The Living Room Went Local: How Streaming TV Became a Small-Business Ad Channel

The Audience Already Left the Old Channels

Nielsen's monthly television-usage report is the closest thing this category has to an agreed scoreboard, and in the four weeks ending May 25, 2025, it recorded a genuine first: streaming reached 44.8 percent of all US television usage, edging past the combined 44.2 percent held by broadcast (20.1 percent) and cable (24.1 percent) together (Nielsen, June 2025). That isn't a projection or a survey response, it is measured viewing behavior, and it marks the point where more of the average American household's television time went to a streaming app than to every broadcast and cable channel combined.

Whether that share has held steady since is less certain than some secondary summaries suggest. One CTV industry source, citing Nielsen's ongoing Gauge tracking but not linking a primary Nielsen report, put streaming at roughly 47 percent of usage in January 2026 before showing it dropping to 41.9 percent the following month (Adwave, 2026). Read plainly, that's real month-to-month movement, not a number sitting at a stable plateau, and because the report cites Nielsen without a traceable primary link, this figure is held at a contested rating in this study even though it points in the same direction as Nielsen's confirmed milestone.

The reach precondition behind all of this, that most American households can even receive a streaming ad on their television, is well established but relies on aging data: 87 percent of US TV households owned at least one connected TV device as of 2022, per Leichtman Research Group figures reproduced on a vendor blog rather than published directly by Leichtman (2022). That number is almost certainly higher today given several more years of device turnover toward smart TVs and streaming sticks, but no fresher, directly sourced figure was found to confirm by how much.

Sixteen Percent, Not Eighty-Five

Set against that audience shift, the small-business adoption number is the most important corrective in this entire study. Borrell Associates surveyed 1,248 US local advertisers in 2025, nearly two-thirds of them businesses with fewer than 25 employees, and found that 16 percent had bought streaming video or OTT advertising in 2024 (Borrell, 2025). That's essentially tied with the 17 percent who bought old-fashioned broadcast TV, and only slightly ahead of the 12 percent who bought cable. It is nowhere close to the 50 percent buying social media advertising or the 40 percent buying search.

A widely circulated claim holds that small-business adoption of streaming TV advertising climbed from 60 percent to 85 percent over two years. That figure does not appear in Borrell's survey, in the Interactive Advertising Bureau's outlook studies, in MNTN's public financial filings, in Nielsen's viewing data, or in any other traceable, dated source checked for this study. It should be treated as unverified rather than repeated as established fact. The real, sourced number, one in six local advertisers, describes a channel that is present and growing at the margins of the small-business ad market, not one that has already become the default choice.

Sixteen percent of local advertisers bought streaming or OTT advertising in 2024, statistically tied with old-fashioned broadcast TV, not the runaway majority sometimes claimed.

Where It Buys In, It Wins Trust

Among the minority of local advertisers who have bought in, streaming earns real marks. Forty-four percent of streaming/OTT buyers rated the channel very or extremely effective, ahead of the 35 percent who said the same about broadcast TV and the 36 percent who said it about cable (Borrell, 2025). The gap widens further on how measurable the channel feels: streaming/OTT buyers gave it a reliance-on-data score of 69.3 out of 100, well above the 53.6 for broadcast and 51.5 for cable.

That's a meaningful signal about the channel's craft. Streaming ads run through platforms that report impressions, completion rates, and often attribution data in ways old-fashioned broadcast buys never could. It is not, however, a measurement of consumer response. No source in this evidence base tracks whether a shopper who saw a small business's streaming ad was more likely to trust, remember, or choose that business than one who saw the same message on cable. What's being measured here is advertiser satisfaction and advertiser-side data visibility, both of which matter to a business owner weighing where to spend, but neither of which is a consumer-behavior finding.

Interest Is Real, But It Isn't a Rush

If streaming earns better marks than legacy TV, the natural question is whether local advertisers are moving budget toward it at pace. Borrell's 2025 survey asked exactly that, tracking net growth interest, the share of advertisers planning to add or increase a channel in 2025 minus the share planning to cut it. Streaming/OTT came in at a net positive 6, essentially matching broadcast TV's +1 and cable's +1, but trailing far behind social media's +19 and search's +16 (Borrell, 2025).

That's a real, positive signal: streaming is one of the only television formats with any net forward interest at all among local advertisers, while both legacy TV formats sit essentially flat. But it's a modest signal, not evidence of a channel in the middle of a takeover. Local advertisers are still, by a wide margin, putting their growth dollars into the channels they already understand and already trust, social and search, and treating streaming as an incremental add rather than a replacement for anything.

The Self-Serve Edge Is Where the Growth Actually Is

The fastest, most concrete growth in this category isn't happening at the broad population level Borrell surveys, it's happening at the self-serve platform edge built specifically for smaller advertisers. MNTN, a publicly traded connected-TV platform aimed at small and midsized businesses, reported that its active Performance TV customer count grew 67 percent year-over-year for the twelve months ended September 30, 2025, reaching 3,316 customers. Third-quarter 2025 revenue reached $70.0 million, up 31 percent year-over-year, and gross margin improved to 79 percent from 72 percent a year earlier (MNTN, November 2025).

Those are publicly disclosed investor figures from a company whose entire business is selling connected-TV advertising to smaller advertisers, which makes them a genuinely strong signal of real demand rather than a marketing claim. They also describe growth inside one company's customer base, not the broad market Borrell measures, and the two numbers, 16 percent broad adoption and 67 percent growth at one self-serve platform, aren't in tension. They describe the same underlying story from two different altitudes: a small, engaged pocket of advertisers finding a self-serve entry point growing quickly, inside a much larger population of local businesses that has mostly not moved yet.

New Money in Television, Not Recycled Money

The assumption behind a lot of streaming-TV pitches to small businesses is that the money funding this growth is being pulled out of an existing linear TV budget. MNTN's own disclosure argues against that mechanism at the self-serve end of the market: 97 percent of the brands advertising on MNTN are first-time television advertisers (MNTN, November 2025). If almost none of a platform's advertisers had a prior TV line item, there's very little linear budget for that money to have come from. It reads far more like net-new advertising demand entering television for the first time than like a budget transfer.

The closest verifiable precedent for a genuine budget-pulling pattern comes from a different era and a different scale of advertiser entirely. A 2022 study by MNTN Research in partnership with Digiday found that among 123 surveyed brands and agencies, over 55 percent had shifted marketing budgets toward CTV between 2018 and 2021, drawing the reallocated dollars primarily from linear TV, cited by 58 percent of respondents, and from social media, cited by 41 percent. That study is enterprise-scale, vendor-sponsored, and now several years old, predating the current self-serve small-business wave (MNTN Research/Digiday, 2022). It's held at a contested tier for exactly those reasons, useful as historical context for how budget-pulling has worked before, but not evidence that the same mechanism is what's funding today's small-business streaming spend.

Ninety-seven percent of the advertisers on the leading self-serve CTV platform for small businesses had never bought television advertising before. That's new demand entering television, not a budget being pulled out of it.

Nobody Agrees on How Fast This Is Growing

Anyone building a case around a single CTV growth percentage should know the industry's own forecasters don't agree with each other. The Interactive Advertising Bureau's 2026 outlook study, based on a survey of 205 US buy-side ad decision-makers, projects 13.8 percent growth in US connected-TV spend for 2026 (IAB, January 2026). eMarketer's independent forecast for the same year puts CTV spend growth at 3.6 percent, roughly a quarter of IAB's number, while agreeing directionally that linear TV spend is shrinking (eMarketer, September 2025).

That's not a rounding difference, it's close to a fourfold gap between two named, established research organizations describing the identical market in the identical year. A comparable inconsistency shows up in the more basic question of how many US households even own a connected TV device, where the figures found for this study ranged from 87 percent (Leichtman/MNTN, 2022 data) to newer figures from vendor sources that did not survive verification for this study. None of this means the underlying growth story is false, both forecasters agree CTV is growing and linear is shrinking, it means a small business owner should treat any single precise growth percentage in this category as a directional estimate, not a number to plan a budget around to the decimal point.

Two named, established industry forecasters differ by roughly four times on how fast US connected-TV spend is growing in the same year.

What This Means If You're Deciding Right Now

None of this argues against streaming TV as a channel worth a small business owner's attention, it argues for entering it with a clear-eyed sense of where it actually sits today. The audience shift behind it is real and Nielsen-confirmed, not a marketing story. The advertisers who have bought in report genuinely better satisfaction and better data visibility than they get from legacy TV. And a self-serve entry point built for this exact size of advertiser exists and is growing quickly.

At the same time, adoption across the broad population of local businesses remains modest, essentially tied with old-fashioned broadcast TV rather than ahead of it, and growth interest, while positive, trails social and search by a wide margin. The framing for a small business owner is that streaming TV advertising in 2026 looks like an early but legitimate channel to test with new, incremental budget, the way a business might test any new platform, not a channel that has already proven it should replace what's already working in search and social.

A Channel Outside the AI-Answer Frontier

Every other channel in this series eventually connects back to how AI engines find, summarize, and recommend a business, because that connection is where attention is actively being redrawn right now. Streaming television, at least based on everything checked for this study, does not. No dated, credible research was found linking streaming or CTV advertising to AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or any other generative-answer surface, and that absence is worth stating plainly rather than forcing a connection the evidence doesn't support.

That makes streaming TV a genuinely separate part of the terrain where a market's attention lives: a reach channel where a business buys exposure directly on a screen, sitting apart from the discovery channels where visibility increasingly has to be earned inside the answer an AI engine gives rather than purchased as an impression. A small business weighing a streaming TV budget against investment in its AI-answer visibility is weighing two different kinds of attention, one bought and one earned, and the right split between them depends on which kind of attention that business's own customers actually act on, a question this evidence base doesn't yet answer for any single local category.