Streaming’s Plateau Problem
Streaming TV has had a pretty amazing run. While there have been bumps along the road and not everyone has come out on top, overall the subscriber numbers and profit margins have been on an upward swing. And while the shift from linear to streaming shows no sign of abating — especially as live sports follows suit — the latest data suggests we’ve hit a critical inflection point.
Based on Wurl’s March 2025 CTV Trends Report, it seems the days of unbridled growth are now in the rear view mirror. Meaning the industry now needs to shift its focus to how it holds onto all those viewers while still being able to monetize them.
Call it streaming’s adolescence.
Let’s start with what’s working. Viewership is holding steady, FAST continues to gain ground (47% of U.S. households use it weekly), and CTV ad spend is projected to hit $32.57 billion in 2025 — nearly double what it was in 2021. Better still, CTV is now outperforming social, search, and even other digital video in terms of ad spend growth. All signs point to the continued dominance of streaming as the primary viewing platform.
There are, however, some great big asterisks to that. Wurl notes that average session lengths — the amount of time someone sticks with a single channel — have plateaued. They dropped significantly during the writers’ strike in 2023 and have only recently shown signs of bouncing back. Average daily hours of viewing (HOV) are also holding steady, but not surging. That tells us viewers are watching, but keeping them watching your service, at a time when churn remains a massive issue, has become an even bigger challenge.
Which is why the data-driven insights that power discovery and personalization have become more important than ever.
Take discovery, for instance. It turns out that being well positioned to be the first app the viewer clicks on is key. That’s because Wurl’s data shows viewers tend to stick with whatever app or channel they start with—they’re not flipping through the channels like they did in cable days.
That means if your app is not one of the first ones a user sees, it’s probably not getting watched. In a world where short-form content is a tap away and 15% of YouTube Shorts are now being watched on CTV, that initial content grab matters more than ever.
It’s something we’ve talked about before at TVREV: CTV needs to make content discovery seamless, intuitive, and above all, personal.
Which brings us to advertising. Wurl shows that while CTV ad spend is booming, fill rates are still lagging. There’s inventory — lots of inventory — but demand hasn’t caught up yet. That gap is a missed opportunity, and it’s one that can be closed with better targeting, better metadata, and smarter ad formats that don’t disrupt the viewing experience.
Contextual advertising — which we spotlighted in our recent special report The Contextual Revolution — would seem to be the natural solution to the Great Fill Rate Dilemma. It doesn’t need personal data to work, it solves issues of transparency and reach, and it gives advertisers the relevance they crave without the creepiness factor that still infects so much digital advertising.
The key takeaway here isn’t that streaming is slowing down. It’s that we’ve moved into a new phase — one where just showing up is no longer good enough. Platforms that lean into personalization, streamline discovery and adopt new systems like contextual advertising are going to be the ones who manage to not just obtain new viewers, but retain them as well.
In other words, stop chasing scale, start chasing stickiness.
