CTV Is Defining the Future of Streaming Ads
Connected TVs are showing how the future of streaming will be consumed: on a typical television screen. There are lots of CTV viewership stats floating around the internet, but they basically all say the same thing. Over 85% of U.S. households have at least one CTV device, making it near universal. Before you wave your hand that TVs are for an older generation, data shows around 60% of Gen Z streaming content on CTVs.
Perhaps that’s what makes CTV such an alluring destination for advertisers. Forget about the different approaches to advertising right now, about programmatic ads, or personalized ads, or SGAI, or SSAI. Streaming video on CTV (which surpassed cable in percentage of content consumed in 2025) is simply where the viewers are, which is why so much advertising energy is going there.
But there’s more to it than that.
While advertising has long been a unidirectional experience, there have been forays into making it bidirectional for a long time. The value proposition is pretty clear. If people are watching a show and an advertisement comes on showcasing a product that interests them, wouldn’t it be great if they could grab the remote, push a couple of buttons, and have it delivered to their doorstep?
But it’s never really worked like that. Bidirectional experiences on cable, like MoCA and OCAP, were just a flop. Then, when video delivery leaned into streaming, the opportunity popped up again. Instead of a remote control, there was a mouse. People were used to clicking.
But, again, interactive ads on a computer didn’t really pan out either, probably because at the same time, CTV devices were proliferating and people were going back to the television. Those CTV devices were built on very open technologies, allowing users to install apps in much the same way they had become accustomed to doing on their phones and tablets. Unlike those attempts to create interactivity using a cable remote, CTV apps provided an order-of-magnitude more opportunity. Not only could they expose a myriad of different interactive experiences, but viewers could engage through both remote and—even better—their smartphones.
Whether it’s achieved through a camera used to snap a picture of a QR code, a second-screen application with a social platform synchronized with the show, or clicking on the CTV remote, there are a variety of ways to finally provide an interactive ad experience. Technology companies are making it happen by leveraging the technologies that already exist. Edge Video, for example, uses AI and the smartphone to provide shoppable moments. Canvas has created an interactive ad-signaling platform built on VAST and operating like SCTE 35 with only two lines of integration needed.
Both of those solutions and others like them are using the same open technologies available to the CTV device software to make interactive ads a frictionless experience for the streaming operator. No one, from device manufacturer to ad buyer to content provider to end user, has to change anything in their workflow. Because these ads are built using what’s already there (thankfully, no one is trying to invent a new technology for interactive ads), they can be measured in much the same way by reporting on viewer engagement: How long did the viewer watch it, when did they interact, and what happened afterwards?
This also makes the ads much more valuable, especially when you can tie them into personalized and programmable systems that can target the interactivity to specific cohorts. Not only can content providers deliver personalized ads, but they can even deliver personalized interactivity. Perhaps ads will be created in such a way as to leverage AI to choose interactive elements dynamically based upon data about the viewer. In some way, this is what companies like Lont are doing as well—using AI to dynamically personalize ads.
While we all hate ads to some degree, they drive the development of the content we watch. Without ad revenue, providers would have little reason (or the funding) to create compelling TV content. Perhaps in a future populated with interactive ads, our engagement with ads will be worth more—perhaps enough that we’ll see fewer of them.
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