Remember “back in the day” when one of the best parts about streaming was no commercials?
What a glorious time it was. No more poorly timed commercial breaks before the big reveal. No more sitting through four minutes of ads to find out who got voted off the island. No 4 minutes straight of snoozey spots before the movie starts. You simply paid your monthly fee, hit play, and sat back to enjoy the abundant bliss of uninterrupted binging.
It was sweet. It was simple. And now it’s gone.
Fast forward to today, and nearly every major streaming service offers some form of ad-supported viewing. Netflix has ads. Disney+ has ads. Hulu has ads. Peacock, Paramount+, and Prime Video all have ads – the list goes on and on. After the masses flocked to streaming in avoidance of the “commercial crush”, what’s driving streaming services to adopt the one thing we cord-cutters hated most about cable?
Survey says: streaming is expensive. Streaming platforms are forecasted to spend as much as $101 billion by year’s end to pad their libraries with original programming, secure exclusive content, and be the streaming home for live sports. (Source)
That’s when the realization sets in: Subscription revenue alone could never sustain streaming’s rapid growth. Advertising unlocked another much-needed revenue stream, and it turns out ads were a revenue-driving tradeoff most consumers were willing to accept.
Streaming viewership has consistently increased year after year, suggesting that consumers rejected the traditional advertising model. But what if we misread the room?
What if consumers didn’t hate advertising – they just hated bad advertising? Bad as in too many commercial breaks, the same ads over and over again – and, the creme de la creme – ads that have absolutely nothing to do with the consumer who’s watching. Sorry, Life Alert, I’m just not in the market this decade.
Streaming has an opportunity to rewrite the ad experience and turn all those negatives of traditional TV into a memorable experience that leaves a net positive impression on consumers.
Instead of trying to recreate the traditional commercial break in a new environment, streaming platforms can use levers unavailable to traditional TV, such as audience data, frequency controls, and alternative ad formats like pause ads, shoppable experiences, and more. All for a discount off sticker streaming prices, of course. And from the looks of things, consumers are increasingly willing to make the trade.
According to Nielsen, more than 70% of all television was ad-supported in Q2 2026 (Source). Moreover, streaming represents nearly half of all ad-supported TV viewing. The shift is even more prominent amongst adults 18-49, where streaming accounts for nearly two-thirds of the time they spend with ad-supported TV. This suggests the mass traditional TV audience didn’t disappear. It moved. And advertising followed suit.
This is where things get interesting for CMOs and marketing strategists. One of streaming’s biggest challenges for advertisers has always been fragmentation. TV let brands reach mass audiences through a relatively small set of networks and programs. Streaming broke that mold into dozens of different platforms, subscriptions, and viewing habits. The pivot has enabled those platforms to build serious advertising businesses of their own, and brands have no choice but to take notice.
Netflix reaches 250M+ monthly ad-supported viewers, Prime Video 315M+, and Disney nearly 160M. At that scale, streaming isn’t incremental to the TV plan. It is the TV plan.
This forces marketers to rethink a pretty outdated distinction. We shouldn’t be asking “How much should we spend on TV vs. streaming?” We should be asking “How do we build the best video plan around the audience we’re trying to reach?” Why? Because consumers are no longer thinking about their video viewing habits in terms of linear vs. CTV vs. AVOD vs. FAST.
They’re just watching TV.
This scale by itself is not what makes this evolution interesting.
Streaming combines the impact of the home’s biggest screen with smarter targeting and measurement. Instead of buying programs based on who might be watching, advertisers can use first-party data and audience signals to reach the people who matter most. And measurement goes beyond impressions – connecting campaigns to brand lift, site activity, search behavior, and even sales.
The creative possibilities are changing too.
Interactive ads, pause ads, QR codes, shoppable experiences, and other emerging formats are turning TV from something consumers need to watch and recall later into something they can immediately act on. Innovid found that interactive CTV ads drove 10x the engagement of standard video ads, with viewers spending 92 seconds engaging with interactive formats compared to standard pre-roll (Source). Amazon reported that campaigns using interactive ads drove a 30% lift in brand awareness and a 28% increase in purchase intent, ultimately leading to a 36% increase in overall orders (Source).
There’s a catch. (There’s always a catch!)
Streaming has a chance to build a better advertising experience, but only if we resist the temptation to turn it into the old one.
As additional dollars flow into streaming, the pressure to add more inventory will most certainly follow. More breaks. More ads. Rinse and repeat. Which unfortunately means more of the things consumers were trying to escape in the first place.
The opportunity is not to simply put ads on Netflix for the sake of having ads on Netflix. The opportunity is to rethink what could be when better data, better technology, better creative, and better scale all intersect on the same screen.
The winners of the next great (screen) race won’t be the brands that interrupt the most content. It’ll be the brands that understand the delicate balance of the value exchange at hand: that consumers are willing to give us a smidge of their attention in return for more affordable access to the content they love. It’s up to us to respect that as much as the environment allows us.
Streaming was supposed to kill commercials. Instead, it may have finally given us the chance to make them better.
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