Survey: Ad-Free Antenna TV?
The television landscape continues its dramatic transformation, but Ring Digital's latest #FutureOfTV.Live ?? Summer 2025 quarterly research reveals some unexpected truths about where viewers are headed. (For the complete report simply navigate to RingDigital.tv and sign up to my quarterly list for free.)
As usual, our survey data adjusts for age and gender demographics in the US and dives into the nooks and crannies of viewing behaviors. Indeed, I took a new approach for some of the questions in the survey whereby we dive into users of Roku, Prime Video, Over the Air Antenna and Cable/Satellite TV.
Without further ado, here’s what we learned.
An Appetite for Ad-Free Antenna TV?
Before we dive into our title topic, we need to be clear:
This question was posed to me by a broadcaster with a huge OTA presence and very little streaming distribution. And the idea here was not to probe a secret ATSC 3.0 possibility, since ad-free viewing is not part of what ATSC 3.0 is about. The new wheel-spinning antenna standard is purely built on requirements for enhancing advertising, not getting rid of it.
But would it make sense to direct some effort toward an ad-free local TV experience? We wanted to know: Would over-the-air (OTA) antenna users pay to remove commercials from their free local broadcasts?
When looked through that lens and knowing that cable and satellite TV have DVRs that do allow manual ad-skipping by viewers, it was notable to me that a fifth of antenna users were interested in such a theoretical ad-free offer. More striking still was the age difference here, with 18–24-year-olds that use Antenna (yes there were a few!) selecting Definitely Yes to premium ad-free viewing at a 66% rate. Older respondents were less willing to pay for ad-free viewing, and no one over 65 registered this preference.
While the growth of ad-supported streaming is front and center these days, the idea of ad-free viewing is still a huge draw for the US viewing population, and it’s particularly strong amongst younger viewers.
This finding becomes even more significant when viewed against the backdrop of streaming's continued growth. While services like Netflix have trained viewers to expect ad-free experiences (for a price), local broadcast television has remained stubbornly tied to the advertising model. The opportunity for a "premium OTA" tier could represent a new revenue stream for broadcasters struggling with declining linear viewership.
After all, as the chart below shows, every successful streaming service today has both ad-free and ad-supported tiers. Maybe a local broadcast station could benefit from a similar structure?
Pluto TV: The Comeback Kid?
Since at least 2021, my surveys have captured a dominant Pluto TV that began to wane and cede ground to Tubi among other AVOD and FAST platforms. But my latest survey showed an uptick in the position of Pluto TV and it’s worth taking note and revisiting this for next quarter. It may well accrue to the benefit of owner Paramount.
Pluto TV and The Roku Channel flipped positions from my previous report. This latest shows Pluto TV being selected by 28% of respondents vs. The Roku Channel’s 23%. In our previous survey the two platforms were roughly even.
This is precisely the kind of tea-leaf data that my #FutureOfTV.Live surveys have produced over the years and that have proven to be a valuable source of advanced notice on big trends. To be sure, I don’t know why this happened or how sustainable this move is for Pluto TV. But there are several possible explanations for it.
First, Pluto TV does benefit from Viacom ownership, providing access to established content libraries including Nick, Comedy Central, and MTV, all laid out in a schedule that relies heavily on sophisticated content programming strategies that balance viewer engagement with operational efficiency.
Second, since part of Roku’s business is helping great content owners stand-out, perhaps a new strategic relationship between Roku and Pluto TV is part of the cause. As Cord Cutters News outlined, the two companies have a partnership in the realm of interactive advertising. I personally have not seen Pluto TV ads on the Roku home page, but that would be a winning tactic that could impact relative viewership.
But content is King, and of course the most plausible explanation is a series of programming and promotion moves and channel launches, including The Martha Stewart Channel in April, a major “Feel the Free” national advertising campaign, and a continuous string of high-profile seasonal promotions including the Cinema of Summer and Free Movie Weekend.
It begs the question:
What does the Roku Channel want to be when it grows up? Is Roku working to make money from promoting its content partners’ Apps? Or to compete for eyeballs on its own EPG?
This is going to be a growing trade-off that Roku will have to navigate. The company is in the enviable position of being right in the middle of our streaming transformation, but are they looking to serve content partners or displace them? As the industry evolves, I suspect this question will be increasingly challenging to manage.
A Roku Word Cloud, Designed by Claude (A Sidebar on LLMs)
Over the many years that I have been running these surveys; I’ve attempted a word cloud more than a few times. But as my publication date neared, I was never able to carve out the time it would take to clean up, segment, and visualize the data in a beautiful way.
That has all changed with LLMs. While it didn’t work on the first try, I was eventually able to get one of the LLMs to correct, segment, analyze and present a usable word cloud.
I asked users of the Roku Channel app to name their favorite programs. The results are revealing in a few ways.
First off, it’s worth noting just how many respondents did not name a favorite show, but instead wrote-in a genre, like Movies, Westerns, or Crime. Others wrote in, “no favorite.”
While we know content is King, to me this data reveals how many viewers are primarily genre-driven when they think about “content”. They don’t have a favorite show on the top of their minds. We know that hit titles drive viewing and subscribing, but a huge portion of streaming audiences aren’t tuning in for specific shows. This, in turn, highlights the importance of discovery in a visual way.
The second insight for me was more anecdotal and fun. I have seen 2 Broke Girls advertised on my Roku home page quite a bit in the past quarter, and it’s validating to see it come up in the data.
And finally, as you look at the purple show titles below, a phrase that sticks out for me is “rock solid content franchises.” I’m no programming expert, but many FAST platforms I’ve browsed do feel overstuffed with second or third-tier content. It’s clear with the word cloud that viewers using the Roku Channel have good stuff to like.
Prime Video: The Art & Science of “Feeling Free”
Perhaps no single finding better illustrates the current streaming landscape than Amazon Prime Video's user patterns. We asked respondents that selected Prime Video to tell us how they engaged with the service.
A healthy majority of users (51%) stick with the ad-supported tier included with their Prime membership. And to date only 13% opt to pay the $2.99 monthly fee for ad-free viewing.
A notable and healthy 24% of respondents say they use Prime Video to access both Prime Video originals and other streaming services (many examples were articulated in the question) — signaling success in Amazon’s broader aggregation strategy. Unlike Netflix, which relies heavily on wholesale distribution partnerships, Prime Video is deeply integrated into Amazon’s own ecosystem. This positions Amazon uniquely: rather than being just a content platform, it’s a content hub.
Prime Video supports over 900 content add-ons globally, offering access to more than 218,000 titles through services like Max, Paramount+, Starz, and Apple TV+. With a single sign-in and unified billing, users can explore a range of third-party services without leaving the Amazon interface.
The Inexorable Rise of Big CTV
We bundled the three top CTV OEMs into one research question option. We bundled a few other second-tier CTV OEM brands into a second CTV OEM bundle. Combining giants Samsung, LG, and Sony into one selection option yielded a combined 28% usage rate placing them ahead of traditional Cable/satellite set-top boxes (25%) and edging out Roku devices (24%).
Shoppable TV? Like Window Shopping?
Nope. They really buy.
Only 12% of the respondents selected Shopping TV as a genre preference. This was the smallest slice amongst all genres listed.
And yet – if we assume the US adult population is at 260 million to match our research, it amounts to about 31 million Americans. Not small in absolute terms.
But more revealing for me was the datapoint that showed me these aren’t window shoppers. When they tune-in, they buy. Only 11% watch content without making purchases.
Looking Ahead: Would FAST Accelerate Cord-Cutting?
Finally, more in the report on this, but another finding that challenged my thinking on cord-cutting was this:
Even after educating a slice of cable and satellite survey respondents about the possibility of getting free local stations via streaming and therefore no longer needing a pay TV device or an antenna - i.e. FAST - the data suggest that FAST versions of local broadcast stations would probably not contribute to accelerated cord-cutting amongst pay TV subscribers.
To be sure, a large portion of pay TV subscribers use a DVR, subscribe for sports, if they’re news viewers they likely watch cable news, and so forth. So, it’s not a surprise to me that this question turned out the way it did. But it’s worth asking this question:
The population remaining as pay TV subscribers today probably looks dramatically different than it did even a few years ago, the last time I tried to nail down the percentage of pay TV subscribers that were DVR takers. You can bet this will be in my next report. Sign up for free.
The Zoom Out: The Future of TV is … Unknown
After well over a decade of conducting these surveys, I can safely say that I’ve had very few runs that didn’t shed some light on a very uncertain future.
Today’s streaming landscape is really settling in now. Sure, there will be continued innovation and consolidation. But to me, the next chapter is this:
We’ve gone from a few possible viewing behaviors to a bazillion. More genres, biz models, formats, delivery methods, devices, and content.
What that means to me – and be forewarned, this is probably too optimistic - is that there are going to be a ton of arbitrage-like opportunities in the future to take advantage of ways that audiences are under-monetized or inefficiently reached or over-reached.
What’s your biggest unknown? Send me an email at brian [at] ringdigital.tv with any proposed survey questions for next quarter and I’ll take them into consideration.
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