2026年CTV、OTT与流媒体市场洞察报告

CTVOTT & 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 their Welcome to the first RetailXCTV, OTT and Streaming Report.This may seem like somethingof a departure, but my interesthere started when it became 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 (see towards CTV as an advertising and marketing medium. 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 the 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 players 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-first 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 those 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 time 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, there’s a world of e-learning, user-generated content,microdramas and much more out there. The ‘BabyShark Dance’, for example, has been viewed more 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 from 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 by 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-adjacent streaming content that competes to beseen (see page 13). In the mass market, that meansfamiliar names, such as Netflix or Disney+. Then One reason CTV is being referenced everywhere ismoney. In 2024, Emarketer predicted CTV ad sales RETAIL MEDIAOne way to contextualise CTV is to think of it as part of the world of off-site retail media. As peopleacross businesses, not just specialists in creative,marketing and advertising, have simultaneouslylearned about retail media and noticed the growth You can also frame what’s happening now as partof a longer story. To understand how we got here,think about going back to November 1994, whenThe Rolling Stones livestreamed five songs froma concert in Dallas using then nascent mbone(multicast backbone) technology[4]. CERN had putits World Wide Web software in the public domainjust 18 months previously. From the very beginning, Consider one of the behemoths of the digital era,Amazon, which started life as a book retailer duringthe dotcom boom era. In 2024, Amazon announcedit was to offer shoppable ads via its Prime Videoservice[6]. Two years later, when UK customers accessPrime, they are routinely offered ads they mightsee in the cinema or when watching linear TV. But What links these developments is that, during theearly 2000s, the contemporary digital age wasemerging. Leaving aside for now the idea that AItakes us into a new phase (see