CTV Advertising Platforms Compared

There are 30+ platforms that’ll sell you CTV inventory. Most PI firms don’t need to evaluate all of them. If you’re still figuring out what CTV advertising actually is, start there. Otherwise, you need to understand three categories and pick the right entry point for your budget.

If your buy spans display and video beyond CTV, compare the broader programmatic advertising platforms too. Or skip the platform research and let our CTV agency run the buy and the trace for you.

What are the CTV advertising platforms?

Every CTV purchase flows through one of three paths. The platform you choose determines your inventory access, targeting precision, and how much work you’re doing yourself.

For a detailed explanation of how DSPs work, see our demand-side platform guide.

The third path: specialized managed performance CTV platforms that sit between DSPs and publishers. They buy programmatically but package everything (buying, creative, attribution) into a managed experience. That’s where most PI firms start.

The platform landscape

Every CTV buy runs one of these paths

Programmatic DSPs One interface buys across dozens of streaming publishers.

• The Trade Desk
• Amazon DSP
• Google DV360

Independent SSPs The sell side that routes inventory into the DSP auction.

• Magnite
• PubMatic
• FreeWheel

Managed Performance Programmatic packaged with creative and visit-based attribution.

• Featured
  Kodiak Structured programmatic for firms that have outgrown self-serve. Around $20K a month and up, run through your agency.
• Vibe Self-serve, from $50 a day.

Direct Publisher Guaranteed premium placements, higher minimums.

• Hulu / Disney
• Peacock
• Paramount+
• Roku
• Netflix

Streaming Audio The household reach a single screen always misses.

• Spotify

Emerging & Manufacturer Low-fee challengers and ACR-data TV platforms.

• Viant
• StackAdapt
• Samsung Ads

The Programmatic Giants

Programmatic DSPs are how the majority of CTV inventory gets bought. Three platforms dominate.

The Trade Desk

The 800-pound gorilla. Trade Desk processes nearly two-thirds of all programmatic CTV spend and has partnerships with Disney, NBCU, Netflix, Roku, and Walmart. CTV represents roughly 40% of their $2.4B annual revenue.

What matters for PI firms:

• Broadest inventory access in streaming. Your ads can run on Hulu, Peacock, Paramount+, Tubi, Pluto TV, and hundreds more through a single buy.
• UID2 identity resolution connects ad exposure to website visits across devices. Most major streamers have adopted it.
• You don’t access Trade Desk directly. You work through an agency or managed service partner who runs campaigns on your behalf.

The catch: Trade Desk is built for agencies and enterprise buyers. No self-serve option for individual firms. The 19-21% take rate gets added to your media costs, plus your agency’s management fee on top.

Amazon DSP

Amazon’s platform with unique access to Amazon purchase data and Fire TV inventory. If you could target people who bought a car seat in the last 30 days for your auto accident practice, that’s the kind of data Amazon brings.

What matters for PI firms:

• Purchase behavior data that no other platform has. Amazon knows what people buy, not just what they watch.
• Fire TV is one of the largest CTV device platforms. Amazon DSP gets preferred access to that inventory.
• Minimum spend requirements are higher. Managed service starts around $50K+.

The catch: Amazon’s data advantage is real but narrower than it sounds for PI. You’re targeting accident victims, not shoppers. The purchase data is more valuable for consumer products than legal services.

Google DV360

Google’s enterprise DSP. Access to YouTube CTV inventory (the largest single streaming platform) plus broader programmatic supply.

What matters for PI firms:

• YouTube reaches more households than any individual streaming service. If you want scale, this is it.
• Integrates with Google Analytics and Google Ads for cross-channel measurement.
• YouTube inventory is different from traditional CTV. Viewer behavior, ad formats, and skip rates don’t match premium streaming.

The catch: YouTube CTV isn’t the same viewing experience as Hulu or Peacock. Viewers are more likely to skip, engagement patterns differ, and the content environment is user-generated alongside premium. DV360 also requires significant expertise to operate.

Programmatic CTV Platforms: DSPs and SSPs Together

Programmatic CTV runs on two sides of the same auction. A DSP is what advertisers use to buy. An SSP is what publishers use to sell inventory into that auction. Every impression bought through The Trade Desk, DV360, or Amazon DSP passed through an SSP first.

Best Independent SSPs for CTV Inventory

The major independent SSPs connecting CTV inventory to DSPs include Magnite, PubMatic, and FreeWheel. “Independent” carries the same meaning it does for a DSP. The SSP doesn’t own the media itself. It has no reason to favor one buyer’s bid over another’s.

What matters for PI firms: you don’t buy directly from an SSP. Your DSP routes bids through whichever SSPs hold the publisher relationships for your target inventory. A broader SSP footprint on your DSP’s side means more streaming apps without switching platforms.

Performance CTV Platforms

These platforms exist specifically for advertisers who need to prove CTV drives results. They’re the most common entry point for PI firms.

Managed Performance Platforms

The whole pitch of this category: CTV that works like performance marketing. These platforms use household identity graphs to tie ad exposure directly to website visits.

What matters for PI firms:

• Visit-based attribution connects ad exposure to website visits across devices. You can see which households watched your ad and then visited your site.
• Creative services built in. They’ll produce your spots, not just place them. For firms without existing TV creative, this removes a major barrier.
• SMB-friendly by design. This category is built for firms your size, not Fortune 500s.
• Attribution that actually works. Correlation-based measurement beats guessing whether CTV moved the needle.

The catch: this attribution measures correlation (same household saw ad, then visited site) more than causation. It’s better than no attribution, but it’s not a controlled experiment. And the CPMs include platform fees, so direct cost comparisons with raw DSP CPMs aren’t apples-to-apples.

Other Specialized Platforms

Roku OneView. Roku’s own DSP with privileged access to Roku device data. Reaches 80M+ active accounts. Useful if Roku devices dominate your target market, but limited to Roku-centric inventory for its best targeting.

Vizio Ads / Samsung Ads. TV manufacturer platforms using ACR (Automatic Content Recognition) data. They know what content was watched on their hardware, enabling retargeting based on viewing behavior. Niche but powerful for competitive conquesting (targeting people who watched competitor ads).

StackAdapt. Multi-channel DSP with strong CTV capabilities. Less CTV-specialized than a dedicated performance platform but offers native, display, and audio alongside streaming. Good for firms wanting one programmatic advertising platform across multiple channels.

Audio Alongside CTV: Spotify Ad Exchange

Streaming audio sits next to CTV rather than inside it, and for household reach that gap matters.

Spotify Advertising reaches 761 million monthly listeners across 180-plus markets through music, podcasts, and audiobooks, and the surface runs audio, video, and display, not audio alone. Listening is organized around moments like Driving, Exercise, Chill, Cooking, and Gaming, so a message can match what a listener is doing, not just who they are.

The same households a plan chases on Hulu or Peacock are also driving, cooking, and working out with Spotify open.

Bought through Spotify Ads Manager (self-serve) or the Spotify Ad Exchange (programmatic, through your DSP), audio behaves as a measurable, full-funnel surface that complements CTV and holds frequency in the moments a single screen always misses.

Direct Publisher Deals

For firms with bigger budgets who want guaranteed presence on specific platforms.

Publisher	Minimum Commitment	CPM Range	Best For
Hulu/Disney	$75K+	$35-55	Premium content adjacency, Disney data
Peacock/NBCU	$50K+	$30-45	Sports, news, NBC content
Paramount+	$25K+ (Ads Manager)	$25-40	Self-serve option, lower entry
Roku	Varies	$20-35	Device-level targeting, scale
Netflix	$100K+	$37-55	Prestige, limited ad load

Direct deals make sense when you’re spending enough that guaranteed placement on a specific platform matters strategically. Below $50K/month, programmatic usually delivers better efficiency.

Vibe sits in the gap between those two paths. It’s a self-serve platform built for direct access to premium inventory. Firms get that access without a DSP’s learning curve or a managed platform’s markup.

Firms buy directly across 500-plus direct-supply channels, including Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN. A campaign can launch at $50 a day, with no annual contract. They can also pair their own CRM data with lookalikes drawn from a 120M-plus household ID graph.

That combination matters most for firms below the direct-deal budget threshold. They still want more control than handing buying entirely to an agency.

Kodiak sits one tier above Vibe, for firms that have outgrown self-serve. The entry point is roughly $20K a month and up, once you’re spending real money on CTV and want more than a self-serve tool gives you.

You won’t buy from Kodiak directly. It sells through agencies and trading teams, the same setup as Trade Desk, so your agency runs the campaign on Kodiak’s infrastructure instead of the open market.

What that buys you is curated access, not aggregated remnant: more granular audience controls on the same premium networks you already want to be on, and tiered options with those networks instead of an all-or-none buy. You get real control without the $75K+ minimum a direct publisher deal like Hulu’s requires.

The platform, called The Den, connects into DV360 and YouTube inventory with transparent reporting built in. If Vibe is where you start, Kodiak is where you land once the spend and the audience control both start to matter.

Which Platforms Legal Advertisers Actually Use, By Market

Platform choice isn’t a national decision. It’s a local one.

Streaming now accounts for 47.5% of all US TV viewing (Nielsen, December 2025), but the share of legal ad dollars flowing to CTV and streaming swings wildly from one DMA to the next. That swing decides whether you lead with programmatic streaming or still anchor in broadcast.

Across the markets Taqtics analyzes, the spread is stark. In Atlanta, 48% of legal advertising spend already runs through streaming and CTV, the highest of any market. One firm there, the top streaming spender, puts 69% of its budget into streaming.

At the other end, Dallas sends 10%, and Washington DC sends just 3%. Same platforms available in every market. Wildly different adoption.

Spend concentration is part of the platform decision too. Those top 10 markets, the ones already dominating the tracked spend, are also where premium inventory gets scarce first. Firms outside that top 10 face less competition for the same platforms.

What this means for platform selection: in a high-adoption market like Atlanta, your competitors already run sophisticated programmatic streaming, so a managed performance platform or agency-managed Trade Desk is table stakes.

In a low-adoption market like Dallas or Washington DC, the same audience is watching streaming, but almost no legal advertiser is reaching them there yet.

The platform mix is identical. The competitive opening is not. Want the full per-market picture? See our DMA-level CTV cost data.

The Decision Framework

Stop thinking about which platform is best. Think about which path matches where you are.

What Actually Matters More Than Platform

Here’s what most platform comparison articles won’t tell you: the platform is maybe 15% of your results. The other 85%:

Creative quality. A bad spot on the best platform still loses. A great spot on a decent platform still wins. Most PI firms run the same “Were you injured?” template. The ones building real brands stand out regardless of platform.

Targeting strategy. Household-level targeting that reaches the right demographics in your DMA matters more than which DSP serves the impression. The data layer beats the plumbing layer.

Measurement discipline. Can you connect ad exposure to website visits to signed cases? That loop determines whether you can optimize or you’re guessing. Visit-based attribution, Trade Desk’s UID2, and third-party measurement all solve pieces of this. None solve it perfectly.

Frequency management. The same viewer watching your ad 15 times in a week isn’t 15x better than once. Cross-platform frequency capping prevents waste. This is actually where DSPs have a real advantage over direct deals. They can coordinate frequency across publishers.

The Emerging Challengers

The CTV platform landscape is shifting. Keep these on your radar:

Viant/Adelphic. CTV-first DSP pitching lower take rates than Trade Desk. Gaining traction with mid-market buyers who want DSP power without the Trade Desk price tag.

Pontiac Intelligence. Another low-fee DSP challenger specifically targeting the CTV opportunity. Transparency-first positioning.

Self-serve platforms (Vibe.co, Adwave). Entry-level CTV access starting around $50/day with no commitment. A fast way to test streaming before committing to managed service, though for high-stakes PI and mass-tort work the compliance layer still belongs in a managed setup.

Before you commit budget to any self-serve platform, check what it actually discloses about its own economics. Most self-serve platforms’ SEC filings never show the one number that matters.

The Bottom Line

Don’t overthink the platform decision. For PI firms, the realistic options narrow fast:

Under $50K/month? A managed performance platform or an agency-managed Trade Desk buy covers 80% of firms reading this. A managed performance platform if you want built-in creative and attribution.

Agency plus Trade Desk if you want broadest inventory access and already have creative assets. For a detailed CTV cost breakdown by platform, CPMs range from $15 on FAST channels to $55+ on premium inventory.

Over $50K/month? Add direct publisher deals on Hulu or Peacock alongside your programmatic base. The combination of efficient reach (programmatic) plus guaranteed premium placement (direct) is the playbook that scales.

The platform gets your ads in front of households. What those households do next depends on your creative, your targeting, and whether they remember your name when they actually need a lawyer. Most firms haven’t made the streaming shift yet, which means the early movers still have a window.

References

1. MediaPost. "Global CTV Ad Forecast: Trade Desk at 63% Programmatic Share." 2024.
2. AdExchanger. "As CTV Blooms, Its Knives Out for The Trade Desk's Take Rate." 2025.
3. IAB. "2025 Digital Video Advertising Spend Report." 2025.
4. Nielsen. "The Gauge: Streaming Hits 47.5% of Total TV Usage." December 2025.
5. eMarketer. "US Connected TV Ad Spending Forecast." 2025.
6. Spotify Technology S.A. "Q1 2026 Shareholder Update." 761M monthly active users. April 28, 2026.
7. Spotify Advertising. "Spotify Ad Exchange and Ads Manager." Self-serve and programmatic streaming audio. 2026.