Modern Retail+ Research: The marketers’ 2026 guide to a shifting CTV landscape, including YouTube, Peacock and Roku

01 Introduction 02 Methodology 03 Mergers could shift the CTV landscape 04 YouTube strategies go beyond just measuring reach 05 From impressions to clicks, KPIs vary by platform 06 Measurement and cost continue to frustrate marketers 07 Marketers hesitate to implement AI on CTV Keeping the complexities of marketing channels in mind, Modern Retail+ Research has analyzed strategies and challenges across leading marketing channels — like retail media, influencer marketing and social media — to identify key trends and best practices in our CMO Strategies series.

In this installment, Modern Retail+ Research focuses on an analysis of the ad-supported streaming landscape and its role in marketers’ playbooks. 01 Introduction As CTV matures, the streaming ad industry is entering a period of change.

Media giants like The Walt Disney Company and Paramount are pursuing mergers that have the potential to reduce market fragmentation and strengthen scale. At the same time, advertisers are reevaluating how they measure success across streaming platforms as performance expectations rise and audience viewing habits shift.

Industry-wide, brands and platforms are experimenting with how to best implement AI in CTV. Modern Retail+ Research’s fifth annual report analyzes the state of ad-supported streaming and the challenges those companies pose to marketers.

02 Methodology To map out marketers’ current digital playbook, Modern Retail+ Research distributed three surveys asking 125 respondents a range of questions, including past and upcoming investments, marketing channel tactics and business challenges.

Modern Retail+ Research also conducted interviews with the marketing and streaming executives from the following companies: Milani Cosmetics NBCUniversal (Peacock) Rembrand Roku Ruggable Tinuiti YouTube 03 Mergers could shift the CTV landscape YouTube came out on top for the fourth year in a row as the ad-supported streaming service that received the largest portion of both survey respondents’ ad placements and ad budgets.

Seventy-five percent of brand and agency respondents said they currently place ads on YouTube as of Q1 2026. Amazon’s Prime Video (with ads) followed in second place at 47% of respondents, while Hulu and Paramount+ tied in third place at 43% of respondents, respectively.

The top three ad-supported streaming platforms that consumed the greatest portion of marketers’ budgets in 2025 aligned with the top platforms where they place ads, Modern Retail’s survey found. Half of respondents (50%) said YouTube consumed the largest portion of their company’s ad budget in 2025.

Amazon’s Prime Video (with ads) and Hulu followed in second and third place at 18% and 8% of respondents, respectively. While the top CTV platforms remained the same in this year’s ranking as last year’s, the streaming industry is poised to experience significant shifts in the coming 12 months, which will likely affect next year’s ranking.

The Walt Disney Company is planning to merge Hulu with Disney+ by the end of 2026. Paramount also plans to combine Paramount+ and Max into a single streaming service in the coming year, pending regulatory approval of Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Harry Browne, vp of TV, audio and display innovation at performance marketing agency Tinuiti, said the mergers are expected to make audience targeting easier for marketers. “Targeting is an exercise in figuring out which platforms consumers might be on, reaching them on those platforms and using different signals to reach them in the right place.

There’s hope that if we consolidate platforms, that exercise becomes easier.” “One of the partners that’s been really effective in this fragmented space is somebody like a Roku or an OEM, or an operating system, because they have this opportunity to reach people on several different streaming platforms regardless of which one they’re watching,” he added.

“This consolidation helps other individual streaming platforms compete a little bit better with that kind of an argument.” However, Brian Albert, YouTube’s managing director of U. S. video deals and creative works, is cautious about the mergers.

“The most immediate effect on viewers will be going from ‘too many apps’ to ‘the mega bundle,’ essentially creating a landscape that looks like the old cable TV model,” he said in an email.

04 YouTube strategies go beyond just measuring reach Marketers surveyed by Modern Retail+ Research in the first quarter of this year mainly used impressions and watch times as the two main metrics to measure ad campaign success across all ad-supported streaming platforms.

On top-used platform YouTube, 46% marketers selected watch time as their main metric of success. That was the largest percentage of respondents who selected watch time on any platform in Modern Retail’s survey. Watch time matters to marketers on other platforms as well because advertisers hope to prompt engaged viewers i