2026年CTV、OTT与流媒体市场洞察报告

OTT &STREAMING MAY 2026RXMCTV26RP Introduction up huge opportunities for brands and retailers.What’s emerging is a media environment whereevery screen is a store front, every impression isaccountable and every player must rethink theirpartnerships and how they create value. Welcome to the first RetailXCTV, OTT and Streaming Report.This may seem like somethingof a departure, but my interesthere started when it becameclear that more and more of theconversations I was having withretailers and brands were turningtowards CTV as an advertising and marketing medium. Contents Over the following pages, we offer an introductionto CTV, OTT and streaming advertising. Mindful thatmany readers will be relatively new to this subject,we have focused in great part on trying to show theshape of the market – no easy task when so manybusinesses are involved in the CTV ecosystem (seepages 6-8). We look at some of the largest companiesin the area (see pages 11-12), but also consider whatwe call CTV’s long tail (pages 13-14). As the strategic overview (page 3) here argues, it’sperhaps a surprise that it’s taken so long for this tooccur since the key technologies that have enabledtoday’s digital world have been with us since thenoughties. What was missing 20 years ago was therich data on which so much business now rests.Missing too, or at least less sophisticated, was thetechnology to combine data sets without givingaway customer data. And perhaps too, in the age ofcookies, it was just easier to follow people aroundthe web rather than to try and analyse their journeysacross different channels. We focus too on what constitutes success in CTV,OTT and streaming advertising. How do companiesassess the effectiveness of their campaigns (pages15-16)? We also profile some of the leading playersin the market (pages 17-19) and look at what maylie ahead (pages 21-22). No longer. The wider TV ecosystem is at aninflection point. From broadcaster to brands andagencies to tech providers, every player in the valuechain is undergoing a period of transition. This isbeing driven by shifts in consumer behaviour, thetransition from linear transmission to digital-firstofferings, the growing importance of first-partydata and the demand for measurable performance.Each one is disruptive to the existing ways ofdoing business but combined, they are opening As ever, we welcome your feedback. Do get in touchwith insights, suggestions of datasets or areas thatwe might explore in future reports. Ian Jindal, Founder, RetailX Widescreenpicture We live in the age of the attentioneconomy, a time when multiple differentplatforms compete to engage us. For thoselooking to cut through the noise, what doCTV, OTT and streaming have to offer? As with retail media a couple of years ago and socialcommerce before that, CTV is a term that suddenlyseems to be everywhere. The board wants to knowmore about it, yet what’s odd here is that CTV ishardly a new term. To use the definition offeredby media research specialists Nielsen[1], you arewatching CTV – connected television – every timethe images you’re seeing are screened from theinternet to your television. would surpass traditional TV ad sales spending inthe USA as early as 2028 (see graphic above). It’seasy to understand why. People increasingly don’twatch linear TV, so more ad sales money is goingto broadcast-quality CTV in a trend that’s set tocontinue. According to the British regulator Ofcom,85% of people access an on-demand TV serviceeach month, compared to 67% who watch live TV[2]. there’s a world of e-learning, user-generated content,microdramas and much more out there. The ‘BabyShark Dance’, for example, has been viewed morethan 16bn times on YouTube[3]. The images may arrive because of technology builtinto the TV itself or via devices such as streamingsticks and gaming consoles. If linear TV is all aboutthe schedules, CTV frees up viewers to choose whenand what to watch in an on-demand world. Ratherconfusingly, two other terms are often used inclose proximity to CTV: OTT and streaming. OTTor over-the-top refers to streaming content fromthe internet across any device and is about thedelivery method. Streaming simply describescontent delivery to any device via the internet. In short, we inhabit a noisy world filled not just withscreens but with headphones too, if you factor inpodcasts. Crucially from the perspective of brands,this generates data about who’s engaging with what,when, where and on which device. When advertisersenrich this data with their own data – think, forexample, of the detailed first-party data held bysupermarkets via loyalty schemes – this enablesthe creation of tightly targeted CTV campaigns. Incontrast, traditional linear TV advertising, whereprimetime slots are the most expensive, has oftenbeen more concerned with scale. This isn’t a neat binary, though. We live in the eraof the attention economy, where there is a long tailof CTV, OTT and what you might loosely call CTV-adjace