Connected TV is the growth line in the 2026 media plan, and this year the forecasts and the buyers agree. The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s 2026 outlook, based on a survey of about 200 U.S. buy-side decision-makers at brands and agencies, projects U.S. advertising spend will grow 9.5 percent year over year, with connected TV spending up 13.8 percent — second only to social media at 14.6 percent, and well ahead of the broader market. Tentpole events including the Winter Olympics, the FIFA World Cup and the U.S. midterm elections are expected to add billions in incremental spend.
Buyer intentions match the forecast. The 2026 CTV/OTT Advertiser Survey from Advertiser Perceptions and Premion found nearly seven in ten CTV advertisers — 70 percent — expect to increase their connected TV spending, by an average of 17 percent. The reasons advertisers gave are telling: the ability to reach highly engaged, opt-in audiences led at 44 percent, followed by combining television’s branding power with digital precision at 40 percent. Only a quarter of the new money comes from overall budget growth; the rest is reallocated from linear TV, digital display, paid search and social.
The structure of buying is changing with the budgets. Integrated or hybrid teams now control 55 percent of CTV and streaming budgets, a sign that streaming is no longer a side experiment run by a digital team but part of total video planning. Programmatic pipes carry most of the money — industry estimates put programmatic at more than 70 percent of CTV transactions, rising toward 90 percent of display-based CTV spend — while private marketplaces and guaranteed deals handle the premium end. Live sports commands the highest prices, with reported CPMs far above standard streaming inventory, alongside completion rates near 97 percent.
Measurement remains the friction. Because viewers rarely convert on the television itself, last-touch models systematically undervalue CTV, pushing advertisers toward multi-touch attribution, incrementality testing and media mix modeling. Retail media partnerships — streamers pairing with large retailers’ data — are emerging as one answer, giving TV ads a line of sight to actual purchases.
For planners, the practical shift is organizational as much as financial. A channel growing at 13.8 percent, bought programmatically, measured on outcomes and planned by hybrid teams does not belong in a legacy TV line or a display line. It is becoming the center of the video budget — and the teams built to manage reach and frequency across linear and streaming together are the ones capturing its value.
The upfront market is adapting in parallel. Buyers negotiating this year’s streaming deals are pressing for alternative currencies and outcome guarantees that older panel-only measurement could not support, and sellers are increasingly willing to trade on them. The net effect is a television market that prices, transacts and proves itself more like digital every quarter — while still selling the one thing digital display never could: a full screen, a sound-on audience and a room full of people watching together.
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