This interview appears in our latest Special Report on the Emerging Smart TV Ecosystem. Download your free copy now.

“One of the reasons smart TV OEMs are  having a moment is that streaming is having a moment,” says Justin Evans,  “There's so much adoption of streaming as a new way to engage with television, that the advertisers who are trying to reach those audiences are favoring the streaming platforms and Samsung TV Plus is one of those key streaming platforms.” 

TVREV sat down with Evans recently to discuss the massive changes in the way people watch TV and the surprisingly rapid rise of AVOD.

Q: For a long time streaming seemed to be dominated by ad-free or SVOD services like Netflix. Is that changing?

A: If you look at the percentage of time people spend watching television on Samsung TVs, the amount of time that's spent watching streaming is hovering at around 60 percent to 63 percent. Which means that a clear majority of time spent on our platform is spent in a streaming environment. So that's one inflection point that we've seen happen over the last year or so. And I think it happened much more quickly than anyone would have anticipated. 

But now we’re seeing an even more interesting shift, as our data shows that SVOD and AVOD are now more or less at parity.

One of the things we saw in processing our most recent numbers is that 72% of our users are watching SVOD and 72% are watching AVOD—obviously many are watching both. Even more interesting is that AVOD and SVOD have reached parity in terms of time spent, which is a big surprise. Viewers are spending about an hour and 20 minutes per day watching each format, some more on one, some more on the other, but on average they are at parity. So first we had the inflection point where streaming surpassed linear. And now we're having another inflection point where AVOD has caught up to SVOD. What that means is that streaming has become a scalable ad environment for advertisers.

Q: Why do you think we’re seeing such a surge in AVOD viewing?

A: I think it's a combination of better content and the fact that it’s free. The amount of content has certainly increased—our FAST service, Samsung TV Plus now offers more than 160 channels. And the quality of what's available on AVOD is continuing to improve. Ditto the experience: we have made Samsung TV Plus available not just on the televisions, but on our mobile devices. So it's now available on 100 million devices globally. And it is free. And the experience is really strong. There’s a lot of personalization: if you sit down in front of your Samsung TV, all the navigation, the choices you have in terms of streaming content, between one genre or another, all the highlights based on your preferences in movies  and TV shows—they’re all there in the dashboard.

Q: For an advertiser, what are some of the benefits of working with a company that supplies both the programming and the hardware?

A: One of the key benefits is around the fact that advertisers can leverage CTV identifiers on our platform, which is a huge plus for TV in general, as advertisers are concerned about the demise of cookies in the digital ecosystem. 

The CTV ecosystem.has been built on IAB standards for CTV identifiers. And these were built principally to allow users to opt in or opt out of targeted advertising. 

It also becomes a great platform for advertisers to gather insights. That’s because all these linear viewing behaviors are happening on the same platform as the streaming viewing behaviors. And that becomes really valuable in a number of different ways. The one we speak about most frequently to our clients is incremental reach. By having ACR data that tells the advertiser which groups of people are being exposed to their linear ads, they can then use our platform to find the people they're missing with linear via targeted streaming ads. That's a great reach opportunity. 

There's also a response opportunity, lower funnel opportunity, where clients can understand how their linear and their streaming are working together to drive conversions

That gets really interesting when you work with media and entertainment clients. Just think about how that ecosystem has evolved. Everyone in the smart TV ecosystem had a robust business with TV networks, because we were able to understand who was converting on a tune-in basis. But now every TV network is not just a linear TV network, they're also an app publisher. So for them, the data they get from smart TVs about both their linear activity and their streaming activity and how they feed off of each other, that’s really the lifeblood of their business, and for them to be able to leverage some of these insights is incredibly valuable.