As Streaming Becomes the Main Shelf, CTV Becomes the Holiday Power Play

With streaming fast (pun intended) becoming the default home screen, it’s no surprise that it surpassed the combined share of broadcast and cable in May this year (44.8% of all TV time), as per, Nielsen’s Gauge, and it has kept momentum into the fall. YouTube alone accounted for 12.6% of September TV viewing. That sets the table for a holiday spike when families binge seasonal films, kids’ shows, and live sports.

Smart marketers are following that attention. Emarketer forecasts US CTV ad spend to be easily over ~$38.36bn in 2026, with budgets consolidating around premium streaming inventory as services bundle, merge, and expand ad tiers. In short: more scalable reach and cleaner pipes to buy it.

Source: EMARKETER

Holiday Consumption on CTV Spikes AND It’s Plannable

Last December, streaming viewership hit record share as holiday movies, NFL Christmas Day games, and kids’ programming drove outsized tune-in. This pattern reliably lifts Q4 impression supply and creates contextual adjacency across family, shopping, and sports content, prime conditions for gift-driven categories and last-mile retail pushes.

Surveys this year back up the budget shift: a majority of marketers report increasing CTV allocations in 2025 and ranking CTV as a top holiday channel, reflecting the channel’s maturing performance toolkit and measurability. According to Samsung’s ACR data, in Q4 2024, CTV viewership jumped +8% YOY, making it one of the most effective channels to reach engaged consumers at scale.

Proof It Performs: Scale, Time Spent, and Ad-Supported Growth

Households are spending materially more time in ad-supported streaming environments, expanding the reachable, measurable audience for campaigns that need frequency control and rapid flighting. Panels tracking millions of smart TVs report streaming accounting for the majority of TV time this year, with ad-supported tiers now mainstream, fuel for performance-minded holiday plans.

In addition to spending more time streaming, a recent LG Ad Solutions report on U.S. consumer holiday shopping behavior and TV viewing habits revealed that a growing number of CTV audiences embrace relevant, targeted ads that help them discover helpful holiday deals.

What Buyers Should Do Now

Front-load inventory and cap CPM creep.

Lock preferred packages before late-November surges as demand concentrates around sports, seasonal films, and kids’ slates. Historical Q4 spikes suggest buying early preserves price stability.

Prioritize premium, in-demand CTV PMPs built for outcomes, not just scale.

The Q4 winners won’t be the brands spraying impressions across generic “holiday shopper” segments built off cookie cutter DMP files. They’ll be the ones buying into curated, high-velocity PMPs aligned to real campaign intent whether that’s gift-givers, new parents, upscale foodies, Spanish-dominant streamers, sports superfans, or holiday travel planners. Premium CTV deals that fuse context + audience + clean supply paths give buyers the trifecta this quarter needs: predictable pricing, real reach, and fast attribution to re-allocate budgets between Cyber Week and last-ship dates.

Favor premium direct paths.

Consolidation means fewer, bigger sellers; use SPO/“clean supply” routes to reduce the “tech tax” and improve log-level transparency for pacing and frequency governance. (Recent H2 outlooks forecast more concentrated CTV budgets - make them efficient.)

Optimize for incremental impact, not just impressions.

The goal in Q4 isn’t to hit the same audience more often, it’s to prove that CTV drove results you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. That means measuring beyond reach or completion rates. Track what happened after exposure (site visits, add-to-cart actions, app installs, QR scans, etc.) and compare it to a true control group to separate holiday hype from actual campaign lift.

And because streaming now over-indexes among cord-cutters, younger demos, and multilingual households, CTV delivers the strongest incremental returns exactly where linear can’t, meaning every extra dollar is doing more than just adding frequency.

The 2025 Q4 Takeaway

CTV is now the holiday “main shelf,” not the endcap. The audience has moved, the pipes to conversion exist, and the market’s growing budget share reflects that reality. If your mix still treats CTV as a nice-to-have, you’ll be buying leftovers while competitors secure the premium placements, the better prices, and the sales proof that closes FY25.