If 2024 was a year of accelerating convergence of linear and streaming TV, 2025 may just be “the Convergent TV Singularity” — the point at which linear and streaming TV become indistinguishable for TV buyers and sellers.
As our team sat down to make our 2025 predictions, we kept coming back to the downstream impacts of this rapidly approaching singularity — from the content we expect to see more of, to how media is measured, to the innovations that will drive ROI for our industry in the years to come.
Mostly, we think of this “Convergent TV Singularity” as a good thing. An increasing number of buyers and sellers are realizing the true promise of our cumulative technological advancements: a marketplace that combines the targeting, optimization, and automation of digital with the premium programs and watercooler moments that have long made TV the world’s most valuable advertising medium.
Ready to see what the future holds for the TV ad industry? Keep reading.
1. Streaming-Exclusive Moments Go Beyond Live Sports
Media companies invested heavily in streaming-exclusive live sports throughout 2024, highlighted by Netflix picking up the NFL’s Christmas Day slate and Amazon’s Prime Video announcing a deal with the NBA and WNBA.
Part of this expansion stems from the fact that live sports are the 10,000-pound gorilla of TV advertising — we’ll spare you the statistics about the NFL’s dominance on broadcast and cable.
But increased investment in sports and live events on streaming platforms speaks to a larger truth about what makes TV special: its unique ability to create cultural moments with must-see content that brings us all together, all at the same time. These convening moments engage audiences and entice advertisers.
In 2025, we expect even more streaming-exclusive, appointment viewing beyond live sports — more live comedy specials, concerts, political news coverage, more hot-dog eating contests, you name it. We won’t be surprised when an upcoming award show is made into a streaming exclusive, or when streamers release more of their scripted programming weekly instead of all at one.
2. Demo-Based Buying Continues Its Secular Decline — and Perhaps We’ll See Some Breakthroughs
In 2025, demographic-based buying — the tired-not-wired method of buying generic audiences like “Women 25-54” — will take yet another step toward the dustbin of history when marketers begin to abandon it in their streaming buys.
First, let’s start with what we know: Convergent TV buyers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in how they think about streaming platforms. Advanced audience targeting, despite the data accuracy, interoperability, and measurement challenges, are the preferred choice.
But more interestingly, we’re seeing our partners plan and execute linear and streaming buys around data more closely aligned to their actual business results. They’re optimizing for impression quality, cutting wasted spend from excess frequency, and driving results. The upshot? 2025 is the year a growing cadre of marketers will put it all together and harness the true potential of convergent TV.
Additionally, here’s what we think might happen: media buyers have long asked for the ability to purchase streaming inventory at the program level, and this could be the year sellers grant their wish.
For years, streaming TV has mostly been bought at the platform level, with recent innovations allowing investment focused on genres or popular inventory. This setup is partially an artifact of streaming pioneer Hulu’s joint venture origins — where demo-based buying could easily manage ad sales channel conflict between the big networks who joined forces to kick off the streaming revolution.
Eventually, digital-first streamers like YouTube started showing brands the exact video where their ads ran. And more recently, the 2023 Hollywood strikes resulted in writers and actors getting even more insight into viewership numbers. Netflix then started leading the way on transparency of viewership at a program level.
Could this increased transparency pressure and the ongoing demand from brand advertisers to control their placements force media companies’ hands to finally sell at the program level in 2025?
3. All Those “Death of ___” Predictions Are Premature, But AI’s Impact Is Already Here
To be clear, we think new innovations – especially Generative AI and Vertical AI (like what we have been doing for years at EDO) – will transform the way we do business for years to come. But predictions that ChatGPT will be the death of Google or human writing (ahem!) are just as premature as those that have predicted Linear TV’s or Nielsen’s or the vinyl record’s demise for years.
As with any game-changing technology, there’s often a rush to claim that its transformative impacts will happen all at once, rather than in phases over time. Those of us who’ve been in the advertising industry for a while may remember the wall-to-wall chatter about “The Year of Mobile” … which seemed to last for a half decade or more.
We are interested in the lower profile, but often higher ROI impact of Vertical AI, which we define as AI models applied to industry specific problem sets (in our case, Media & Advertising). For us, the core advantage of this Vertical AI comes from category-level training of massively multi-dimensional machine learning models, based on 10+ years of proprietary training data (mostly very noisy, unstructured data that we had to leverage other AI models to clean up and make accurate and usable). The benefits are primarily new capabilities and lower unit economics, driven by predictive accuracy and scaled automation.
Here’s how we’re applying it today: with AI-driven automation, EDO has already measured over 100 trillion streaming ad impressions, over 300 million linear ad airings, and 2.3 million ad creatives, organized into a categorical taxonomy consisting of over 32,000 brands and 115,000 products. Whew, that’s Big Data. But what it means is that we’re delivering brand engagement reports for almost 20x less dollars per campaign than conventional brand lift surveys. Now, that is ROI from AI.
4. Cost Pressures Inspire Media Companies to Find More Efficient, More Scalable Measurement and Data Delivery
If there’s one thing we all missed in our 2024 predictions, it was the massive, industry-wide impact of Amazon’s Prime Video “opt-out” entrance to the streaming ad marketplace.
In one fell swoop, Amazon made 100 million streaming households available to marketers, massively increasing the amount of streaming TV inventory on the market. Alongside this new supply and a pair of great hires — Krishan Bhatia and Jenny Burke, Amazon rolled out an aggressive strategy to give advertisers two impressions for every one they purchased upfront. With gigantic scale and low prices (sound familiar?), Amazon prompted the rest of the big convergent TV players to keep pace by offering deep discounts.
Heading into 2025, media companies that were already feeling the heat from the high costs of a complex TV ecosystem are under greater pressure than ever to reduce costs, find efficiencies, and capitalize on automation and economies of scale. Great technology — and great technology teams — will be essential for finding and executing on these opportunities.
Streaming measurement data is an area ripe for just these kinds of cost savings. Custom, client-by-client solutions — like surveys and focus groups — will be increasingly rare, with media companies opting instead for automated, repeatable, and scalable solutions for measurement and data delivery.
The bottom line? It’s never been more important for media companies to have great technology leaders and practitioners at the table.
5. Programmatic TV (Finally) Makes the Leap
We’ve been saying for years that programmatic TV will only reach its true potential once marketers integrate outcomes into their measurement stacks — much like we saw in the boom in social advertising.
Increasingly, leading programmatic innovators like our new partners at SciBids (acquired by DoubleVerify) and Chalice AI are adding TV outcomes measurement and pre-bid optimization, and marketers are capitalizing on them. Media companies, too, are warming to unlocking their most premium inventory for programmatic buying, especially as cost pressures motivate them to extract top dollar from every impression.
All you have to do is look at the most recent Upfronts to see how much more frequently media sellers are celebrating their programmatic offerings these days — with NBCUniversal even making Olympics content available for programmatic buying.
In 2025, we believe our industry will reach a tipping point. Sellers will offer even more of their top inventory for programmatic buying, and advertisers will become more sophisticated and creative in using programmatic to maximize their results.
The future of convergent TV is here, and the winners will be the buyers and sellers who are ready, willing, and able to capitalize on it.
What are YOUR predictions for 2025?
If our 2025 predictions are as accurate as our 2024 predictions, we’re in for another fascinating year of technical advancement, new opportunities, and a transformation in how we all think about what’s possible from TV advertising.
Another certainty? We’re probably missing some things — and we’d love to know what YOU think is coming in 2025. Let us know in the comments below, or drop me a line at kevink@edoinc.com.
Until then, let’s rest, recharge, and get ready, we’ve got a big year ahead of us!