Marketplace, leverages the continuous contextual and messaging opportunity analysis of generative AI models supported by Amazon Bedrock in conjunction with intelligent ad triggering and placement orchestration, live media ingestion, processing and packaging, and other functionalities available through AWS.

AI-powered insights “are enabling CTV and OTT providers to maximize high-value moments by monetizing when viewers are actively engaged and watching the screen, using nonlinear formats during high-attention periods without interrupting the experience and reserving traditional linear ads for naturally less exciting moments,” Lone said, noting research shows such strategies produce a 50% gain in user engagement compared to traditional TV advertising.

Such results are to be expected when broadcasters can “transform content into dynamic marketplaces, where, for example, cooking shows can sell kitchen gadgets, home renovation programs enable furniture purchases and automotive shows become interactive car showrooms, creating entirely new business models.”

Local Ad Exposure
No platform provider has gone further than Roku in affording station owners the ability to capitalize on local TV advertising through FAST channel placements. Noting that viewer content discovery “is one of the key benefits of our platform,” Roku Head of Content Lisa Holme said the company drives awareness of hundreds of locally targeted channels that serve viewers “the same live content they’d see on traditional TV in their location.”

The benefits TV stations gain with the local ad exposure that comes with this support is abetted by the fact that Roku advertising, as Holme put it, “is becoming more and more performant.”

Having invested in partnerships and innovations that support “advanced audience targeting, real-time data, and programmatic ad buying,” Roku believes “this is a key differentiator and reason why marketers will continue to move traditional TV advertising dollars to CTV,” Holme said.

Along with the experience broadcasters have gained generating local news and other content for more exposure via FAST channels and other digital feeds, they’ve benefited from vendor support that has made channel creation for digital viewing on CTVs far more efficient than it was before the advent of FAST.

Rethinking Playout
“FAST pushed our traditional customers to rethink the way they were designing playout operations,” Imagine Communications Chief Revenue Officer Glodina Lostanlen said. Citing the unified ground and cloud resource management enabled by Imagine’s Aviator Automation and Orchestrator platforms, Lostanlen added: “Our customers don’t differentiate the quality of viewers anymore whether they’re watching FAST or traditional linear TV. They need to operate a FAST channel and a linear traditional channel in the same way with live playout at five 9s quality.”

With live local news and other coverage proving out as a big audience draw for FAST channels, dealmaking and new amalgams of broadcasters’ output on FAST are proceeding at a dizzying pace. The former VuIT FAST platform has been revamped into Zeam, which is offering content from nearly 300 local TV stations, covering close to 80% of DMAs, including the NewsON aggregation of local newscasts acquired from Sinclair in August.

LG’s recent launch of News Hub brought in dozens of Fox LiveNOW and Allen Media Group Local Now FAST station channels, along with many other local station feeds. And apps supporting local TV access are abundantly available for Android TV and Google TV users and through the Google Play store. In Roku’s case, Holme noted, along with supporting hundreds of FAST channels carrying individual stations’ live content, the company’s Live TV offering features FAST channels from every major national broadcaster.

The notable big station group bucking this trend is Sinclair, which, with the NewsON deal and sale of the STIRR collection of live channels two years ago, has shifted away from live FAST broadcasting, although some of its stations are still in the game with participation in LG’s News Hub local-station lineup. But the station group is all in on fulfilling what Sinclair Chief Operating Officer and President of Local Media Rob Weisbord described at NAB Show New York as the “need to be hyperlocal” through digital feeds served over NextGen TV outlets. With ATSC 3.0, “we have something to make stations vibrant again,” he said, adding, “I’m very bullish.”

Meanwhile, the local TV explosion into monetization over CTV connections has already produced the biggest change in the local TV business model since the transition from analog broadcasting. NextGen TV will be emerging in the years ahead to ice an already well-baked cake.

SOUTHPORT, Conn.—Main Street Sports Group has announced that the FanDuel Sports Network app is now available directly on Vizio and on smart TVs with Vizio OS. The FanDuel Sports Network app features live and on-demand local sports programming.

The distribution agreement marks a significant step forward in Main Street Sports Group's direct-to-consumer (DTC) strategy for the network, the company said.

It adds to the growing list of FanDuel Sports Network devices partners, including iOS, Android, Apple TV, Android TV, Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV, Google TV, Roku, Samsung TV, Xbox, and Xfinity's X1, Xumo TV, Xumo Stream Box and Flex.

“As we continue to evolve FanDuel Sports Network into a dynamic, fan-first local sports media platform, our partnership with Vizio is another meaningful milestone in expanding accessibility and fueling our direct-to-consumer growth,” Main Street Sports Group Chief Revenue Officer Eric Ratchman said.

Customers can launch the FanDuel Sports Network app directly from the Vizio Home Screen and access programming based on their regional availability.

NEW YORK—DoubleVerify has launched a streaming TV offering designed to give advertisers greater transparency, control and efficiency across their streaming TV investments.

DoubleVerify, an ad-verification company, is leveraging unique, licensed data from IMDb to fuel AI-driven classification of streaming content. Additional capabilities are planned for launch in early 2026, DoubleVerify said.

Advertisers are demanding stronger safeguards to ensure their campaigns are delivered in premium environments and avoid content that doesn’t align with their brand values, according to DoubleVerify. To address this issue, the company will launch several new products, including Verified Streaming TV prebid segments and measurement and “Do Not Air” automation.

“As streaming TV grows, advertisers are contending with new challenges—from opaque, resold inventory and questionable ad placements wasting billions in media spend, to a lack of automation that inhibits contextual alignment,” DoubleVerify general manager of connected TV Todd Randak said. “Our new Streaming TV products directly address these pain points, giving advertisers the ability to verify media quality and maximize their investments across devices and platforms.”

Verified Streaming TV prebid segments and measurement are powered by DV’s AI-driven content classification technology. This capability helps advertisers verify that their campaigns run in premium streaming environments that deliver the quality and engagement of traditional TV, the company said.

With Verified Streaming TV, advertisers can:

• Align impressions with premium streaming TV player environments across leading programmatic platforms, including The Trade Desk, Teads, StackAdapt, Microsoft Invest and Index Exchange.
• Verify that ads appear in branded players alongside high-quality media—not extension networks––and measure the scale and quality of those placements.
• Maximize media investments and prevent overspending on non-streaming TV inventory.

“Do Not Air” automation, integrated into DV’s AI-powered prebid Authentic Brand Suitability, helps advertisers avoid unsuitable content before a bid is placed. “Do Not Air” automation modernizes this process, which previously was manually managed with spreadsheets and emails, with intelligent automation. This capability automates list activation and enforcement across streaming environments.

With “Do Not Air” automation, advertisers can:

• Eliminate manual list management while maintaining precise control over content alignment.
• Curate streaming inventory leveraging DV normalized data across genres and maturity ratings.
• Activate lists at the point of transaction using a single segment ID aligned with their DV Authentic Brand Suitability settings.

Advertisers will have early access to “Do Not Air” automation for programmatic open market and PMP buys through The Trade Desk, with more platforms to follow soon.

Leveraging IMDb data, DV is enriching streaming contextual insights as well as popularity insights. To enhance DV’s AI-powered analysis and classification of streaming TV content, DV is drawing on unique IMDb data, including Parents Guides, Meters and Ratings. This lets DoubleVerify deliver more granular and precise contextual insights to help global brands improve media quality.

DV’s Verified Streaming TV and “Do Not Air” automation offerings are key components of DV’s Media AdVantage Platform.

More information is available on the company’s website.

RESTON, Va.—Comscore’s new “2025 State of Streaming” report highlights the growing importance of ad-supported streaming services and FAST channels, with data showing big gains across the board for those services.

According to the report, total hours watched across major free ad supported streaming services grew by 43% year-over-year this August compared to August 2024.

Ad-supported tiers have also gained popularity across major subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services. Netflix now sees 45% of total household viewing hours on its ad-supported tier, up from 34% just one year ago.

“Consumers are navigating crowded streaming options with the clear intention that they want value, simplicity, and content that’s easy to access,” said Jen Carton, Comscore’s senior vice president of product management. “This year’s State of Streaming reflects that shift and shows how FAST and ad-supported options are meeting those needs in a way that’s culturally resonant and commercially viable. For Comscore, our mission is to illuminate this transformation and help the industry understand what’s next.”

Overall, connected TV streaming in internet-enabled homes reached 96.4 million households, an increase of 849,000 year-over-year, the new Comscore study indicated.

Time spent streaming rose to 13.9 billion hours, a 6% increase year-over-year. The average household watched content from 6.9 streaming services, reflecting modest growth as the market reaches maturity, Comscore reported.

With households now streaming video for nearly 5 hours per day, it has become the default viewing experience for millions of Americans, the researchers said. For many households, creator-driven video sits alongside premium series, sports and films as everyday viewing. Platforms like YouTube are no longer viewed as “separate categories” but as integral parts of the streaming diet. As the report points out, “more than half of U.S. households stream YouTube content monthly for free.”

The full State of Streaming 2025 report, which explores the trends shaping the future of content, advertising, and technology across screens, is available here.

NEW YORK—In a landmark agreement to overtake the burgeoning connected TV (CTV) advertising market, Amazon Ads and Roku today announced a new integration that gives advertisers access to the largest authenticated CTV footprint in the U.S. exclusively through Amazon DSP.

The new collaboration, according to the two companies, will deliver logged-in reach to an estimated 80 million U.S. CTV households, representing more than 80% of those homes, according to Comscore data. The exclusive partnership will connect viewers tuned into The Roku Channel, Prime Video, and other CTV streaming services on Roku and Fire TV operating systems; as well as streaming services from Disney, Fox, Paramount, Tubi and Warner Bros Discovery; and all premium publishers.

Early tests of the integration showed that advertisers reached 40% more unique viewers with the same budget and reduced how often the same person saw an ad by nearly 30%, enabling advertisers to benefit from 3x more value from their ad spend, the companies claimed.

The CTV advertising market is the fastest-growing segment of TV advertising, expected to top $33.5 billion in 2025; however, the majority of ads are still viewed on linear TV. Prior to the announcement, Roku already had the largest share of CTV devices on the market at 38%, more than twice that of Amazon’s Fire TV platform (18%), and far ahead of Apple (13%), Samsung (12%), LG (5%) and Vizio (5%).

But competitors are not sitting still; in April, Samsung launched its Creative Canvas interactive ad service, the first TV manufacturer to offer an in-house interactive ad format. Also in April, LG Ad Solutions announced a new integration with Amazon Publisher Services (APS) that enables marketers to access expanded advertising inventory on LG Channels, LG’s free streaming service available on all LG Smart TVs.

(Read: CTV: TV's Latest Gold Rush)

In addition to giving Roku and Amazon a leg up on competitors Google, Disney and Comcast, the companies said the joint venture will unlock an addressable CTV audience at such unprecedented scale, that it "will drive improved performance, planning, optimization, and measurement for all advertisers, further enabling CTV as a true performance solution."

“Our exclusive partnership with Roku is a giant leap for advertisers, bringing best-in-class planning, audience precision, and performance to TV advertising,” said Paul Kotas, senior vice president, Amazon Ads. “The collaboration enables agencies and brands that use Amazon DSP to benefit from greater efficiency and higher performance. We’re removing the guesswork to provide advertisers with unprecedented capabilities and delivering performance in ways that simply weren't possible before. By combining our technologies, advertisers can now drive full-funnel campaign outcomes—from awareness through conversion—while eliminating media waste across Amazon and Roku streaming audiences.”

The integration utilizes a custom identity resolution service, allowing Amazon DSP to recognize logged-in viewers across the Roku OS and devices in the U.S. This exclusive capability enables advertisers to reach the same viewer deterministically across different streaming channels and devices, providing more accurate audience targeting and measurement than previously possible, according to the companies.

“For years, Roku has been committed to delivering performance-driven, open, and interoperable solutions that provide visibility and accountability for advertisers. Our partnership with Amazon strengthens this mission, as Amazon DSP exemplifies these principles,” Roku Media President Charlie Collier said. “This collaboration delivers a unified, future-ready solution at an unprecedented scale, one designed to drive measurable outcomes by unlocking performance across CTV. With nearly half of all TV streaming time in the U.S. happening on Roku, and the power and depth of Amazon in retail and beyond, together we’re uniquely positioned to prove performance and differentiate DSP offerings for our shared advertisers and marketers.”

The new solution will be available in the U.S. to all advertisers that use Amazon DSP by the fourth quarter.

MENLO PARK, Calif.—Streaming channel provider Future Today has launched its Future Today Marketplace, a new connected TV (CTV) advertising platform that offers more than 1.5 billion privacy-safe, ID-less yet addressable impressions from Future Today's owned and operated channels, including Fawesome, FilmRise and HappyKids.

“The streaming advertising industry is experiencing its next transformative era,” Future Today Co-Founder Vikrant Mathur said. “As an innovator in CTV advertising and technology for nearly two decades, the Future Today Marketplace represents the next frontier in CTV advertising offering privacy-safe, brand-safe premium content in a transparent marketplace that advertisers can trust to deliver measurable outcomes.”

Key features of the marketplace include:

• Next-Generation Audience Targeting: With legacy identifiers like IP addresses under increasing scrutiny, traditional device graph methods are compromised. The Future Today Marketplace employs advanced, ID-less targeting methodologies, leveraging first-party data and PII-agnostic solutions for privacy-compliant targeting, measurement and attribution with solutions such as IRIS.TV, which has already generated substantial scale and results with its contextual targeting solution
• Transparency: A common pain point among advertisers is the lack of show-level transparency. The Future Today Marketplace solves this by masking PII and offering unparalleled visibility into brand-suitable content, with data granularity down to individual programs, ensuring advertisers have the insights needed to drive effective campaigns.
• Access to Brand-Safe Inventory: ID-less buying unlocks a high-quality, previously inaccessible audience in family programming, delivering incremental reach beyond traditional TV. This complements and bolsters Future Today’s substantial scale across its general entertainment services.
• Seamless Integration With Adtech: The Future Today Marketplace is interoperable with leading CTV ad tech platforms such as Magnite, PubMatic and Index Exchange, allowing brand marketers to simply transact via preferred DSP or direct IO to maximize performance across Future Today’s CTV supply.
• Measurable Outcomes: Built on robust first-party data signals, Future Today Marketplace partners with leading advanced TV measurement providers such as EDO, iSpotTV, NCSolutions and others, to demonstrate and deliver results; ROI, brand lift, etc.

“The tools are in place for CTV to fulfill on its unique ability to combine the impact of Sight, Sound and Motion with the precision of digital buying to impact and measure upper, mid and lower funnel metrics for brand marketers,” said Tim Ware, vice president of Future Today’s Marketplace. “Future Today Marketplace, elevates the value of our CTV inventory, across our popular services, by incorporating best-in-class technology, to deliver an end-to-end solution to our buyers that empower our advertisers with transparent, privacy compliant data and insights necessary to drive their KPI’s in this rapidly evolving landscape.”

Connected TVs have revolutionized video consumption and transformed the digital advertising landscape. And as we’ve seen over recent years, an increasing number of streaming providers and broadcasters are turning to advertising to support growth.

However, to maximize this revenue stream personalization of ad content is key. When ads are tailored to align with the viewer’s preferences and behavior, they resonate more deeply, driving higher engagement and conversion rates. This benefits broadcasters by strengthening their appeal to advertisers, who naturally want maximum return on their investments. Yet personalization in advertising remains a huge challenge.

Ad personalization on CTVs relies heavily on the use of tracking cookies, but growing privacy concerns, regulatory shifts and a widespread aversion of third-party cookies are making this model unworkable. And so, the industry needs a new advertising strategy—one that respects user privacy while still delivering effective ads. Many are turning to contextual advertising as a potential solution. While this advertising model is itself not new, what is new, is the use of AI to significantly enhance it, making it much more powerful and effective.

Unlocking Contextual Advertising’s Potential
Rather than relying on personal data, contextual advertising works by tailoring the ad to match the content. As the name suggests, contextual advertising, it’s all about context. By matching ads to the content being viewed, contextual advertising aims to deliver an enjoyable ad experience that feels natural to the viewer.

For instance, if the viewer is watching sports content, then ads showing sports clothing brands might be selected. This alignment enhances the likelihood of viewer engagement, because the ads are relevant to the immediate context of the content they are watching. Importantly, this strategy also aligns with evolving privacy expectations, allowing broadcasters to provide personalized experiences without intrusive data collection.

While contextual advertising can be effective on its own, AI takes it to the next level by analyzing video scenes in incredible detail. AI can be used to identify key elements such as mood, setting and pace, as well as objects in the frame, to create a precise match between ads and content on the screen at any given moment.

For example, if a scene shows a person on a sandy beach heading to the sea to surf, with the power of AI, contextual advertising tools may suggest advertising for surfboards, watersports equipment, beach wear, and outdoor adventure activity vacations. Or if the scene features a person chopping fresh vegetables while preparing to cook a meal, suggested advertising may include kitchen knife sets, fresh vegetable delivery services, or healthy meal subscription service kits. Similarly, if the content shows a person practicing yoga, contextual advertising tools may suggest ads on yoga equipment, fitness apparel, wellness supplements, or healthy living and wellness apps and services.

Engagement = Conversion
The reasoning behind this approach is that if the viewer is already watching content that features the things being advertised, or similar, it’s reasonable to assume that they may appeal to or interest the viewer to some degree. If ads are delivered that the viewer is more likely to be interested in and engage with, this leads to higher rates of conversion.

Additionally, while standard contextual advertising works to identify objects in the scene, AI can analyze the content at a much deeper level. It can help determine what mood the viewer is in so that ads can be placed that they will be most receptive to at that moment. This enables streaming providers to select ads that resonate with a scene’s emotional tone, creating a more immersive and engaging experience for the viewer.

Pairing contextual advertising technology with prediction tools can also help video providers to optimize ad placement for maximum impact. These types of tools can measure conversion rates enabling video providers to track viewer engagement patterns to identify when viewers are most attentive or most likely to convert.

Shaping the Future of CTV Advertising
By incorporating AI into contextual advertising strategies, broadcasters can deliver hyper-personalized ads that have higher relevance to the viewer, at precisely the right moment when the viewer is most likely to take action. This combination of relevance and precision is reshaping the way media companies approach advertising, ensuring an enhanced viewing experience, improved conversion rates for advertisers, and increased ad revenue for service providers.

This approach offers broadcasters a solution to a major challenge: how to deliver impactful, personalized ads without relying on personal tracking data. As such, AI-powered contextual advertising has the potential to transform CTV advertising, and it is only going to get better as AI technology evolves and improves.

As the reliance on advertising to support growth intensifies across the media landscape, the adoption of AI-driven advertising solutions will become a critical differentiator. Broadcasters and video providers who invest in these technologies now will be well-positioned to lead the industry into a new era of smarter, more effective advertising.

LONDON—DPG Media and Brand Metrics have partnered on a connected-TV audience measurement solution that enables users of DPG Media’s VTM GO streaming platform to measure the brand-lift effect of advertising campaigns in real time, without traditional research panels.

“Connected TV combines the impact of television with the precision of digital advertising,” DPG Media Chief Digital Officer Stefan Havik said. “With our new interactive brand lift surveying product, DPG Media allows advertisers and agencies to better understand the impact of this channel, making it more accountable than ever before.”

The solution uses a custom VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) ad tag, integrated into the video player, to deliver brand-lift measurement in real time within the CTV environment, DPG Media said.

The new approach measures the frequency and time of campaign exposure and then delivers a single question directly to users’ CTV device, enabling instant response via remote, DPG said.

Each measurement delivers campaign results across four key brand outcomes: awareness, consideration, preference and action intent, the company said.

"Having measured over 40,000 campaigns, Brand Metrics has always been committed to proving the impact of digital advertising on brands,” Brand Metrics CEO Anders Lithner said. “We are therefore delighted to announce this exciting partnership with DPG Media, proving that broadcasters and media owners can now also measure CTV campaigns directly on the device, thereby helping us move towards a more transparent and addressable ecosystem."

More information is available on the DPG Media website.

Walmart said it has finalized its acquisition of Irvine, California-based TV maker Vizio. The $2.3 billion deal, first disclosed in February, is designed to boost Walmart’s presence in the growing connected TV market, which mines viewer data to enhance targeted advertising.

CTV is among the fastest-growing advertising sectors in the U.S. with ad spend expected to grow by 22.4% globally in 2024 to $25.9 billion, according to GroupM’s midyear forecast.

As part of the deal, Walmart acquires Vizio’s SmartCast OS, which the retailer said will accelerate growth of its Walmart Connect ad business. While it plans to integrate Vizio’s products and OS into its TV product line over time, the retailer has not indicated whether it will rebrand the TVs under its Onn consumer electronics brand.

Founded in 2002, Vizio’s growing device ecosystem and its smart TV operating system, SmartCast, have amassed over 19 million active accounts, growing approximately 400% since 2018. Vizio says its direct advertiser relationships include many of the Fortune 500. Vizio’s Platform+ segment, which consists largely of its advertising business, now accounts for all the company’s gross profit, according to the company.

“Vizio offers great products at great prices that customers love. They’ve always put customers at the center of their business—and that’s core to Walmart’s values and the omnichannel experiences we’re excited to roll out,” Walmart U.S. executive vice president and chief growth officer Seth Dallaire said. “Vizio has also expertly changed their business over time, like building and quickly scaling a profitable advertising business. Pairing it with Walmart Connect will be impactful and allow us to invest in our business even further on behalf of our customers.”

Added Vizio founder and CEO William Wang: “Since the inception of Vizio, our mission has been to provide incredible value, great technology, and award-winning innovation. Today, with the tremendous number of resources from Walmart, we will continue to further accelerate that mission around the best home entertainment experience.”

In the film “The Matrix,” the character Neo is given the choice of taking the blue pill or the red pill. If he swallows the blue pill, the perception of life as it is goes on unaltered. If he takes the red pill, though, the veneer of security is ripped away and the reality of life is revealed. TV decision-makers are facing a blue pill, red pill moment.

If planners take the red pill, they’ll enter a world where watching TV is a niche activity among Gen Z, while TikTok and YouTube has become their TV. MrBeast is bigger than any streamed or cable soap or drama—much bigger.

Did Gen Z ever really fall in love with broadcast and cable TV? The body of evidence suggests it didn’t. Almost two years ago, research by Hub found 13-to-24-year-olds spend just 17% of their time viewing TV shows compared to those 35 years or older, who spend 43% of their total screen time watching TV. It found the older demographic spent about a fifth of their time gaming or looking at “nonpremium” videos on social platforms, while 13-to-24-year-olds spent twice as much time gaming and watching videos on platforms like YouTube.

Now it is YouTube, not Netflix or any other streaming service, that wins more TV viewing across all age groups. According to recent Nielsen viewing data, YouTube accounts for more than 10% of all adult viewing in the United States. All broadcast accounts for 22.6%, all cable 26.1%, all streaming is 41% (of which Netflix is the nearest single challenger with 7.9%) while Prime Video and Disney+ trail with 3.6% and 2.5%, respectively.

Data published by Hub in September showed that two-thirds of viewers turn to an online source for watching TV first. Only 26% of viewers say they default to an MVPD set-top box for viewing.

We’re due another detailed breakdown of Gen Z’s TV consumption patterns soon and you can expect the divergence in TV viewing styles to continue. However, we can already see that 60% of Gen Z viewers watch SVOD on a regular basis, compared to 13.3% for cable and 8.6% for broadcast, and they could switch in numbers to AVOD alternatives as subscription costs mount up.

This pattern of change is more or less an international phenomenon. In the United Kingdom, for example, the media regulator Ofcom’s latest viewing analysis for 2024 reported less than half of 16-to-24-year-olds watch broadcast TV in a typical week.

And yet, when it comes to the TV advertising business, the industry acts as if nothing has happened. I’d argue it is time to change how we think about TV in two ways.

Firstly, isn’t it time to recognize that as far as Gen Z, and to a larger degree millennials, are concerned, YouTube and similar platforms are TV? The fact that it mixes social content with TV and film production is surely irrelevant. Vested interest in the production world—which, of course, means TV channel brands—may attempt to promote a form of prejudice against user-generated and influencer-created video, but ultimately the audience will decide. And market power is shifting to younger viewers.

Influencers that produce some of the most entertaining content on video social platforms would argue that their TV product is as valid as any TV drama. And their production values are rising. But TV brands are increasingly using VSPs as a gateway to their product.

Social media’s hold over Gen Z’s attention directly influences what TV they do watch. According to a recent study by CableTV.com, 95% of Gen Z viewers age 18-24 decide whether they are going to watch a show on TV based on what they’ve seen on social media.

In the US, eMarketer estimates that more than half YouTube viewing is done via a CTV device and this could hit 60% by next year. A similar pattern is emerging in the U.K., with 34% of YouTube’s viewing inside homes during 2023 happening on a TV, up from 29% in 2022.

So, shouldn’t we all accept that the audience has decided that YouTube is TV?

Secondly, planners need to swallow that red pill and enter an AV planning matrix in which every 10-year age bracket is plotted by different AV tech and format consumption habits, cross-referenced by interest or behavior group segments and shopping data, as well as people’s relationship with advertising on different AV technologies.

Major sporting events are likely to remain an exception to the new matrix planning rules, which would likely generally identify broadcast TV as an older segment buy and YouTube and TikTok as primary Gen Z and Millennial buys with AVOD providing a more nuanced audience mix.

But watching TV is also an increasingly complex pursuit. Research by Hub shows more that 50% of Americans subscribe to more than three TV streaming services. Major sporting events such as NFL games are becoming spread across a selection of platforms—Nielsen credits Thursday Night Football for a 12% bump in Amazon Prime Video viewership in September.

Planning TV across the multiple formats and platforms is now byzantine in nature, but although the 20th century model still dominates and skews planner’s thinking about the audience, change is coming fast. Statista predicts OTT will be worth $193.6 billion in the U.S. in 2029, compared to $130.5 billion for “traditional TV and home video”.

A fresh way of thinking about how audiences consider TV as an experience both in terms of content and delivery technology is overdue. Let’s enter the matrix.

VENTURA, Calif.—Programmatic ad giant The Trade Desk is pushing into the streaming technology business with a new operating system called Ventura.

“We’re at a point in the evolution of streaming TV where we must ensure the supply chain of streaming TV advertising is competitive and transparent, so advertisers can maximize campaign performance, publishers can fund this new golden age of TV, and consumers have a better streaming TV ad experience,” Trade Desk Founder and CEO Jeff Green said. “This innovation has to come in the OS, and it has to come from a company that brings the objectivity of not owning any streaming TV content. At The Trade Desk, all we want is a fair marketplace, where supply chain costs are minimized, and advertiser trust can thrive.”

The launch, which will face stiff competition from operating systems from Google, Ruku and others that are already in hundreds of millions of smart TVs, highlights the growing importance of operating systems in the connected TV business.

In launching Ventura, The Trade Desk is hoping to leverage its position as the largest independent demand-side programmatic ad platform and a major provider of ad technologies to improve the streaming technologies used by CTVs and streaming media players in ways that would streamline and boost the CTV ad business.

The Trade Desk said it will partner with smart-TV original equipment manufacturers and other aggregators to deploy Ventura. And while Ventura will face significant competition, executives from four major streaming companies—Disney, Paramount, Sonos and Fox’s Tubi—expressed interest and support for the OS.

In announcing the product, The Trade Desk said Ventura represents a major advance in streaming TV operating systems because it solves key complaints about existing systems including frustrating user experiences, inefficient advertising supply chains and content conflicts of interest.

It described the major benefits of Ventura as follows:

• A more intuitive, engaging user experience, including cross-platform content discovery, personalization, subscription management and ultimately fewer (more relevant) ads.
• A much cleaner supply chain for streaming TV advertising, minimizing supply chain hops and costs—ensuring maximum ROI for every advertising dollar and optimized yield for publishers.
• Incorporating advances such as OpenPath and Unified ID 2.0 (UID2), Ventura will enable advertisers to value and price ad impressions across all streaming platforms more accurately, while finding relevant audiences with greater precision.

Ventura comes as more consumers use streaming platforms than traditional cable TV and as almost every major media company has launched an ad-supported streaming option for viewers.

“Everyone from OEMs to airlines and hotel chains are now in the streaming TV aggregation business, and they’re all trying to figure out the advertising business model while improving the viewer experience,” Matthew Henick, senior vice president of Ventura at The Trade Desk, said. “With our content objectivity and our scaled streaming TV advertising demand, The Trade Desk is uniquely positioned to drive innovation at this key moment.”

The Trade Desk reported that it expects that Ventura will be deployed by OEMs and other streaming TV aggregators as early as 2025.

It also noted that Ventura is already generating industry support and provided quotes from executives at four major streaming media players. Tose included:

• Jamie Power, senior vice president of addressable advertising sales, Disney Advertising: “As the streaming TV landscape rapidly evolves, we are entering a new paradigm for TV advertising. These trends are driven not only by consumer adoption but also by the innovation in the marketplace. We look forward to seeing The Trade Desk continue to drive innovation that will create more efficiency and a more enjoyable TV experience.”
• John Halley, president, Paramount Advertising: “The Trade Desk has been a great partner and real innovator in the programmatic space, and we are excited to see them bring their approach to the OS marketplace. Both broadcasters and consumers will undoubtedly benefit.”
• Paul Cheesbrough, CEO, Tubi Media Group: “As viewers shift to streaming, it’s imperative that advertisers can find their audiences with precision and put as much of their campaign spend to work as possible. We look forward to building upon our existing partnership with The Trade Desk to bring this vision of a better CTV supply chain to life across our portfolio alongside other industry leaders.”
• Patrick Spence, CEO, Sonos: “At Sonos, we are committed to providing our customers with the very best home entertainment experience. We are excited to explore the integration of premium audio and video with The Trade Desk and the Ventura OS.”

All media companies are exploring new ways to maximize the value of their live and on-demand content. In a complex landscape where broadcasters, sports, entertainment and technology players compete for market share, capturing and retaining global and hyperlocal audiences across multiple platforms is a vital challenge. Leveraging the right ad strategies to monetize content of all flavors is mission-critical for business growth.

The New Broadcast Advertising Landscape
Before connected TV devices, smartphones and the streaming media revolution, the linear television world relied on traditional broadcast advertising strategies targeting wide audiences across shared household TVs. In the absence of more targeted advertising capabilities, brands leveraged broader demographic data and panel-based audience measurement to determine whether ads would reach the right audiences. We’ve come a long way from the days when measurement was hard to come by and return on investment difficult to quantify.

The digital world has changed everything. Consumers can watch their preferred content anytime, anywhere and on any platform. Brands and digital advertisers have a whole host of advertising strategies at their disposal to target specific consumers based on their content consumption patterns—and they can shape their ad-buying decisions accordingly.

The value of traditional broadcast advertising is being questioned, with WARC research finding that 39% of marketers plan to reduce spending on linear channels. Consumers are increasingly favoring event-based viewing and on-demand streaming content experiences instead of traditional linear TV consumption, contributing to significant declines in pay-TV revenue, which will sink to $15 billion annually by 2027, according to PwC. Media consumption is changing and the linear methodologies many people are accustomed to simply don’t translate in the digital advertising arena. New thinking is needed to bridge diverse broadcast and digital environments.

Increase ROI With Strategic Targeting
Media organizations are looking to expand their reach by delivering market-relevant and localized content that resonates with viewers and boosts engagement. This opens the door for brands and advertisers to explore new ways to tap into these audiences in a more targeted and precise way—and make the most of their investment.

Digital advertising is driven by data that sheds light on consumers and their viewing habits. Brands and digital advertisers now have the consumer insights they need to make informed decisions about their advertising real estate.

This is particularly useful for brands that target narrow audiences with hyper-targeted regionalization, tailored messaging and coordination to increase their chances of getting their messages to resonate with target buyers. Although this type of strategic targeting comes with a premium price tag, it should be seen as a worthwhile investment.

A Digital Mindset for Linear Channels
Media companies can uplevel their broadcast advertising strategies by adopting a digital advertising mindset for their linear channels. Customization and hyperlocalization can be critical competitive advantages that enable broadcast advertising to transition to the digital world and bring back much-needed investment. Content distributors with the infrastructure in place to support digital ad sales can apply their digital framework to their linear channels, creating compelling offerings that deliver similar value to digital ad packages.

This mindset requires a shift in approach from selling air time to impressions, which is commonplace in digital advertising. By seamlessly implementing impression-based broadcast advertising and digital models within the same hybrid ecosystem, they can offer brands and advertisers ad packages across digital and linear channels — optimizing content monetization and streamlining siloed ad processes.

Hitting Linear and Digital Advertising Targets
Today, media organizations are finding ways to grow their digital businesses while protecting and maximizing ROI on high-value linear channels and live events. Broadcasters with hybrid digital and linear offerings need to maximize the value of their content libraries by increasing reach and monetization potential. Innovation in IP video distribution and content versioning enables media organizations to produce highly regionalized content that targets multiple linear and digital markets simultaneously — without heavy costs or additional resources.

By intelligently creating and inserting multiple versions of SCTE-35 markers, it’s also easier than ever for media companies to enrich the downstream ad experience for any region, audience, or platform.

Broadcast advertising is not going anywhere — it is evolving. By harnessing the targeting capabilities typically associated with on-demand streaming, new broadcast advertising models can increase ROI and drive growth for broadcasters. As the volume of high-value content produced, delivered, and consumed through the event-based model increases, the new phase of digitally-inspired broadcast advertising will begin to deliver measurable results.

As content creators, aggregators and distributors continue to finagle their respective paths around the constantly changing video-consumption desires of global audiences, the race to monetize content and engage audiences with relevant advertising might be getting some much-needed help from the ad tech vendors.

Part of the need for advanced technology solutions is driven by the tremendous growth in ad-supported streaming, whether via free ad-supported television (FAST) channels or ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) tiers offered by subscription services like Amazon Prime Video and Netflix. More and more channels and options for viewers have created an interesting dilemma—there’s way more ad inventory available than there is supply. For companies relying on programmatic ad models to fill this inventory, the user experience must be considered.

“With traditional linear TV, the measurement we’re still looking at is ratings,” said Steve Reynolds, president of Imagine Communications. “But, ‘ratings’ has started to evolve into ‘reach’ and ‘frequency’ and pacing of advertising. Delivering the same message to the same household 30 times may not be any more effective than delivering that message five times.”

Balancing Act
Addressable advertising inventory available on subscription services and other media offer the ability to match ad content with very specific viewer demographics, but a careful balance has to be struck to maintain brand quality and avoid doing more damage than good.

“We’ve always had good tools for managing frequency and pacing in the linear world, but we’re now seeing our customers’ need to bring those capabilities into the connected TV (CTV) world,” Reynolds continues. “The targeting enabled by programmatic systems works great.

“The problem is it’s almost too perfect—to the point where advertising can become ineffective if it creates negative viewer perception,” he adds. “To counteract this, we’ve taken the traditional business rules we’ve applied to linear TV for years, like frequency, category separation and brand safety rules and incorporated them into what we describe as a broadcast-quality digital ad server.”

The system exemplified in this scenario is designed to make life easier for broadcasters and distributors transitioning from traditional selling of ad inventory to converged selling of linear and digital ads. This transition is ongoing, but it’s not new.

In fact, according to a recent report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, “2024 IAB Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy Report,” three-quarters of CTV advertising is already bought programmatically, much of it transacted through systems offered by suppliers like Imagine, Operative, WideOrbit, Boostr and many others that simplify the sales process and drive revenue growth.

What’s AI Got to Do With It?
Technology is being applied to do more than simply create efficiency. Despite the apparent imbalance between inventory supply and content available to fill it, there are significant efforts to introduce new types of inventory—ones with greater opportunity for branding and viewer engagement—many of which are leveraging AI.

In a recent interview with IBC365, BroadView Software President Michael Atkin said: “[Using AI] you can now do real-time identification of new spots to insert advertising in backdrops that we couldn’t do even this time last year. Every year we get better and better at being able to identify the piece of content. And the better we can identify the user, the better you can target the materials they want to see.”

In fact, recent improvements in AI’s ability to analyze video content has opened up a number of unique opportunities for engagement and new revenues.

In the past several years, major events, especially sports, have begun including new sponsorship opportunities during lulls in game action (think “Playing Through” during NBC’s golf coverage). Capitalizing on this trend, Sportradar, a data and insights company focused on sports analytics and betting, offers an API to broadcasters that pushes real-time game information that triggers on specific game events. Productions can use this data to automatically run branded graphics to celebrate a big home run or touchdown.

AI promises to take this type of “in game” engagement even further.

“We use AI to create a transcript of the commentaries coming from sports broadcasts,” explained Jean Macher, senior director, global SaaS solutions at Harmonic. “We then feed that text into OpenAI to come up with a summary and highlights of the live action.”

This solution, currently still in development, will be able to autonomously create catch-up packages and highlights of big plays during the game, offering further opportunities for audience engagement.

Moving forward, the company hopes to capitalize on GPT 4.0’s next-gen capability to natively analyze video content.

“Now that the AI is able to understand the notion of the passage of time and make inferences based on that content, the hope is that if you combine the video analytics together with the audio analysis, you could achieve decision-accurate inferences,” Macher explained. “This workflow would then feed actionable metadata into the company’s VOS 360 platform to provide contextually accurate ad spot opportunities.”

The Audience Is Still the Thing
With all of these moves toward creating additional, and more relevant opportunities for brands to engage with audiences, regardless of the platform, it would stand to reason that the entire business model has been reimagined. Unfortunately, that’s not really the case.

“The need to be able to make dynamic ad decisions thanks to addressability—and now we’re doing unicast addressability—[has led to] new products coming along like ad servers, like Imagine’s Surefire,” Reynolds said. “But it’s not a fundamental change to the way things are done. The business model still hasn’t changed because advertisers still want to buy audience.”

The battle for improved brand engagement and action associated with this engagement is being fought on the frontlines like never before between agencies/brands and the folks with multiplatform inventory available.

“What we have to do,” Reynolds added, “is flip it 90 degrees and start thinking about the value of the inventory. There’s premium inventory and there’s non-premium inventory. People need to wrap their heads around optimizing the premium inventory on the basis of price and delivery value while optimizing the non-premium inventory on the basis of utilization and getting the highest yield possible out of it.”

Advertisers are seemingly open to the idea of new ways to engage and improve the impact of the impressions they’re getting.

“Dynamic brand insertion is something we do to insert the brand directly inside the video content,” Macher described. “Sometimes called ‘virtual product placement,’ we can create a placement opportunity where you’re going to see a bottle with a specific brand or a billboard with a specific message. We can use AI to analyze the video programming and find those placement opportunities in advance and then dynamically—and frame accurately—stitch that alternate content that now includes the brand placement into the program.”

Fortunately for those trying to balance market pressures like this, a wide range of tools are available to make this process both easier and more efficient. Leading cross-platform digital ad servers such as Google Ad Manager and FreeWheel work closely with other industry suppliers to ensure the products used to manage the sales process are smoothly integrated and ready to help ad sales folks sell more, instead of wasting time on administrative tasks.

This improved communication between the supply side and demand side leverages advanced tech that should lead to a more efficient system that takes everyone’s needs into account.

In a 48-page report, the Center for Digital Democracy cast a critical eye on the rapidly growing connected TV industry, noting that with the rise of AI and ad-supported streaming channels, TV viewers’ privacy is being threatened like never before. The report, “How TV Watches Us, Commercial Surveillance in the Streaming Era,” was authored by Jeff Chester, executive director and founder of the CDD, and Kathryn C. Montgomery, Ph.D., professor emerita at American University’s School of Communication and senior strategist at CDD.

With the rise of ad-supported streaming, CTV has helped prime the television industry, with advertisers investing $25 billion in the U.S. alone in 2023. As the overall TV ad market is expected to grow to nearly $41 billion by 2027, CTV has become “one of the fastest-growing ad sectors,” the authors said, citing EMarketer’s InsiderIntelligence.com.

Using Tubi as an example, the authors noted that the Fox-owned free streaming service offers 270 FAST channels to 78 million viewers and that “in many ways … Tubi is now the dominant way that people get television in the U.S.” And though Tubi’s programming doesn’t offer anything viewers can’t get elsewhere, its dominance in the CTV market is driven by its technology—in essence, it’s not a programming distributor but rather a data company.

“Tubi is a key player in a massive data-driven surveillance system that has transformed the television set into a sophisticated monitoring, tracking and targeting device,” the authors wrote, using Tubi’s own words. “ ‘We are an ad tech-first platform. Everything we do is based on data,’ ” the company boasts as quoted in the report, adding, “ ‘Tubi promises advertisers access to ‘billions of rows of data on its customers, gathered from their viewing behaviors.’ ”

The authors describe CTV’s rise as a “transformation of television” and said its ability to granularly track viewers has gone largely unnoticed by policymakers despite the rise of similar concerns over social media.

“The U.S. CTV streaming business has deliberately incorporated many of the data-surveillance marketing practices that have long undermined privacy and consumer protection in the ‘older’ online world of social media, search engines, mobile phones and video services such as YouTube,” they wrote.

While there can be some advantages to improved viewer tracking—with more personalized ads, lower subscription costs and access to a far wider array of programming—the advantages go to the advertiser and not the viewer, the authors said.

“All of the pleasures and conveniences that this new medium offers come with a steep price,” they wrote. “And it goes beyond the rising monthly rates that consumers have to pay to access many of these streaming services, or the annoyance of commercial interruptions in some of their favorite programs. The widespread technological and business developments that have taken place during the last five years have created a connected television media and marketing system with unprecedented capabilities for surveillance and manipulation.”

In response, the authors—who describe the report as a “call to action” for regulators—offer several areas of improvement to protect consumers.

First, they call for more robust privacy protections, noting that while “there has been some progress at the federal and state levels on privacy regulation, a great deal more work is going to be needed in order to curb the expansion of ubiquitous data gathering, profiling, tracking and targeting of individuals.” They also recommend that regulators and policymakers get more involved.

“Both the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission should investigate the practices in connected television, and should consider building on laws and enforcement actions that are already on the books, including the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act and the 2017 settlement by Vizio with the FTC about its data practices,” adding that regulators and lawmakers will also “need to conduct research on the structure and operations of the connected television industry.”

The authors also call for more extensive safeguards against dangerous surveillance practices when it comes to political, health and children’s advertising, citing the regulation of political advertising in the U.S. as “already very weak.” They also point out the impact of CTV’s data mining practices on young viewers.

“Because they are such avid users of connected television, children and adolescents require particular attention from regulators,” they wrote.

The authors also called for increased “competition and diversity in the digital and connected TV marketplace,” citing the example of big tech monopolies such as Facebook, Google and Amazon, as well as the studios themselves. As an example, they cited the new Venu sports streaming joint venture between The Walt Disney Co., Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox, noting the impact its potential monopoly on big-league live sports could have on the market.

“Policymakers, advocates and sports CTV company Fubo have raised concerns about Venu’s impact on competition, although there has been little attention paid to how the potential integration of all the CTV-related data harvested by these three companies working in concert may be having a harmful impact on the marketplace,” they wrote.

While the process of oversight and regulation of the CTV industry will be difficult, the authors concluded the television industry's size, scope and influence exemplify the importance of action.

“Undoubtedly lobbyists and trade associations for this very influential industry will turn to the same ‘it’s too early to regulate’ mantra that has repeatedly thwarted efforts to enact laws and regulations the U.S. communications system so badly needs,” they wrote. “In addition to protecting consumers, the connected TV industry must do more to serve our democracy, especially as CTV continues to move into such a central and influential position in the media landscape.”

The report can be read here.

DURHAM, NH—The internet’s takeover of the American TV set is nearly complete as research shows that almost nine out of ten U.S. households now own at least one connected TV set. and nearly half of adults watch video via a connected device daily. 

New consumer research from Leichtman Research Group, Inc. (LRG) finds that 88% of U.S. TV households have at least one Internet-connected TV device, including connected Smart TVs, stand-alone streaming devices (like Roku, Amazon Fire TV sticks or boxes, Chromecast, or Apple TV), connected video game systems, and/or connected Blu-ray players. This compares to 82% with at least one connected TV device in 2021, 74% in 2018, and 44% in 2013. 

Overall, 49% of adults in U.S. TV households watch video on a TV via a connected device daily—compared to 39% in 2021, 29% in 2018, and 6% in 2013.  Younger individuals are most likely to use connected TV devices.  Among all ages 18-34, 63% watch video on a TV via a connected device daily—compared to 58% of ages 35-54, and 27% of ages 55+.

These findings are based on a survey of 1,770 TV households in the U.S., and are part of a new LRG study, Connected TVs 2023.  This is LRG’s twentieth annual study on TVs in the U.S.

Other findings include:

• 74% of TV households have at least one connected Smart TV – up from 64% in 2021, 47% in 2018, and 13% in 2013
• 55% of all TV sets in U.S. households are connected Smart TVs – an increase from 43% in 2021, 29% in 2018, and 7% in 2014
• 44% of TV households only have Smart TVs for all their TV sets
• 62% of TV households have at least one stand-alone streaming device – up from 55% in 2021, 46% in 2018, and 6% in 2013
• 67% of TV households have multiple types of connected TV devices – compared to 62% in 2021, and 49% in 2018
• The mean age of those with multiple types of connected TV devices is 42.3, while the mean age of those with one type of device is 50.5, and the mean age of those with no connected TV devices is 55.5

“Nearly half of all adults now watch video via a connected TV device daily, a significant increase from 29% five years ago, and 6% a decade ago,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc.  “While Smart TVs are a key component of the connected TV category, the vast majority of connected TV users stream via multiple types of devices."

With the increasing risk of a major recession, increasing interest rates, and historic inflation, brands are scrutinizing ad spend more closely than ever. When it comes to advanced TV advertising, this signals a potential shift in strategy away from hypertargeting and toward a renewed appreciation for reach extension. 

Advanced TV includes connected TV (CTV) or over-the-top (OTT), video-on-demand, and addressable TV. Simply put, advanced TV is any form of television that is not traditional, over-the-air, broadcast TV, even though the content is much the same. Regardless of whether delivered by IP address or set-top box, all forms of advanced TV offer advertisers the ability to reach viewers with addressable advertising. And that addressability—the holy grail of one-to-one targeting – has become an advertiser’s latest shiny new thing. 

But here’s the rub: getting personalization wrong alienates the very consumers you’re trying to win. 

According to a recent study from ParcelLab, nearly half of US consumers experienced incorrectly targeted ads in the last six months. Of those, 42% immediately unsubscribed from the brand’s content, 24% took immediate action to block the brand on social media, and 22% decided not to purchase from the brand again. Budget spent on incorrectly targeted ads isn’t just budget wasted, it also negatively impacts brand reputation and leads to lost revenue. 

Add the problem of over frequency to the negative impact of inaccurate targeting, and advanced TV’s addressability loses some of its shine. But addressability isn’t the only value advanced TV has to offer advertisers. When working with budget constraints, extended reach often becomes more important, and more impactful, than expensive targeting.

The Promise of Addressability
Addressable advertising allows brands to target different households with different ads during the same program. At its most aspirational, addressability even promises the ability to deliver different ads to different devices within the same household. But while addressable advertising can be effective, it still lacks a supportive model that provides value to agencies and advertisers while also delivering a high-quality viewer experience—the kind of experience audiences have been trained to expect from decades of watching broadcast TV. 

What was initially controlled by a few prominent broadcast networks and cable TV companies is now fragmented across multiple platforms and service providers, both subscription and ad-supported, each with their own audience data. This fragmentation makes it challenging to know who is watching what and on which platform, and knowing that with precision is necessary for effective addressable campaigns.

Using advanced TV for reach extension, however, can be equally or more effective, since achieving unduplicated reach across platforms requires less granular and more readily available audience data. 

The Trouble with Measurement
Advanced TV allows brands to target unique groups at precise moments. But with increasing fragmentation, measurement can be inconsistent across platforms, providers, and services, as well as between advanced TV and broadcast TV.

Advertisers want to know what they bought, what was delivered, who it was delivered to, and what the outcome was. But depending on who’s compiling and reporting on the data, advertisers can end up struggling to compare GRPs to impressions to views to completed views, making cross-channel measurement and attribution extremely difficult.

Brands and agencies often find it more advantageous to blend metrics to get an overall picture rather than try to translate measurement currencies and force a more precise, apples-to-apples comparison – neither of which can ever be truly accurate. 

With the challenge of measurement and its degree of inaccuracy, brands might be better served by thinking more about content, context, and audience composition, focusing on the effectiveness of the creative and timing, as well as on reach.

Trust vs. Targeting
Consumers access content through a variety of methods and devices, each gathering various levels of information about them. No matter how and where the data is collected, the goal for advertisers is to ensure the information is both useable and useful, while maintaining compliance with privacy regulations.

But since data privacy regulations are constantly changing, advertisers should shift their focus toward meeting consumer expectations around their personal data. Consumers will trust your brand more if they believe you care about protecting their privacy as much as, or even more than, complying with the rules. 

As we approach a world without cookies, first-party data becomes more important than ever. Collecting first-party data, with consent, avoids privacy concerns but the data must be used with care—distrust can still result, and consent withdrawn, if the consumer senses their data has been used in a way they didn’t anticipate.

One solution getting a lot of buzz lately is data clean rooms. A data clean room allows advertisers and brands to match their own, first-party data with a publisher’s user-level data without exchanging any personal information or raw data. It sounds great in theory, but data clean rooms have their own drawbacks. 

The advertiser needs to have a solid database of first-party information to start with, and unless they focus primarily on a single publisher, they’ll need to invest in data clean room access for each publisher they use, which can become expensive. For most advertisers, data clean rooms are probably more of a future solution, when the promise of omnichannel data clean rooms becomes a reality.

Data and targeting tie back to attribution, concerning everything about the brand – from brand reputation to conversion. Attribution is how a brand determines campaign effectiveness but most of the data sits with publishers. As a rule of thumb, brands should only serve highly targeted or addressable ads if they have enough trusted data to have confidence in the purchase intent of the viewer. 

Advertisers concerned about consumer trust who are looking to grow their businesses would often do better to seek out unique, unduplicated reach, via both advanced and broadcast TV, rather than focus on one-to-one targeting. 

A Shift in Strategy
Our economic climate is changing, and the promise of hypertargeting hasn’t quite delivered on its promise. Consumer distrust and ad fatigue are escalating, meaning a significant amount of ad spend is wasted. 

Instead of gravitating towards the shiny new thing, evaluate the complexity of advanced TV measurement and currency, how third- and first-party data availability factor into addressability, and compare the cost and effectiveness of hypertargeting versus the extended, unduplicated reach that can be achieved by complementing broadcast TV campaigns with advanced TV advertising. 

Adapting to the expectations of today’s hyper-engaged, hyper-sensitive consumer is challenging under an avalanche of data from so many disparate sources. But the brands who succeed still see audiences for what they are—human beings looking for shared experiences, not numbers populating a spreadsheet. 

Success in an evolving TV ecosystem requires advertisers to elevate their strategy by shifting their thinking away from the pursuit of delivering the right message to the right person, at the right time, and toward a more inclusive, holistic goal – delivering a common message, to a common audience, at different times.

Connected TV is surging. A record 92% of U.S. households are now reachable via CTV, and brands are paying attention. Advertising spend on CTV grew 57% in 2021 to $15.2 billion, and is expected to rise an additional 39% at the close of this year to $21.2 billion, making it one of the fastest-growing ad sectors. The television has always been the “gathering place” of our homes, and being connected to the internet, rather than through broadcast waves or cable, isn’t changing that any time soon. 

What makes all of this particularly exciting is realizing that CTV advertising hasn’t even reached its full potential. CTV users watch streaming content across any number of platforms from Netflix to Roku and any number of FAST channels. Performance across all those platforms are siloed, meaning advertisers can’t track or evaluate campaigns as a whole, but are left to piece together insights from each platform they advertise on. 

Our industry is also still working through how to properly attribute action by a viewer to an action taken in the market. Did the 30-second ad pushing Oreo’s double-stuffed cookies cause a viewer to make a late night order while binge watching Love Island? Directly correlating a purchase or action to viewing an ad on CTV is still an area for growth.

As a result of these factors and more, CTV campaigns tend to be oriented around increasing “brand awareness,” a well-known, but admittedly vague metric. Measurement after the fact typically consists of a brand lift study, which can tell you generally how an ad performed and whether it measured above or below expectations. But, such studies are largely ambiguous and after-the-fact.

While many different attribution platforms are starting to come to the foreground and deliver interesting capabilities around CTV, there is still a lot of connective tissue that’s missing for the whole piece to work well. By shifting strategy to focus on yield and performance-based outcomes, advertisers and sellers can get the most out of CTV and utilize it as a true performance marketing channel.

Reconsider What CTV Really Is
When brands think of connected TV, they think “Like Hulu, right?” In reality there are multiple platforms available and connecting across all of them is essential—CTV is everywhere. People watch CTV on any internet-connected device, be it on their smart TV, gaming console, tablet, phone—or all of the above. 

In fact, there is a mean of 3.9 CTV devices per TV household. This suggests an opportunity for advertisers to think about how to reach consumers everywhere they are and take an omnichannel approach to marketing on CTV.

A/B Test and Iterate (a lot)
In a traditional digital campaign, advertisers launch new creatives all the time, and ruthlessly A/B test messages. While this practice doesn’t happen much yet in CTV, it can and should. 

A/B testing provides advertisers with real data that's optimized, allowing for creatives to constantly be iterated upon and made more powerful so that they can transact better. Taking advantage of A/B testing is the new type of creative thinking and action required to turn CTV into a true performance channel.

Gain a 360-Degree View of the Customer
Advertisers know a lot about their target audience, as do CTV sellers. By bringing the two together, brands can implement digital targeting to get a fuller picture of their customer and who they’re reaching. 

With tools like affinity or lookalike audiences on top of existing targets, advertisers can achieve a bigger pool of inventory and viewers to target.

Think Like a Direct-to-Consumer Brand
Ecommerce destinations and direct-to-consumer companies like Nike do a great job using CTV to drive traffic to their apps and sites for sales. QR codes, overlays and squeezebacks are all formats that are well suited to performance marketing on CTV, and can drive a new level of action (and attribution) beyond general media buys and old-school brand awareness. Every brand should put direct-to-consumer thinking in their approach to CTV advertising.

CTV is digital and real-time. It’s designed for both brand awareness and performance marketing, where yield and outcomes can be optimized. Leaning into all of that is the only way to realize CTV’s full potential—for brands, advertisers, sellers, and content creators.

Smart TVs and streaming media players (SMPs) are the backbone of the CTV ecosystem. A large majority of homes in the United States (83%) have either an “enabled” (internet-connected) smart TV or an SMP. A plurality of homes (44%) own both types of devices.

Asked about the equipment attached to their smart TV sets, respondents tell us that over half (57%) of enabled smart TVs have at least one streaming media player attached – with a notable share of those having two attached!

Viewing Data are More Valuable Than Ever to the New CTV Gatekeepers
In today’s connected TV (CTV) world, the smart TV and the SMP are the primary ways viewers stream to their TV screens (putting aside the much smaller user bases of other CTV devices like game consoles or Blu-ray players). As a result, the evolution of the CTV space has seen the manufacturers (OEMs) of smart TVs and SMPs take on increasingly important positions as middlemen in the marketplace, impacting the 4D’s of CTV (Discovery, Decision, Delivery, and Data).

They act as an intermediary to the viewer by impacting discovery and viewing decisions – such as providing recommendations or pseudo-curating viewers’ decision sets by virtue of what their device shows on its home screen. They affect delivery of content through their agreements with content providers, and of advertising through their platform’s ad functions. As for data, the entireCTV ecosystem is reliant on viewing data collected by the smart TV and SMP OEMs – these data points are used for viewer recommendations, program promotion, advertising sales, or the provision of viewer data to third parties such as marketers, agencies, and audience measurement firms.

Viewers Are Unfamiliar with Their Opt-In Status
People in homes with enabled smart TVs and SMPs report low levels of awareness of their opt-in status for OEMs to track their viewing—and of tracking at all. This is a potentially serious issue for those working in the CTV space.

Overall, almost half—43% of those who are in a home with a smart TV or an SMP—say they are unaware at all of OEMs potentially tracking the viewing on their respective device.

Another 30% are aware of tracking but have no idea whether their device(s) are opted-in or opted-out of tracking.

Let’s take a pause. This ultimately means that 73% of people in smart TV or SMP homes don’t know about tracking, or don’t know their opt-in status.

In fact, only about 1 in 6 (18%) people in smart TV or SMP homes are sure – or think “maybe” – their device(s) are opted-in.

Tick… Tick… Boom!
These results indicate there may be a couple of ticking privacy time bombs waiting to disrupt the CTV world. The first could be a consumer revolt once the true scope of tracking and its business applications become well known. In the 1980s, concerns about the privacy of personal videotape rentals caused enough consternation that a federal law was passed providing protections against rental lists being shared or becoming public. It may be that we’re in a different age and no one cares anymore about privacy, but what if we’re not?

The other potential time bomb is the validity of OEM viewing data if it’s true that just 1 in 6 have opted-into tracking. There have always been issues with the representativeness of individual OEM datasets, simply by virtue of who is the target market for the brand in question (and no, millions of installed sets don’t make a dataset representative—it just makes it a very large unrepresentative dataset). If only a small proportion of installed devices are opted-in, those viewing data just got even more skewed.

By way of argument, some readers may be quick to blame our survey or our respondents. But the point is, even if one discounts these results for some invented reason, the levels would still be alarming—if “only” 35% were unaware of their opt-in status instead of 73%, would that be “good”? It still shows a lack of communication, understanding, and education.

Others may argue this is just standard operating procedure in the digital space, ranging from in-the-bubble excuses like “everyone knows they are tracked,” or “what do they expect?” to dressing up opt-in language in a way that doesn’t really reveal everything (“we collect data to improve recommendations and personalize advertising” rather than “we collect every piece of content that hits your TV’s screen, streaming or not, and we monetize your viewing in every way we can, including selling the data to whoever will pay for it”).

Burst the Bubble
As I’ve seen over almost 30 years in this business, consumer education greatly lags media technology. 

Why did VCRs always flash “12:00”? Why did TiVo lose out to comparatively poorly designed cable box DVRs? Why did cable VOD and TV everywhere fall flat and let Netflix emerge? A big reason is many of these services or technology were ahead of consumers, and there was little effort to help consumers catch up.

Maybe, as some argue, privacy is dead. But maybe—as evidenced by Europe’s GDPR and its equivalents in several US states—it is not. The CTV industry, whether individually or as a group, should be out educating consumers in simple, transparent terms of what is being done with viewing data and their options to participate. This would hopefully help increase awareness and willingness to opt-in; at the least it may help defend against any future blowback.

PALO ALTO, Calif.—AppLovin Corporation has announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Wurl, a software platform in the Connected TV (CTV) market, for about $430 million. 

Wurl interconnects over 1200 streaming channels from the world’s top content companies with the leading streaming distribution services in over 50 countries. Reaching over 300 million connected TVs around the globe, the Wurl Network platform helps leading studios such as A+E Networks, AMC Networks, Bloomberg, BBC Studios, CNN, Reuters and Sony, deliver programming to the biggest streaming platforms, including Amazon IMDb TV, Roku, Samsung TV Plus, Rakuten, Twitch, and VIZIO, while maximising monetization. 

The acquisition will extend AppLovin’s software platform capabilities into the large and growing CTV market, which is expected to produce more than $30 billion in advertising by 2025, the companies said. 

“The acquisition of Wurl will further our commitment to building and growing the world’s largest, most-effective digital marketing platform by providing advertisers a seamless way to tap into the highly addressable and measurable CTV market,” said Adam Foroughi, CEO and co-founder of AppLovin. “We believe our software marketing expertise can further optimize the experience for advertisers and consumers as well as enable content companies to expand their audiences and increase monetization.”

“Our shared vision and values made the opportunity to join forces compelling and unique,” said Sean Doherty Sr., CEO and co-founder of Wurl. “AppLovin brings enormous new demand from advertisers and our partnership will enable current customers to realise even more benefits including expanded ad revenue, new viewers, and enhanced distribution to global CTV audiences. Together, we’ll pursue our mission and dramatically impact the CTV market.”

Wurl is expected to retain its brand and operate independently with its existing management team. The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2022 and be funded with approximately 55% cash and 45% AppLovin equity.

Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati served as legal advisors for AppLovin, and Fenwick & West LLP acted as legal advisor for Wurl. LionTree Advisors acted as exclusive financial advisor to Wurl.

PASADENA, Calif.—The connected TV ad platform tvScientific has issued a new survey showing that a majority of consumers say they watch video on connected TVs, more than any other platforms and that advertising is more effective on that platform. 

The survey found that 57% said that the primary way they watch television, movies, and other video content is by streaming it digitally, compared to just 26% who watch through cable or linear TV. Ninety-two percent of consumers who watch streaming content also use at least one ad-supported service. 

Moreover, audiences claim that they find ads on TV or streaming less annoying than ads on social media, websites, or in mobile games, and that they’re able to recall ads on streaming TV 46% of the time, which is at least 39% more often than they can recall ads on other channels. 

“We are in an age where digital advertising revolves around 2-inch ads sandwiched between an endless stream of social media content — and these ads command a staggering premium,” said Jason Fairchild, CEO of tvScientific. “CTV represents a unique new era in which advertisers can reach consumers with large, full-screen ads with no surrounding clutter. They deliver superior consumer recall and drive measurable performance for advertisers. Our new report paints a compelling picture of why advertisers need to adapt as CTV adoption grows.”

According to the survey, 50.4% of consumers watch streaming video content from their smart TV or CTV, which is more than all other digital viewing options combined. Twenty-four percent of respondents watch streaming content on an external smart device, while 11 percent watch on a mobile device, nine percent on a computer or laptop, and six percent on a video game console. 

The new report and survey “How CTV Advertising Powers The Performance TV Revolution” also found that of the consumers who stream television content, 86% use more than one streaming service, while 39% use four or more streaming services. Meanwhile, 92% of consumers who watch streaming content also claim to use at least one ad-supported service.

In terms of ad recall, 46% of consumers said TV and streaming ads are the most memorable, compared to 33% brand recall for social media ads, 12% for ads in mobile games, and just 9% for ads on websites. 

In terms of ad influence, the survey found that ads on TV or streaming are essentially on par with social media ads, with 39% of respondents citing TV/streaming as the most influential ad channel compared to 41% who cited social media. Meanwhile, only 11% of consumers find ads on websites the most influential, and only 10% find ads in mobile games to be the most influential. 

Respondents also reported that they find ads on TV or streaming TV less annoying than ads on other digital channels—it was selected as the “most annoying” channel by just 22% of consumers, compared to 23% for social media, 26% for websites, and 30% for ads in mobile games. 

The survey also found high levels of second screen engagement: 78% of consumers use a mobile device while watching television, while 31% of TV watchers use a mobile device to research or purchase products they see advertised and 33% of consumers say they bought a product after seeing it advertised on TV or a streaming service. 

“How CTV Advertising Powers The Performance TV Revolution” draws on results of a September 2021 survey of 1,000 consumers in the United States about their experiences with CTV and over-the-top advertising. The respondents represented a diverse range of ages, ethnicities, industries, roles, education, income levels, and household sizes.

The full report can be accessed here. 

OSLO, Norway—OTT software tech provider Vewd has released Vewd Core 4.22, the latest version of Vewd’s HTML5 and streaming SDK for connected TV devices. 

New features in the latest Vewd Core enable video calling and advanced advertising. Vewd Core is available for connected devices running Linux, Android TV, AOSP, and RDK.

“Vewd Core makes Live TV, streaming video and games come to life on tens of millions of TVs and set-top boxes each year,” said Sascha Prüter, chief product officer at Vewd. “The newest Vewd Core leverages our nearly twenty years’ experience redefining what connected TV devices can do today, and charts a new course for what is possible in the next five years.”

New features of Vewd Core 4.22 include:

• Native video conferencing with WebRTC
• Better addressable TV with HbbTV targeted advertising 
• Innovative smart TV software architecture for Linux devices 
• Compliance with 2022 requirements from key OTT service providers and content owners
• Support for HbbTV 2.0.3 standard 
• Tightened security with stricter sandboxing 
• Improved text-to-speech support  
• Performance and security improvements by updating to Chromium 92

 More information is available here.  

NEW YORK & IRVINE, Calif.—Vizio and Verizon Media are putting their heads together in an effort to push forward advanced TV advertising, announcing a strategic partnership that will aim to deliver new cross-platform and connected TV (CTV) advertising solutions, anchored in unique TV viewership data and premium programmatic inventory access.

Verizon Media now has demand-side platform (DSP) access to Vizio’s Inscape viewership data from more than 18 million opted-in Vizio Smart TVs. This will help enable expanded CTV targeting, optimization and measurement opportunities for Verizon Media’s DSP advertisers, independent of cookies.

Vizio remains the exclusive seller of its guaranteed inventory and data licensing, but this partnership makes Verizon Media its preferred supply-side platform (SSP) for programmatic ad monetization.

The deal is also designed to boost Vizio’s cross platform ad retargeting product, Household Connect. Vizio, through Verizon’s unified ad platform, will now be able to offer audience extension campaigns to its advertisers with Verizon’s omnichannel marketplace and diverse cross-device Identity Graph, matched with near real-time Inscape ACR data. This will allow advertisers to extend the reach and frequency of their Vizio CTV campaigns while also reinforcing brand messaging in an omnichannel manner, according to the official announcement.

“VIZIO has built a CTV advertising ecosystem centered around premium partnerships and our direct-to-device offering,” said Mike O’Donnell, chief revenue officer, Platform+ at VIZIO. “Our relationship with Verizon Media will enable us to expand our reach, bridge the gap between TV and mobile, and create more impactful and actionable premium advertising experiences across platforms.”

PASADENA, Calif.—tvScientific is dipping its toes into the world of Connected TV advertising, announcing the launch of its own CTV buying, measurement and attribution platform. The goal of the platform is to eliminate barriers of entry around TV advertising, making it accessible and measurable for all businesses, tvScientific said.

The tvScientific CTV platform offers a self-serve solution with direct access to more than 90% of premium CTV publishers. It also features advanced audience targeting, with the ability to target more than 15,000 unique customer segments; measurement and attribution solutions, like deterministic ID technology; and optimization with direct attribution, which enables advertisers to make real-time decisions on campaign performance and media plan optimization.

The CTV platform connects to platforms, CTV OEMs and tech infrastructure providers including SpotX, Magnite, OpenX and Samsung, and runs on CTV devices from Samsung, Vizio, Roku and more.

“Until now, Connected TV advertising has been complex, inefficient and not measurable in the way that digital is, preventing most businesses from advertising on the most influential screen in the house,” said Jason Fairchild, co-founder and CEO of tvScientific. “Our new platform allows businesses to buy and measure Connected TV media on one simple platform, and evaluate it the way they do with search and social.”

For more information, visit www.tvscientific.com.  

BOSTON—Connected TV devices are proving to be a popular gift this holiday season, as Strategy Analytics is reporting that global sales of CTV devices are expected to reach record heights, largely due to both the holidays and people recovering from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to new research from Strategy Analytics, CTV device sales will surpass 111 million units in the fourth quarter of 2020, a 32% growth from the previous quarter and a 6% growth year-over-year. Game consoles are the fastest growing device (150% growth), per the report, with both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X hitting shelves this year. Meanwhile, media streamers will see a 42% growth in sales and smart TVs are projected to have a 9% growth.

Strategy Analytics projects that Amazon will be the leading vendor from these sales, with 12.8 million CTV devices sold. Samsung and Sony are expected to sell around 12 million each; LG and Nintendo about 7 million.

By the end of 2020, Strategy Analytics predicts that there will be 1.3 billion CTV devices in use worldwide.

“For many people, streaming video and TV are increasingly the default option when they switch on the big screen,” said David Watkins, director, Connected Home Devices. “Smart TVs are fast becoming the first-choice gateway to the fast expanding world of video-on-demand and internet TV services, and streamers and consoles are a great choice for those who want to upgrade on existing TV.”

The full Global Connected TV Device Vendor Market Share report is available on Strategy Analytics website. 

Connected TV is hot, attracting the attention of advertisers and media buyers. Eager to combine the measurability of digital video with the appeal of sight, sound and motion on the biggest living room screen, brands are paying top dollar to reach consumers via this medium. It’s also attracting fraud, though, causing concerns about inventory quality, invalid traffic and measurement. At Advanced Advertising, part of Fall TV 2020’s suite of virtual events, top executives from the world's largest media investment company GroupM, which recently issued a brand-safety playbook, and digital media verification company DoubleVerify, which has made comprehensive CTV measurement a priority, discuss the latest techniques for ensuring CTV media quality and performance, while the industry develops standards for the channel.

Fall TV 2020 interviewed Joe Barone, managing partner, Brand Safety Americas, at GroupM ahead of the Sept. 14 Advanced Advertising session, about the topic, the event and trends in the media industry.

Q: What are you looking forward to most out of this conversation? Where are you expecting the conversation to go, and what would you hope audiences will glean from it? 

Joe Barone: From our perspective, the key factors to unlocking further growth are technology standardization and transparent contract terms. These are the key takeaways I’d like to make sure are communicated.

Q: By the way, are you approaching your preparation any differently that you might have, if the pandemic had not hit? How (if at all) has the pandemic touched your lens on the space, when you engage in these conversations with other industry leaders? 

JB: The pandemic has accelerated the viewing shift to streaming, increasing the urgency for the factors listed above as well as comprehensive cross-platform audience measurement.

Q: What remain your greatest concerns about brand safety in the year ahead in the advanced TV space? How would you like to see the different players (agencies, brand safety solution providers, brands themselves, et al) in the ecosystem improve the state of play for all of us?

JB: The biggest brand safety issue is invalid traffic. As we move to a standard best practice of measuring IVT, it’s becoming obvious that all secondary markets for CTV inventory are rife with fraud. This awareness may begin to restrict or even reverse the flow of video investment to CTV, especially in light of the CPM premium vs. digital video. Publishers and resellers need to recognize and address this risk through technology standardization, transparent business terms, and third party measurement integrations.

Q: When you think about the clients your agency serves, and this area of concern, what do you most want them to know about where the industry is going and what they can expect? 

JB: CTV as user behavior is here to stay. We need clients willing to test and learn and then apply new insights to future investment. And please traffic more than one execution, frequency capping is still a major issue!

For more information about Advanced Advertising and Fall TV 2020, please visit FallTVEvents2020.com.

NEW YORK—The last three years have seen significant growth in viewership habits for Connected TV (CTV), to the point that it is beginning to be treated more like linear TV, according to a new whitepaper from FreeWheel, a Comcast company.

CTV is Comcast’s term for OTT. But regardless of what you call it, FreeWheel identifies that since 2017, CTV has become a destination for premium video viewing, having viewers invest a significant amount of time to content. In 2017, 36% of CTV visits lasted more than an hour; in the third quarter of 2019 that number rose to 61%.

CTV viewing is also following similar time patterns as linear TV viewing, with ad consumption (and by proxy, viewing) increasing gradually throughout the day and reaching a peak from 8-10 p.m. among all CTV device groups.

PLUS: Legacy Pay-TV Subscriptions Continue to Decline Amid OTT's Rise

“The viewing patterns we’re seeing on CTV are mirroring what we’ve historically seen in linear TV, suggesting viewers are turning to new ways to watch their favorite shows,” said David Dworin, vice president, Advisory Services, FreeWheel. “For advertisers, this represents an opportunity to tell their story to viewers they have not reached on other channels.”

Findings regarding advertising in the whitepaper show that there is a 97% average ad completion rate for CTVs. There is also a high authentication rate, with 68% of ad views generated by those that have logged in; that number is higher (90%) for smart TVs.

The full “Power of CTV: Audiences and Engagement” whitepaper is available online. 

Too frequently the word “middleman” is used as a pejorative, describing someone who not only brings buyers and sellers together but also has the tendency to be an opportunistic interloper.

Look no further than the occasional GEICO car insurance commercial, TheCompanyStore.com bedding ad or any number of local siding, online flower and buy-direct prescription eyeglass and contact lens pitches for examples.

But there are times when it’s essential for someone with the right qualifications to enter the middle ground between parties to make a transaction happen. Sean Doherty sees his company Wurl doing just that in the connected TV marketplace.

A co-founder and CEO of Wurl, Doherty says his B2B network, which interconnects video producers, video services and advertisers, is mending what has proven to be a fragmented market, enabling video producers to reach a bigger footprint with their ad-supported content and advertisers to buy audiences for their commercials at scale.

In this interview, Doherty discusses how Wurl is removing the friction that has plagued connected-TV channels, content producers and advertisers; the way the parties to these transactions have responded over the past year to its offer; and how every new player who connects only strengthens the overall network.

(An edited transcript:)

TV Technology:What is Wurl out to accomplish?

Sean Doherty: We operate a B2B network that interconnects three different constituencies: video producers, video services and advertisers.

The sea change that our company is based on is this migration of viewers from legacy pay TV to connected TV. It’s hard to get everyone to agree on exactly what the numbers are but it seems like there is something like 25% or 30% of television living room viewing time now that is accomplished through internet connected devices, replacing normally what would have been pay TV. We think more than half of TV viewing time will migrate to this viewing platform in the next five years.

TVT:That looks like a big opportunity.

SD: It is a big opportunity because like traditional television for both programmers and advertisers, it is the living room experience. So, it’s high-production, lots of engagement, lots of reach—all of the things that are great about television programming and advertising. Like digital, CTV (connected TV) also has very granular targeting and measurement. Behavioral data can be gathered as well.

But the problem for our customers—both the video producers and advertisers—is that it’s very fragmented—aside from Hulu and Roku, which have pretty large businesses and ad-supported video on TV.

TVT:What’s the upshot of this fragmentation?

SD: Other than those two in the United States, there’s just a lot of tiny little $25-, $50- and $100 million pockets. Many are even smaller than that, and that’s a problem for video producers because they want distribution.

They want a large footprint to receive their ad-supported video, but building connections to each of these individual video services is very expensive to do and to maintain.

TVT:What about on the ad side of the equation?

SD: The big problem for advertisers, who love the idea of connected TV inventory, is they want to buy it at scale. They want to buy it like they have bought TV for the past 40 years, and it is just practically impossible to do it.

When we first started this business, we used to hear these kinds of paradoxical statements from our customers. The video producers would say: “We’ve got plenty of inventory, but not enough ad buyers.” And the ad buyers would say: “We have plenty of demand, but not enough inventory.”

And we asked, “What’s going on here?” It turns out the problem is they are both right, but there is a scale problem in trying to put it all together.

TVT:So, how does your B2B network remedy the problem?

SD: The simple idea we had about one year ago was to create a network that would link the video producers and the video services and the advertisers, and do it in such a way that the video producers—our main customers—could launch TV channels—live, VOD and linear TV channels—via these video services and do it pretty much effortlessly.

Once they have a commercial arrangement with a video service, they just stay on our platform and turn on the channels. We also wanted to help them make money, so we wanted to enable targeted ad insertions through the distribution that we were enabling.

In the past six to eight months, we have launched three products: our Managed Channel Services to help these companies create linear program lineups and live events and schedule them; our AdSpring product, which is basically ssDAI [Server Side Dynamic Ad Insertion] and targeting product for mid-roll advertising; and then our Data Pool product, our reporting product to provide our customers with very granular reporting on people’s behavior, what they watch, for how long, what advertising they consume, impressions and beacons on the impressions.

We launched late last summer [2018], and what happened was the network just blew up.

TVT:Can you quantify the blowing up?

SD: Well, more video producers attracted more video services, and the inventories that got created on the network attracted more advertisers. Now it is growing some months, 30% to 40%. Pretty consistently for the past eight months, it has been growing at around 15% to 20% per month on just about every metric.

We are up to about 20 million monthly hours of viewing, and we are headed to more than 25 million hours.

We are hitting about 100 million unique CTV devices through the video services that are connected to our network. And about 30% to 35% of those become monthly access viewers.

TVT:Have you seen similar result on the advertising side of the equation?

SD: Our advertising demand is just taking off. As all of the streaming that happens on this network grows, it creates inventory. We now have about 450 million ad avails that we are creating each month and that will soon be closer to 500 million.

To fill that inventory, we run this AdSpring service that is sort of in the middle of every ad request.

TVT:How so?

SD: Let’s say you are watching ABC News on Samsung TV PLUS through our network. We are delivering all of the streaming to you. We receive an ad request when an ad pod is close to being inserted based on where ABC News scheduled it.

We get that ad request about 500 milliseconds in advance of when the ad is supposed to be placed, and then we route the ad request to whomever is supposed to fill it.

So, 4 to 4.5 billion times a month, an ad request goes across our network and hopefully an ad comes back and fills and gets displayed.

TVT:You’ve mentioned Roku and Samsung TV PLUS as two of the devices Wurl supports. Are you supporting others?

SD: We are constantly adding new devices to our network—whether it’s Roku or Samsung or Sinclair STIRR or Comcast [Xfinity] Flex and all of their X1 set top boxes for streaming. There are 25 to 28 million Roku devices, and some percentage of those become active users.

Those active users and the number of hours of viewing for each of those active users are increasing each month because the quality of the content on our network is increasing. With more hours of viewing, you get more ad inventory and more impressions. That all translates into a hockey stick of growth across this network of networks that we have built across all of these C-TV services.

TVT:Support for all of this ever-increasing universe of CTV devices must place quite a technical burden on Wurl.

SD: We have about 22 or 23 engineers—our whole company is 35 employees. They spend more time on what you just described than any other activity. Each platform has its own spec for what you need to deliver to them.

So Twitch has their own API for ad insertion, and Samsung has HLS with HLS ad markers. Roku has something else. Sling’s got MPEG TS with SCTE markers. Each of these guys has a 50- to 70-page spec about what you must do to deliver a live streaming channel or live event to them. So our job is to create what we call “connectors.”

TVT:I would imagine that’s a big value proposition—relieving customers and potential customers of the headaches associated with accommodating all those specs.

SD: It’s not just relieve them of the headache, but most of them can’t afford or don’t have the technical skills to do it. They just simply couldn’t do it.

We are trying to normalize this whole thing. We are like Switzerland in the center, or, maybe it’s more like the Tower of Babel—this big translation we do.

SILICON VALLEY, Calif.—The beginning of 2019 has shown no signs of the streaming revolution slowing down, as Conviva’s “State of the Streaming TV Industry” report covering the first quarter of 2019 details. However, the TV still holds a strong grip as the chief method for watching the latest content.

In Conviva’s report it was revealed that streaming viewership grew 72% year-over-year, and the rate of consumption growth increased by 49%. While this growth of streaming includes mobile devices (73% growth) and PCs (55% growth), it is connected TVs that is having the biggest impact.

Connected TVs viewership growth came in at 74%, while in terms of hours spent viewing streaming content, TVs were the top choice at 56%. Among available connected TV devices, Roku maintained its lead share of the market at 42.4%, but there was strong growth with Amazon Fire TV, which grew from 11.4% in Q1 2018 to an 18.6% share in the new report.

As far as how people are watching, virtual MVPDs—DirecTV Now, Hulu, Playstation Vue and Sling—had a 108% growth in viewership year-over-year; other services came in at 60% growth in the U.S.

Sports also remain a key component for viewership numbers, as the College Football National Championship game held the highest peak concurrent viewership of the quarter, 37.6% higher than the Q1 2018 peak event. Super Bowl LIII and March Madness also saw streaming boosts of 157% and 67%, respectively.

Not all of the findings were positive. Up to 47% of streaming TV ads are failing according to Conviva, carrying a high cost and impact on engagement.

“There’s no surprise that the streaming TV market is expanding significantly,” said Bill Demas, CEO of Conviva. “Maintaining a high-quality viewer experience tightly across content and advertising is increasingly important as streaming providers look to increase viewer engagement and monetization. The battle for streaming market share is a fast-growing pie and service must deliver an experience comparable to linear TV to fulfill viewer expectations.”

The findings of the report were based on an analysis of a trillion real-time transactions per day via three billion applications streaming on devices in 180 countries.

To access the full report, visit conviva.com.

Not too long ago, streaming was an emerging technology. Today, it’s the norm. In fact, cord-cutting isn’t just growing, it’s accelerating, according to the latest eMarketer data. But that means that the larger transformation toward connected TV (CTV) is no longer being driven by technology companies, nor is it being driven by media companies, many of which are scrambling to build their own direct-to-consumer platforms. At this moment, and throughout 2019, consumers will be in the driver’s seat. Here’s what that means for CTV.

The CTV revolution will be ad-supported

A funny thing happens when you cut the cord. At first, you can buy anything, but as most consumers discover, what they’re really doing is rebuilding their old bundles, with some modifications, of course. The reason is simple: everyone wants to experience as much of the second golden age of television as they can. But unlike the first golden age, household budgets mean consumers have to make choices as they rebuild their bundles.

With the exception of Netflix, you can bet that just about every streaming service out there, including the ones that will launch sometime in 2019, will subsidize subscribership with advertising. In fact, Hulu already offers advertising subsidies, and the company’s success with its $5 student bundle (which includes Spotify!) will certainly mean that the next generation of subscribers will be looking for a subsidized deal. Likewise, it would be very strange for Amazon not to turn to ads at some point, given the $2.2 billion dent the company made in the advertising business in 2018.

Bottom line: the skinny bundle that helped companies like Sling TV grow, isn’t economically viable—not without advertising subsidies. Eventually, as competition among streamers gives way to consolidation, we’ll see a reality check on the cost of an ecosystem teaming with premium content choices. Or put another way, as consumers continue to demand nearly unlimited choice at low prices, the only thing that will keep CTV viable is advertising.

But advertising won’t look like advertising as we know it

Direct-to-consumer brands are eating away at the biggest traditional advertisers, thanks to first party data. In fact, as first-party data capabilities grow, there’s even a new mantra in marketing to fire the CMO and replace them with a chief growth officer. After all, if you have enough first party data, you’re really only trying to solve two challenges: sales and attribution. Those challenges are tailor-made for CTV.

Direct-to-consumer brands are already experimenting with CTV, but as traditional advertisers fight back, their efforts won’t look the carpet-bombing ad blitzes of the legacy model. Instead, they’ll either buy as much third-party data as they can, or they’ll simply buy the direct-to-consumer upstarts, just as Unilever did when it acquired Dollar Shave Club. Or, if they can’t do it through acquisition, they’ll do it through imitation, just as P&G’s Gillette brand did with its on-demand razor service. But regardless of strategy, the writing is now on the wall for television. In 2019, direct-to-consumer advertising will begin to become the norm on CTV.

But will I still see the same ad over and over again?

It’s absolutely true that any consumer who has ever watched more than an hour of streaming TV has run into the annoyance of being hit over the head with the same—often totally irrelevant—ad at every single commercial break.

Initially, advertisers bought CTV as an add-on to their traditional buys. As a result, they weren’t worried about unduplicated reach because the streaming audiences were small, and the advertisers were still running the legacy playbook of carpet-bombing their audiences in the hopes that they’d hit their target. But as advertisers shift to a data-driven approach—whether they’re direct-to-consumer brands using first party data, or traditional brands using third-party data—solving the unduplicated reach problem becomes imperative. After all, the name of the game is to narrowcast your message, not broadcast it.

From both a sales and technology standpoint, the pieces are now in place to solve the unduplicated reach problem in 2019. That’s good news for advertisers and broadcasters, but it’s even better news for consumers. Because what’s at the heart of the CTV revolution isn’t a better way to deliver ads. The heart of the CTV revolution is a better consumer experience, and that’ll be the big story of 2019.

People who stream TV content now prefer to watch it on TV sets instead of personal computers, according to a new report from Conviva.  

The report, The Secret Life of Streamers Part II, found that during primetime, between 9 and 10 p.m., connected TV sets accounted for 48% of the episodic video plays in 2017, up from 35% during the 2016 survey.

The share for personal computers has plunged to 19% in 2017 from 39% in 2016.

"Conviva has a unique census-level data set capturing detailed viewing habits of billions of streaming video applications and devices across the globe,” said digital media analyst Colin Dixon of nScreen Media, researcher and author of the report. “Our most recent analysis shows connected TV dominating all devices 24/7, with plays increasing 75%, highlighting the rise of this platform at the expense of other screens. The transition from traditional television to streaming television has become more prominent, and viewers are binge-watching multiple shows via connected TV during primetime.”

The Secret Life of Streamers Part II follows a similar study done in 2016. That report noted a lunchtime bump in PC usage during lunchtime.

“The data strongly suggested people were catching up with their favorite shows on their PC while they ate their lunch,” the new report said. “The lunchtime bump is still there. Plays at noon are 20% higher than for the average hour. However, this is lower than last year, where the lunchtime peak was 29% higher.

[Read: All ‘Major’ TV Networks To Launch OTT, Direct-To-Consumer Services By 2022: TDG]

Some of the lunchtime viewings appear to have transferred to the smartphone, the report added. Last year, episodic plays from a smartphone in the noon hour were only 8% above average. This year the difference has increased to 19%.

Conviva also found that the average viewing session on connected TVs, 77 minutes, is twice the amount of time viewers spend watching streaming video on personal computers and mobile devices.

Conviva monitors over 14 billion streaming video hours per year from over three billion video viewing applications and devices around the globe. The data used in The Secret Life of Streamers Part II came from nearly two billion streaming sessions in North America from April 2016 to April 2017.

NEW YORK—When it comes to streaming, viewers say they are becoming ok with advertisements, according to a recent report from Telaria. In a survey that featured respondents from five countries, half of the respondents said that watching ads was a fair value exchange for low-cost content. They also found ads on connected TVs to be “less annoying” than those on linear TV. Ads on connected TVs also seem to work better, with more than half of weekly users researching or purchasing items they saw ads for.

Read the full story on TVT’s sister publication B&C.

NEW YORK—Around 21.4 million U.S. households have a streaming device connected to at least one TV set.* That’s about 18 percent of all U.S. TV households, according to Nielsen’s total. It’s a pretty big chunk, and people are using those devices to watch TV content. Around 46 percent of Americans now subscribe to a TV content streaming service, and 70 percent of them now “binge” watch an average of five episodes at a sitting, according to Deloitte.

Nielsen has now added this universe to its viewing metrics, not merely in terms of total number of people, but what device they’re using to stream content. Nielsen is now breaking out what type of peripheral—e.g., Roku Xbox, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Chromecast, PlayStation, Nintendo and Wii boxes—growth trends for usage of those peripherals, and what type of content people watch on them, and for how long. (See “Nielsen to Provide TV Connected Device Data by Brand.” March 23, 2016.)

The granular metrics reach beyond ratings, providing clients with the type of data they can use for targeted advertising and even dynamic, responsive programming. The data also reaches into the TV distribution plant, where proliferating TV streaming services are part of what’s driving the move toward IP-based technologies that can react more nimbly to new media file format specifications. The deep data could help broadcasters anticipate and prioritize file-format demand.

TV Technology asked Sara Erichson, executive vice president of Client Solutions and Audience Insights for Nielsen, about Nielsen’s decision to provide this type of granular data to its clients.

TV Technology: Have clients been asking for this data?
ERICHSON: Yes, in order to make smart business decisions, clients need to understand the growth in ownership and usage of TV connected devices, and how these devices are being used to access television content. This new service provides far more granularity than what was previously available.

TV Technology: What type of impact is this expected to show on overall viewing of specific formats?
ERICHSON: The impact will be more around how clients leverage the data. The new insights will allow them to analyze the viewing behaviors and demographics of homes that have TV-connected devices.
While penetration of streaming devices – like Roku – in U.S. households are still relatively modest, homes that own streaming devices used them often, as much as they use their DVRs. The growing popularity of streaming devices as an alternative means to bring television content to the television screen has implications for both content owners and distributors.

TV Technology: How often will Nielsen be releasing this data?
ERICHSON: The data will be available to subscribing clients on a daily basis.

TV Technology: Are there any privacy issues with regard to knowing who owns a Roku box, for example?
ERICHSON: No. All of this data are based on information collected from Nielsen’s opt-in, highly representative panel of 40,000 U.S. television households. It’s the same panel that our national television ratings are based on.

* Derived from NPD’s Connected TV Report and Ooyala’s citation of Park Associates figures.