The CTV Lane Is Closing, Market by Market

The audience left cable years ago. The spend didn’t follow.

That’s the gap this study tracks: the distance between where viewers actually spend their time and where advertisers still concentrate their budgets. In streaming, that distance is wide enough to drive a campaign through. In the markets we’ve modeled so far, it’s also closing fast. A rough directional figure: 24 million adults in our initial market sample represent reachable streaming inventory that’s currently underpriced relative to its audience share. That number is illustrative. We’ll confirm it as the full panel completes. But the directional signal is consistent everywhere we look.

What We’re Measuring

The core question isn’t whether CTV is growing. That’s settled. The question is which markets still have a meaningful cost-per-point gap between broadcast rates and streaming reach. Where can a buyer get in front of a target audience at a fraction of what the local broadcast rep charges? And how long does that window stay open?

We’re building the answer from the bottom up, market by market.

The Three Inputs

Audience displacement. We track how viewing time has shifted from linear broadcast and cable to streaming in each DMA. This isn’t a national average, which hides most of the story. Phoenix, Pittsburgh, and Portland don’t look the same. Markets with older median demographics held linear viewing longer. Markets with younger, higher-income households crossed the streaming majority threshold years ahead of national trends.

Spend allocation. We index actual advertiser spend in each market against the viewing-share split. A market where 60% of viewing is streaming but 80% of ad dollars still flow through broadcast has a 20-point allocation gap. That gap is what we’re calling the open lane.

Velocity of change. Some markets are static. Others are closing the gap at 4-6 points per year as larger advertisers shift budgets and local broadcast rates compress. Velocity matters because it tells you how much runway is left.

What the Data Shows Directionally

Early-stage markets in our panel split into three clusters.

The first cluster contains markets where streaming viewership crossed 55% but advertiser spend in streaming stayed below 30%. These are the wide-lane markets. They’re also the ones where broad-reach categories (legal, healthcare, financial services) have historically been slowest to move. TV buyers at those categories tend to work from rate cards and ratings books they’ve used for a decade. The inventory they’re not buying is the inventory that’s still cheap.

The second cluster includes markets already in transition. Spend has started to follow the audience, rates are adjusting upward, and the efficiency gap is compressing. Buyers who moved 18 months ago got the discount. Buyers moving now are paying closer to parity.

The third cluster is the warning. In a handful of markets, streaming rates have caught broadcast rates in certain dayparts. The lane isn’t closed, but it’s one lane wide. The window in those markets exists only in off-peak inventory and niche audience segments.

That three-cluster pattern is what we expect to find fully confirmed once the panel is complete.

The 24M Figure

The 24 million adults is a projected addressable count: the audience reachable through streaming inventory in our modeled markets where the spend-to-viewership gap is still at least 15 points. It’s built from public measurement sources and our market panel, and it’s deliberately conservative. We excluded markets where our confidence in the allocation gap is below threshold. We also excluded any market already in the second cluster above.

That projection will move when the full study publishes. It could go up. If the final panel confirms the gap in markets we haven’t modeled yet, the addressable count grows. It could go down if more markets turn out to be in transition faster than the early data suggests. We’re saying 24M because that’s where the defensible floor sits today. We won’t revise it until we have a reason grounded in data.

Why It Matters Now

A CMO running legal or healthcare advertising in a mid-tier market faces a specific version of this problem. Their broadcast buy is fully built out. They know their GRP target, their daypart mix, their frequency model. Streaming feels like a new system to learn with unclear measurement standards and a vendor landscape that takes a full quarter to navigate.

That friction is real. It’s also the reason the gap still exists.

The markets that have already closed the gap didn’t close it because local advertisers got sophisticated. They closed it because national buyers came in, recognized cheap reach, and absorbed the inventory. The local buyer often finds out when rates jump at their next renewal.

This study’s practical output is a market-ranked opportunity list: which DMAs still have the lane open, how wide it is, and how fast it’s closing. That’s the tool a media buyer needs to make the case internally for a CTV shift before the economics make the decision for them.

When the Full Study Publishes

The methodology confirmation phase will add three things. First, the complete DMA panel, which takes the market sample from its current illustrative range to a coverage set large enough to rank every major market with confidence. Second, a time-series layer showing lane-closing velocity for each cluster. Third, a cross-tab between the allocation gap and category spend patterns, so we can identify which advertiser categories are still systematically underweight in streaming relative to their own audience’s viewing habits.

The directional case is already clear. The audience moved. The spend is catching up. The lane is closing, and it’s not closing evenly. Some markets still have years. Others have months.

The full numbers will tell you which is which.