For years, video advertising meant one thing: buying time on a broadcast or cable network, paying a premium CPM against a broad demographic, and hoping the right people were watching. The measurement was blunt, the waste was significant for small businesses, and the feedback loop was slow. Marketing managers lived inside that model for decades because there was no alternative. There is one now, and it is reshaping serious marketing plans across the country.
Streaming TV and premium streaming have moved from an emerging channel to a core part of the mix. Maybe you need some stats and figures to prove it. Well, here you go: According to the IAB’s 2026 Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy Report, U.S. advertisers are expected to spend nearly $38 billion on CTV this year, with digital video projected to surpass $80 billion in total spend. For the first time in 2026, non-pay-TV households outnumber traditional pay-TV homes in the United States, and streaming now accounts for about 47% of all TV viewing.
The audience is always moving and businesses have to move to where the audiences are going. Video consumption is where you now win consumers attention. The question for marketing managers and automotive general managers is whether their budgets have moved with it, and whether they are buying in the right places.
Streaming TV is not just another line on a media plan. It changes how targeting, measurement, and follow-up work across the rest of the funnel. Traditional TV buys impression volume against a demographic proxy. Streaming buys impressions against actual households, using first-party and third-party data layers that do not exist in a linear environment. When you place an ad on Hulu or Amazon Prime Video, you are not buying a time slot. You are bidding for access to a confirmed household, often enriched with behavioral, purchase-intent, and geographic data. The ad is unskippable, full-screen, and easier to connect to outcomes like site visits, form fills, and in some cases, sales.
That measurability changes the value of the channel. When streaming TV becomes a foundational part of the plan, it creates a data signal that supports the rest of the funnel. Audiences exposed to a streaming TV ad can be retargeted across display, streaming audio, and more. Amazon Ads found that visitors exposed to a streaming TV ad were five times more likely to complete a desired action, such as a form submission, phone call, or dealership visit, than those who had not seen the ad.
For automotive, that matters. Industry research indicates that 61% of car shoppers say CTV ads influenced their purchase decision, and campaigns that include CTV in a broader media plan have shown returns of up to 6:1 on vehicle sales. Dealers shifting part of their traditional TV budget into Amazon DSP have also seen incremental reach at lower cost, especially among households linear TV no longer reaches.
One of the biggest mistakes I see in streaming is treating all inventory like it works the same way. It does not. Premium streaming publishers and vMVPDs sit at the top of the quality spectrum. Virtual MVPDs are subscription-based live TV services delivered over the internet, including YouTube TV, Hulu with Live TV, Sling, and FuboTV. These platforms attract paying subscribers, which usually means stronger engagement, authenticated audiences, and access to live sports and primetime programming. YouTube TV is expected to pass 14 million subscribers in 2026. Hulu with Live TV also reaches a large audience across entertainment, sports, and news.
Subscription video-on-demand platforms with ad tiers make up another premium layer. Amazon Prime Video and Peacock are the clearest examples. Amazon Prime Video’s ad-supported tier opened more than 100 million U.S. Prime households to addressable streaming advertising, while Peacock has become a major vehicle for live sports, including NFL, NASCAR, the Olympics, NBA, and NCAA coverage.
That premium inventory usually carries higher CPMs, often in the $20 to $45 range depending on the buy. Even so, the quality-adjusted value is often better than what advertisers get from a broad traditional TV buy with more waste built in. In my experience , you cannot judge a campaign by CPM alone. CPM can be inflated but it cis also driven by a factors like DSP fees, audience data costs, attribution tool costs, inventory, publisher, and more. If you tell your provider to get you premium inventory at industry low CPM’s, there will be corners cut to make that happen! More on this in a future blog.
FAST channels sit in a different lane. Platforms like Tubi, Pluto TV, and the Roku Channel are free to the consumer and funded entirely by ads. They are large and growing fast. Tubi reports more than 100 million monthly active users. Pluto TV serves more than 80 million monthly users, and FAST viewing reached 1.8 billion hours in August 2025 alone.
That does not make FAST bad. It just means it serves a different job. FAST is useful for scale, lower CPMs, and broad reach. But content quality can vary, brand adjacency is less predictable, and the audience often skews more value-conscious than purchase-ready. For broad awareness, FAST can play a real role. For campaigns built around conversion, premium publishers and vMVPDs usually outperform it on a cost-per-outcome basis. Insider tip, don’t sleep on FAST channels for video retargeting.
If there is one category that shows the value of premium streaming clearly, it is live sports. Live sports still deliver some of the most watched, most shared, and most brand-safe content in media. They are also one of the fastest-growing parts of premium streaming. Amazon Prime Video carries major live sports rights. Peacock carries the NFL Wild Card game, NASCAR, and the Olympics. YouTube TV and Hulu Live continue to deliver major network sports inventory.
For automotive advertisers, this matters because sports has always been a strong context for dealership marketing. Streaming adds a layer linear never really offered. It can connect an in-market shopper watching a game to a measurable action later. NBCUniversal’s LIVE Total Impact product is one example, giving marketers a way to connect Peacock sports exposure to real-world outcomes.
Understanding publisher quality is only half the job. The other half is how the inventory gets bought. The Trade Desk and Amazon DSP have emerged as two of the most important platforms for premium streaming access. The Trade Desk has built a strong position on the independent buy side, with direct supply connections and tools designed to improve transparency, pricing, and optimization. Amazon DSP takes a different route by tying Amazon’s first-party shopping and behavioral data to premium inventory across Prime Video, Twitch, and Fire TV, while also offering many of the same tools.
Both platforms help solve a measurement problem that has frustrated automotive marketers for years. With the right attribution setup, streaming impressions can be tied back to vehicle sales, showroom visits, and VDP traffic. But that does not happen automatically. It takes platform access, deal structure knowledge, and campaign architecture built around actual business outcomes.
As someone who has worked in both platforms and others, as well as teaches about these platforms at WVU, take it from me when I say there are important differences in how the major DSP’s operate, but, the biggest impactor is your desired business outcomes. You should not approach STV as a single media campaign with a single goal. Think of it as an ecosystem and place your business objectives in tiers, then have the appropriate campaign developed for each tier.
One of the strongest arguments for premium streaming is what happens after the impression. When a consumer sees a brand in a premium streaming environment, brand recall, search intent, and site engagement tend to rise. Search Engine Land has reported that branded organic and paid search volume often spikes after CTV exposure. That is one of the clearest signs that streaming TV is not just an awareness tool. It influences the channels that close the sale.
In automotive, the path from awareness to purchase often runs 60 to 90 days or more. Streaming TV gives marketers a way to get in front of that shopper earlier, in a high-attention environment, with stronger audience signals than linear TV can offer. A household that is in market for a truck, lives near a dealership, and is watching NFL content on Peacock is not just another impression. It is a valuable early signal that paid search and retargeting can build on later. Marketers who treat streaming TV as a side item instead of a core part of the strategy are leaving measurable results on the table.
The advantage in 2026 is not simply buying CTV. Most brands are already doing that. The advantage is knowing where premium inventory wins, where FAST fits, and how to connect those choices to actual outcomes. A strong streaming plan puts more weight behind premium publishers and vMVPD inventory when brand safety, audience quality, and purchase intent matter. It uses live sports where that adjacency supports the objective. It uses FAST with a clear purpose, usually for reach extension, not as a substitute for premium inventory. And it builds measurement into the plan from the start.
What separates good streaming plans from average ones is not access to information. It is execution. The technology, the data, the publisher relationships, and the attribution setup all matter. So does knowing which inventory deserves the budget in the first place. The audience has moved to streaming. The budget needs to follow.
Silverback works with automotive marketing managers and general managers as a trusted managed-seat partner across Amazon DSP and The Trade Desk. If your next planning cycle includes streaming TV, let’s talk.
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