How streaming took over TV.

YouTube launched in 2005, but streaming TV really began in January 2007, when Netflix let subscribers watch instantly online. Then Hulu launched in 2008 with ads built in from day one. The same year, Roku released its first streaming player, built to bring Netflix to the TV screen.

Still, streaming was mostly a laptop habit, and the biggest service had no ads at all. TV ad budgets, dealer budgets included, stayed with broadcast and cable.

Amazon launched Prime Instant Video in 2011, and in 2013 Netflix released House of Cards, proving a streamer could make prestige TV of its own. Streaming also moved from the laptop to the living room as Google’s Chromecast (2013) and Amazon’s Fire TV (2014) joined Roku, and smart TVs started shipping with apps built in.

The free, ad-supported side of streaming arrived in 2014. Pluto TV launched with channels that looked and felt like cable, and Tubi launched with a library of on-demand movies and shows, both free and monetized by regular ad breaks. CBS launched All Access the same year, an early sign that broadcast networks saw what was coming.

In 2015, Sling TV launched as the first live TV bundle delivered over the internet, and HBO Now let viewers subscribe to HBO without cable. YouTube TV and Hulu + Live TV followed in 2017. For the first time, people could drop cable and keep their live sports and news.

Connected TV became a real ad channel in these years, as streaming apps and TV makers sold ads to a fast-growing audience. But the biggest subscription services were still ad-free, and most TV ad dollars, dealer budgets included, still went to broadcast and cable. That started to change fast in 2019.

In the space of about eight months, three of the biggest names in entertainment launched their own streaming services. Disney+ arrived in November 2019, followed by HBO Max in May 2020 and Peacock in July 2020. Each one pulled a major studio’s library off cable and onto streaming.

The free side of streaming grew up at the same time. Viacom bought Pluto TV in early 2019, and Fox bought Tubi for $440 million in March 2020. Peacock launched with a free tier paid for entirely by ads.

For dealers, this was the moment the audience started to fragment. Viewers who once sat in front of the same few networks were now spread across dozens of apps, and the pandemic in 2020 accelerated the move.

In 2021, Nielsen launched The Gauge, a monthly snapshot of how Americans split their TV time. By that summer, streaming held 28% of it. HBO Max introduced a cheaper, ad-supported plan that June, one of the first major subscription services to do so.

The real turning point came in 2022. In July, streaming passed cable in total viewing for the first time, at 34.8%. That fall, the two biggest holdouts gave in: Netflix launched Basic with Ads on November 3, and Disney+ followed in December.

For advertisers, the most-watched content in America was suddenly available to buy. For dealers, it meant streaming was no longer just a supplement to a broadcast schedule. It was where a growing share of local buyers spent their evenings.

Once the doors opened, the money followed. According to the IAB, U.S. connected TV ad spend passed $20 billion for the first time in 2023. By November, a year after launch, Netflix’s ad tier had reached 15 million monthly active users worldwide.

In January 2024, Amazon turned on ads in Prime Video by default, bringing one of the largest streaming audiences in the country into the ad market overnight. Free streaming kept climbing too: Tubi ended 2024 with more than 97 million monthly active users.

By now, streaming ads weren’t an experiment. They were a standard line in national media plans, and the same inventory was increasingly within reach of local businesses like dealerships.

In May 2025, streaming reached 44.8% of U.S. TV viewing, more than broadcast and cable combined. It was the first time in Nielsen’s measurement that streaming outweighed all of traditional TV put together.

It kept going. In August 2026, streaming hit 49.6% of TV time, its highest share yet. Nearly every other minute Americans spend watching TV is now spent on a streaming service.

The story of two decades of streaming comes down to three shifts that every dealer marketing plan now has to account for.

• The audience moved. Half of TV time is streaming, and that share keeps growing. A plan built mostly on broadcast and cable now reaches a minority of the TV audience.
• The audience split up. Viewers are spread across dozens of services, free and paid. Reaching in-market buyers means planning across platforms, not buying a single network.
• The results became measurable. Streaming ads run to specific households digitally over the internet, so they can be tied to what happens next, including whether someone actually walked into the showroom.

We ran our first CTV campaign for a dealer in January 2018, before Disney+, HBO Max or Peacock existed. Since then, we’ve grown alongside the industry: walk-in tracking that ties streaming ads to showroom visits, a strategy model for dealer streaming campaigns, direct buying from streaming platforms, the Streaming Automotive Summit, the Automotive Streaming Council, and Maven, which won Digiday’s Best Ad Tech Innovation award in 2026.

Most of this story was still being written when we started building a streaming advertising solution for dealers. We’ve been helping them generate sales and market share growth with streaming since the early days of programmatic CTV and digital audio ads. Streaming’s next chapter is already being written, and we’re helping write it for dealers. Let’s talk about where your dealership fits in.

Sources

• Nielsen, The Gauge: monthly reports, May 2021 to August 2026 (streaming share of TV, including October 2021)
• HBO Max ad-supported tier launch, Advanced Television, June 2021
• Netflix ad tier launch date, TechCrunch, October 2022
• IAB CTV ad spend, 2023, Next TV
• Netflix ad tier reaches 15M users, TheWrap, November 2023
• Tubi reaches 97M monthly users; Fox’s 2020 acquisition, StreamTV Insider, January 2025