Executive Overview
The connected TV (CTV) and ad-supported streaming ecosystem is hurtling toward a massive structural transformation. According to new data from the Glossy+ Research report, "The Marketers’ 2026 Guide to a Shifting CTV Landscape," YouTube continues its dominant reign, capturing the largest slice of brand and agency ad placements and budgets for the fourth consecutive year. Yet, beneath this familiar hierarchy, the foundational mechanics of how brands buy, measure, and deploy media on streaming platforms are on the brink of an overhaul.
Driven by impending major media mergers—including The Walt Disney Company’s plans to integrate Hulu fully into Disney+, and Paramount’s prospective combination of Paramount+ and Max—the streaming marketplace is contracting. Industry executives anticipate that these maneuvers will reduce market fragmentation, alter pricing power, and streamline audience targeting. However, legacy pain points persist. Advertisers continue to grapple with opaque walled gardens, persistent measurement hurdles, and the ongoing tension between driving down costs and ensuring true business-outcome attribution.
This report provides an in-depth analysis of the 2026 CTV landscape, unpacking survey data from 125 brand and agency professionals alongside insights from top-tier marketing and media executives.
Detailed Chronology & Market Shifts
To understand where the ad-supported streaming landscape is headed in 2026 and beyond, it is essential to trace how platform adoption and budget allocations have evolved over recent years.
The 2026 Platform Hierarchy
In the Q1 2026 survey data, YouTube secured the top spot for ad placements, with 75% of brand and agency respondents confirming they currently place ads on the platform. This cements its unmatched reach across both user-generated content and professional programming. Amazon’s Prime Video (with ads) followed closely behind, capturing 47% of advertiser adoption. Meanwhile, Hulu and Paramount+ locked down a third-place tie, with 43% of respondents utilizing each service.
When it comes to financial commitment, the top platforms commanded the lion’s share of budgets in 2025:
- YouTube: Captured the largest share of ad budgets for 50% of respondents.
- Amazon Prime Video (with ads): Followed in second place, claiming the top budget spot for 18% of respondents.
- Hulu: Secured third place at 8%.
The Looming Consolidation Wave
While the podium positions for platform adoption remained relatively stable year-over-year, the next twelve months are projected to rewrite the competitive playbook. Two tectonic industry shifts are set to reshape the ecosystem:
- The Disney Consolidation: The Walt Disney Company has formally scheduled the integration of Hulu into Disney+ by the end of 2026, creating a unified domestic streaming app experience.
- The Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery Convergence: Pending regulatory approval of the Paramount Skydance acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount plans to merge Paramount+ and Max into a single, comprehensive streaming destination.
These mega-mergers represent a systemic pivot away from hyper-fragmentation and toward a consolidated model that industry analysts are increasingly calling "the modern cable bundle."
Supporting Context & Metrics: Challenges in the CTV Ecosystem
Despite billions of dollars flowing into ad-supported streaming, brand and agency leaders report deep-seated frustrations regarding measurement, transparency, and media costs.
Measurement, Attribution, and the "Walled Garden" Dilemma
For consecutive years, a lack of standardized measurement and restricted budgets have ranked as the primary pain points for CTV advertisers. As traditional broadcast budgets migrate to streaming, publishers have largely operated as walled gardens—deploying encryption tools and tightly guarding user data to protect their competitive moats. This fragmentation has historically made cross-platform attribution a mathematical nightmare for marketers.
Nevertheless, incremental progress is being made. Data collaboration is expanding through strategic partnerships with Retail Media Networks (RMNs). A prime example is Walmart’s streaming benefit, which grants Walmart+ members a choice between free access to Paramount+ or Peacock, simultaneously creating closed-loop data loops that connect media exposure directly to point-of-sale data.
Furthermore, platforms are slowly opening their once-opaque ecosystems. Agencies like Tinuiti have recently partnered with Netflix to test conversion API (CAPI) tools, alongside deep-dive clean room integrations with Amazon and Google. These advancements are slowly transforming traditional black-box environments into more deterministic ecosystems capable of tracking users down to an actual purchase or revenue event.
CPM Pressures and Cost Dynamics
The explosion of ad-supported tiers—expanding the market to roughly a dozen major streaming platforms—has historically worked to the advertiser’s advantage. The sheer volume of supply and inventory fragmentation has exerted continuous downward pressure on Cost Per Mille (CPM) pricing, allowing savvy media buyers to drive hard bargains.
However, industry experts anticipate that the impending mega-mergers will stabilize these fluctuating metrics. By reducing the number of isolated selling points and gathering audiences under fewer, larger roofs, pricing is expected to find a sustainable floor.
Content Transparency and Brand Safety Concerns
As media buyers mature in their CTV strategies, their concerns have shifted from basic execution to qualitative alignment. Glossy’s survey revealed distinct anxieties across different platforms:
- YouTube: 17% of respondents cited brand safety as their primary concern, driven largely by the platform’s massive volume of user-generated content.
- Disney+ (with ads) and Hulu: 19% of respondents pointed to a lack of transparency into content as their top concern on both platforms.
- The Roku Channel: Tied closely with 17% reporting content transparency anxieties.
- Amazon Prime Video (with ads): Cited by 15% of respondents as a transparency worry.
Experts note that these transparency concerns are frequently less about brand safety and more about brand acceleration. Advertisers increasingly evaluate whether specific programming environments offer the right cultural synergy, tone, and prestige to elevate their brand equity.
Official Industry Perspectives
To capture the sentiment of key players across the media supply chain, industry leaders weighed in on the structural shifts defining the 2026 landscape.
The Agency Perspective: Easing Targeting vs. Stabilizing Pricing
Harry Browne, VP of TV, Audio, and Display Innovation at Tinuiti, believes the upcoming platform consolidations will fundamentally streamline audience planning:
"Targeting is an exercise in figuring out which platforms consumers might be on, reaching them on those platforms and using different signals to reach them in the right place. There’s hope that if we consolidate platforms, that exercise becomes easier."
Browne also highlighted the unique role that Operating Systems (OS) and hardware manufacturers play in bridging fragmented gaps:
"One of the partners that’s been really effective in this fragmented space is somebody like a Roku or an OEM… because they have this opportunity to reach people on several different streaming platforms regardless of which one they’re watching. This consolidation helps other individual streaming platforms compete a little bit better with that kind of an argument."
Regarding cost dynamics, Browne expects the era of plunging CPMs to find a stabilizing floor:
"My expectation is that we’re going to see a bottoming out of the CPM trends that we’ve seen over the last couple of years… Now there are 11 or 12 major ad-supported streaming platforms eating up a lot of time. All of that has led to a downward pressure on CPMs, which has been a huge benefit to advertisers. My expectation is that this kind of consolidation helps bottom out that pressure and starts to stabilize CPMs."
The Publisher Perspective: The "Mega Bundle" Era
Offering a publisher-side counterpoint, Brian Albert, Managing Director of U.S. Video Deals and Creative Works at YouTube, raised concerns over the long-term consumer experience resulting from industry consolidation:
"The most immediate effect on viewers will be going from ‘too many apps’ to ‘the mega bundle,’ essentially creating a landscape that looks like the old cable TV model."
Looking toward the future of media investments, Albert asserts that the metrics governing media spend must evolve:
"Looking ahead, the efficiency of the spend will become more important than the raw cost of the impression. Marketers will want to know that every dollar spent is optimizing for actual business lift rather than just a rising market rate."
Echoing the importance of advanced data collaboration, Kristina Shepard, EVP of Streaming, Performance Sales, and Partnerships at NBCUniversal, emphasized the shift toward actionable intelligence:
"The industry is moving toward smaller, higher-quality, more actionable datasets that improve modeling and lead to better business decisions. Across the industry, we see progress being driven by stronger data collaboration and strategic partnerships, like those with retail media networks, that are enabling more closed-loop attribution with clearer links between media exposure and real business outcomes."
The Brand Perspective: The Power of Premium Format Trust
Brands themselves continue to view Connected TV not merely as a performance marketing channel, but as an indispensable vehicle for building long-term consumer trust.
Lauren Sherman-Kaoud, Chief Marketing and Creative Officer at Ruggable, emphasized the psychological impact of the traditional television format on modern audiences:
"CTV and linear in general are incredible brand trust interest mechanisms. Inherently, when you’re watching a show, whether it be streaming or not, and a brand pops up, it is still meaningful to the consumer that the brand is showing up in that larger format. That will forever be true."
Future Outlook
As the Connected TV landscape navigates the remainder of 2026 and looks ahead to 2027, the rules of engagement are undergoing a metamorphosis.
- Fewer Silos, Better Interoperability: The impending mergers of Disney/Hulu and Paramount/Max will reduce the cognitive and operational load on media planners. By consolidating user bases into larger ecosystems, these multi-app houses will be better equipped to offer robust, deterministic measurement tools that rival the capabilities of retail media networks and tech giants.
- Shift from Impression Cost to Business Lift: With CPM pricing projected to bottom out and stabilize, the competitive differentiator for streaming publishers will no longer be cheap inventory. Instead, success will be determined by a platform’s ability to prove tangible business outcomes, leveraging conversion APIs, clean rooms, and first-party data loops.
- The Renaissance of the "Cable Bundle": Ironically, the streaming wars are coming full circle. As standalone services bundle together to survive, consumers and advertisers alike will inhabit an ecosystem that closely mirrors the linear television model of the past—albeit supercharged with programmatic precision, digital data integration, and full-funnel attribution.
For brand marketers, the mandate is clear: navigate the consolidation wave carefully, lean into deterministic measurement frameworks, and demand transparency that aligns media placement with true brand equity and business growth.
