The New Television Landscape: Where The Viewers Are

eMarketer forecasts that in just two years, video streaming services will fully overtake cable subscriptions, and 64.4 million homes will watch streamed content exclusively. But while the predominance of streaming grabs all the headlines, the mostly untold story is the growth of advertising-based video-on-demand (AVOD), according to Ad Age.

Up to 90% of all video ad budgets continue to go to linear spends, according to eMarketer. This imbalance of where the ad dollars go compared with where the audience goes leaves a lot of opportunity for companies that can be flexible and think outside the cable box. For advertisers in search of a younger, more diverse and nationally representative audience who can’t be reached via linear TV, AVOD will become an even more prominent complement to existing linear campaigns in the year ahead.

Network and cable TV have long been the standard for home viewing options, and in many ways, the waves of cord-cutters in the past five years have been early adopters. While live events such as the Super Bowl and the Oscars are big draws for network audiences and advertising, larger numbers of consumers are recoiling from paying for extra channels that they don’t watch, all while cable costs significantly outpace inflation. According to Broadband Search, 45 million consumers cut the cord in 2020. 

Compare that with the exponential growth of streaming services. According to Tubi’s  audience report, The Stream: 2021 Actionable Audience Insights for Brands consumers subscribe to an average of four streaming platforms per household and watch roughly 13 hours of content each week. Some 33 million monthly active users streamed more than 2.5 billion hours last year—a 58% growth in viewership over 2019—and since nearly half our streamers do not have cable, our audience represents an incremental reach of 80% over the top 25 cable networks, according to MRI-Simmons.

Streaming skews younger as well; the majority (57%) of Tubi’s younger streamers (18 to 34) do not subscribe to cable. Not only are they eschewing the traditional advertising model, but they are also becoming increasingly unreachable by linear TV. Nearly half of Tubi’s active monthly users are under 35, making them 20-plus years younger than traditional television audiences. Additionally, 36% of these viewers’ households have children, meaning there are multiple built-in demographics per home.