The third quarter in a non-election year is typically a tricky time for TV and streaming advertising businesses. People usually spend less time in front of their TVs in July and August (at least until the NFL and college football seasons start). But Q3 earnings season can actually be a pretty great time to get a read on what TV network and streaming service owners’ ad businesses are up to.

During the latest quarterly earnings calls, executives from the major TV and streaming companies shared details on how their streaming businesses fared in the latest upfront cycle and teased out new ad products and capabilities. 

Some companies also shed light on how their streaming ad businesses currently stack up against their traditional TV ad businesses. So let’s start there. 

In short, they still don’t. Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery provide the clearest views of the dynamic, and at best streaming delivers 30% of the ad revenue of traditional TV. And that figure comes from Paramount, which saw 41% year-over-year declines in both TV and streaming ad revenue. 

Meanwhile, WBD’s streaming ad revenue increased by 15% year over year, which was not enough to outpace the 20% decline in TV ad revenue. 

The situation was similar at TelevisaUnivision where streaming ad revenue grew but not enough to offset declining TV ad revenue, leading to a $21.1 million decline in U.S. ad revenue.

The dynamic may not be all that different a year from now. 

Upfront updates

NBCUniversal’s parent company Comcast president Mike Cavanagh said during the company’s most recent earnings call that Peacock represented one-third of the money advertisers committed to spend with NBCUniversal in this year’s upfront. That’s a 20% increase compared to the prior year’s upfront, but it still means traditional TV accounted for a significant majority of the company’s upfront haul. For what it’s worth, 

That said, streaming advertising is a growing business, unlike traditional TV advertising. AMC Networks reported a 40% year-over-year increase in digital ad commitments in this year’s upfront, but CEO Kristin Dolan didn’t provide any numbers to put that in context of its overall upfront haul. And Fox’s ad-supported streamer Tubi increased its ad revenue by 27% year over year and turned a quarterly profit for the first time.

Then there are the streaming-only ad sellers like Netflix and Roku. “We more than doubled our U.S. upfront commitments,” Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters said during its earnings call. And Roku CFO and COO Dan Jedda said the company’s ad prices are higher in Q4 2025 compared to Q4 2024 as a result of this year’s upfront deals, “which is different than last upfront.”

YouTube’s (grand)parent company Alphabet didn’t divulge how the platform did in this year’s upfront, but this is the best place I could think to cite a stat that covers a year-long timeframe: YouTube is on track to generate $1 billion in annual revenue from interactive, direct-response ads served on TV screens, per Alphabet svp and chief business officer Phillip Schindler.

TelevisaUnivision didn’t break out streaming’s impact on its upfront market, but it did tease out the importance of streaming ad capabilities exceeding traditional TV’s. “Our household graph powered record volume this year, with 100% of streaming commitments activated through the graph’s advanced targeting capabilities,” said CEO Daniel Alegre during its earnings call.

That helps to explain why there was plenty of talk about advanced streaming ad capabilities across company earnings calls. 

Paramount, for example, is in the midst of unifying its three streaming services – Paramount+, Pluto TV and BET+ – onto a single tech stack that will, among other benefits, “improve our capabilities across the ad tech we’ll be able to deploy,” said chairman and CEO David Ellison. 

And then Netflix and Roku each talked up their respective deals to make ad inventory available through Amazon’s demand-side platform. Netflix’s Peters called out programmatic as an incremental revenue growth area, though some of that boost will have to wait until 2027 when it introduces new advanced measurement and advanced targeting capabilities.

Disney is also upgrading its streaming tech in a way that could benefit its streaming ad business. 

“Regarding Disney+, we’re in the midst of rolling out the biggest and the most significant changes from a product perspective, from a technology perspective, since we launched the service in 2019. And we’re really encouraged because it’s enabling greater personalization, resulting in a product that’s just more dynamic, more engaging and basically it’s working,” said Disney CEO Bob Iger during the company’s earnings call. 

Obviously, he didn’t explicitly say anything about ad-related benefits, but when I hear “greater personalization,” I think “ad targeting.” And when I think “ad targeting,” I also think “scale” because what good is it to carve up an audience if the resulting audience segments are too small to be of much interest to advertisers. Which would mean Netflix and Disney are expecting to further scale up their ad-supported audiences and would help to explain why AMC Networks talked up its inventory-carving capabilities during its quarterly earnings call.

A year after signing a deal to make AMC+’s ad-supported tier available to Charter’s pay-TV subscribers, AMC Networks’ Dolan said that more than 850,000 people “have opted into AMC plus since its inclusion in the package earlier this year.” 

And now AMC Networks is opening up more of its ad inventory to dynamic ad insertion, or being able to slot in different ads for different audiences versus the typical “everyone sees the same ad” model. DAI “actually allows us an opportunity to cross-sell across all our platforms, including CTV” and soon horror-centric streamer Shudder’s ad-supported tier, said chief commercial officer Kim Kelleher.

What we’ve heard

“We have a PMP with [Netflix] through The Trade Desk, and it’s pretty annoying. You have to have a separate tag for every single creative. So you can’t rotate creative.”

— Agency executive during one of the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit’s behind-closed-door town hall sessions

Numbers to know

-14%: Percentage decline year over year in films and TV shows produced in Los Angeles in 2024.

2 million: Number of Fox One subscriptions as of October 2025.

57%: Percentage share of Fox One subscriptions driven by Amazon’s Prime Video Channels subscription resales program.

84%: Percentage share of surveyed U.S. adults who use YouTube, compared to 50% who use Instagram and 37% who use TikTok.

$18: New monthly subscription price for Comcast Xfinity’s StreamSaver bundle that includes Netflix, Peacock and Apple TV.

$78 billion: How much money TV and streaming companies are expected to spend globally on sports rights in 2030.

What we’ve covered

Visa extends its reach into the creator economy’s liquidity crunch:

• Visa is using Visa Direct to speed up how quickly creators get paid by brands.
• The program doesn’t actually press brands to pay on time; it just helps to move the money along once they hit send.

Read more about the creator economy here.

Dedicated interactive and localized ad formats are the new focus in CTV arms race:

• Amazon has added location-aware interactive video ads.
• Disney, Tubi and Samsung have also introduced new interactive ad formats this year.

Read more about CTV ads here.

What we’re reading

Paramount’s WBD bid:

WBD’s most aggressive suitor has upped its ante with money backed by sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, according to Variety.

Netflix’s WBD bid:

Netflix has offered to pay mostly cash to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which underscores the streamer’s seriousness in picking up WBD’s film-and-TV studio, according to Bloomberg.

Disney’s next-CEO frontrunners:

TV boss Dana Walden and theme parks chief Josh D’Amaro have separated themselves as the two frontrunners likely to succeed Bob Iger as Disney CEO when his successor is supposed to be named early next year, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Paramount’s ad boss exits:

John Halley is stepping down as Paramount’s top ad executive a month after former Roku exec Jay Askinasi officially joined as its chief revenue officer, according to Variety.