A study by Premion and Advertiser Perceptions indicates that 73% of advertisers and 79% of agencies plan to invest in live sports streaming over the next year. While high fan engagement drives interest, the industry faces significant barriers including high costs, fragmented inventory, and challenges with local audience measurement and ROI attribution.
The shift of premium sports rights to digital platforms is forcing a transition in ad spend, yet the infrastructure for local measurement has not kept pace with consumer behavior. Advertisers are clearly prioritizing incremental reach over linear TV, but the complexity of buying across fragmented publishers remains a significant bottleneck for budget scaling. As Premion notes, the industry is moving past the question of whether to invest and is now focused on solving transparency and accountability issues. Watch for whether unified buying platforms can simplify cross-publisher inventory access to lower the 34% barrier cited for marketplace complexity.
Premion has positioned itself at the center of the live sports streaming ad market, and its latest study with Advertiser Perceptions reflects a broader push by CTV ad-tech vendors to quantify advertiser intent. The company published its 2026 Live Sports Streaming Study showing 73% of advertisers plan increased spend, with 79% of agencies echoing that commitment. That data point arrives as multiple measurement vendors race to close the gap between linear TV attribution standards and streaming delivery. In August 2026, Nielsen expanded its CTV measurement panel to include live sports viewing windows, a move aimed at giving advertisers comparable audience guarantees across linear and digital sports telecasts. The expansion addresses one of the core friction points Premion identified: the inability to reconcile local market reach when inventory is split across regional sports networks, league-owned apps, and national streaming platforms.
On the business side, the competitive landscape for live sports CTV buying has intensified. Magnite launched Showcase in mid-2026, a programmatic marketplace connecting premium CTV inventory to AI-driven buyer agents, directly targeting the fragmented inventory problem that Premion's study highlights. Meanwhile, Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV (FAST) channels carrying live sports content grew 41% year-over-year in the first half of 2026, according to Samba TV data, giving advertisers more entry points but also compounding the measurement fragmentation challenge. The economic pressure is real: Premion's study found that 34% of respondents cited marketplace complexity as a barrier, a figure that aligns with IAB's 2026 CTV Ad Market report showing average CPMs for live sports streaming rose 18% compared to 2025, reflecting both demand growth and supply-side pricing power.
From a technical and workflow perspective, the tools advertisers use to plan and verify live sports CTV campaigns are evolving rapidly. Innovid published data in Q2 2026 showing that live sports CTV campaigns delivered 2.3x higher completion rates than on-demand CTV ads, reinforcing the engagement thesis that drives advertiser interest. However, the same report noted that frequency capping across multiple streaming platforms remains inconsistent, with some advertisers seeing 40% over-exposure when campaigns run simultaneously on Peacock, Paramount+, and YouTube TV. DoubleVerify released a live sports CTV verification suite in May 2026 that uses content-level signals to confirm ads ran during actual game broadcasts rather than pre-game or post-game filler, addressing a specific brand-safety concern unique to sports inventory. These tooling advances suggest the measurement hurdles Premion identified are being actively addressed, but no single vendor yet offers end-to-end attribution across the full live sports streaming ecosystem.
A new Premion study reveals that 73% of advertisers intend to increase their live sports streaming investment over the next year. While reaching engaged fans drives this growth, the industry faces significant friction from high entry costs and fragmented inventory, highlighting a critical need for better local measurement and unified buying solutions.
According to a Premion study, 73% of advertisers intend to increase their investment in live sports streaming over the next year.
The top motivator for 61% of respondents is the ability to reach highly engaged fans, while 40% use streaming to extend their reach beyond linear TV.
The primary barrier is cost, cited by 44% of participants, followed by ROI attribution challenges at 41% and marketplace complexity at 34%.
Local audience delivery and geographic reporting are the most requested measurement capabilities, cited by 57% of advertisers.
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