Nielsen reports that streaming accounted for 43.8% of U.S. TV time by March 2025, with increasing marketer plans to shift spend toward CTV. To address measurement fragmentation, the company has expanded its Ad Intel service to include cross-channel measurement across 20 platforms.
The structural shift from linear to CTV has reached a tipping point where ad-supported viewing is the primary consumer experience. For the technical and strategic stack, this necessitates a move away from siloed reporting toward high-frequency cross-channel measurement that Nielsen is attempting to centralize. As ad-supported tiers become the default growth engine for major platforms, the ecosystem is transitioning from a reach-based model to one defined by granular audience data and performance ROI. Watch for whether U.S. retail sectors—which currently show lower growth in planned CTV spend due to existing high saturation—begin reallocating budgets back toward premium streaming as performance metrics improve.
Nielsen's measurement infrastructure has continued to document streaming's ascent beyond the 43.8% figure reported in March 2025. By May 2025, streaming reached a historic milestone by eclipsing the combined share of broadcast and cable for the first time, hitting 44.8% of total TV usage, according to The Gauge. The report also noted that the number of streaming platforms exceeding a full share point of TV usage has grown from five to eleven since the metric launched in May 2021, with YouTube alone capturing 12.5% of all television viewing. FAST services PlutoTV, Roku Channel, and Tubi combined for 5.7% of total TV, surpassing any individual broadcast network.
The ad-supported dimension of this shift has accelerated in parallel. Nielsen's second Ad Supported Gauge report found that viewing of content with ads reached 73.6% of overall TV viewing in Q2 2025, up 1.2 share points from Q1, with streaming accounting for 2.7 of those share points gained from ad-supported broadcast. This reinforces the economic logic behind Nielsen's Ad Intel expansion to 20 CTV platforms: advertisers need cross-channel visibility as the ad-supported pool grows faster than any single platform's inventory.
From a budget-allocation standpoint, the CTV share of total television advertising spend has climbed sharply. According to IAB and eMarketer analysis, CTV now represents 38% of total U.S. television advertising spend, up from just 15% in 2020, marking one of the fastest channel shifts in advertising history. This trajectory aligns with Nielsen's finding that 56% of global marketers plan to increase CTV budgets in 2025, and it underscores why measurement fragmentation across platforms remains the primary operational challenge for media buyers navigating the transition.
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