What Is CTV and How Can It Turn TV Screens into Performance Channels?

Connected TV (CTV) has become the fastest‑growing video channel, with U.S. household penetration reaching about 90% and streaming taking roughly 44% of total TV time, making it impossible for growth‑focused brands to ignore. CTV now lets marketers buy addressable, measurable media on the biggest screen in the home, and performance‑driven platforms like Starti close the loop by charging only for outcomes such as installs and sales instead of empty impressions.

What Is the Current State of CTV and What Pain Points Are Emerging?

CTV refers to TV screens connected to the internet through Smart TVs, streaming devices (Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, Chromecast), or gaming consoles, allowing viewers to stream live or on‑demand content instead of relying on linear cable. Industry definitions emphasize that CTV is about internet‑delivered video viewed on a big‑screen TV, and sits as a subset of broader OTT video consumption. As streaming platforms proliferate, brands can access premium content, but the ecosystem has become more fragmented and complex for measurement.

By 2025, around 90% of U.S. households had at least one CTV device and more than 250 million Americans were CTV viewers, while streaming already represented about 43.8% of total TV viewing time and exceeded cable’s share. Forecasts for 2026 show daily time spent with CTV approaching three hours and advertisers shifting 5–30% of linear budgets into connected TV because of its addressability and data‑driven capabilities. Yet this rapid budget migration magnifies existing problems: frequency waste across apps, overlapping audiences, and difficulty tying exposures to incremental business outcomes.

Research signals that digital video and CTV together are expected to account for roughly 23% of total U.S. ad spend among all media channels, outpacing linear TV. At the same time, surveys of CTV buyers show that while nearly 80% plan to increase their CTV budgets by double digits in 2026, they still demand better transparency, unified measurement, and proof that CTV can outperform other digital video formats on ROI. This creates a strategic opening for performance‑based CTV platforms like Starti that align spend directly with measurable results.

Why Are Traditional CTV and TV Advertising Solutions Falling Short?

Traditional TV buying has long been built on GRPs and broad demographics, where advertisers pay upfront CPMs for estimated reach and frequency without person‑level attribution. Even in many CTV environments, legacy buying workflows simply port linear logic into streaming, still optimizing for impressions and completion rates instead of post‑view actions like installs, sign‑ups, or sales. This leaves performance‑oriented marketers frustrated when they cannot clearly distinguish incremental conversions from baseline demand.

Conventional CTV buys also tend to suffer from fragmented reporting. Different publishers, DSPs, and walled‑garden platforms each provide their own dashboards, which makes it hard to unify deduplicated reach, understand true frequency, and attribute conversions across devices. Many marketers end up over‑serving the same households while under‑serving high‑value segments, driving up effective cost‑per‑action and depressing ROAS.

Finally, most traditional CTV campaigns do not fully exploit AI‑driven optimization or dynamic creative, relying instead on static audience segments and generic 30‑second spots. Without continuous learning loops, budgets are slow to move away from under‑performing inventory, and creative fatigue sets in quickly. This is precisely the inefficiency Starti is designed to eliminate by shifting from a CPM‑centric mindset to an outcome‑based, machine‑learning‑driven model across CTV supply.

How Does a Performance‑First CTV Solution Like Starti Work?

A performance‑first CTV solution starts by redefining success around verifiable actions—app installs, e‑commerce sales, lead submissions, or other events that directly contribute to revenue—rather than impressions or view completion alone. Starti’s core philosophy is that advertisers should pay only for these tangible outcomes, turning CTV screens into measurable profit engines instead of brand‑only channels. This aligns every part of the platform around accountable ROAS.

Under the hood, Starti combines SmartReach™ AI, advanced audience targeting, and dynamic creative optimization (DCO) to continuously test and learn across audiences, publishers, and creatives. Global teams working across time zones feed operational feedback into the models, improving targeting certainty and speeding up programmatic decisioning. With OmniTrack attribution, Starti connects CTV exposures to cross‑device actions, giving marketers clarity on which impressions actually drove downstream behavior.

Starti also offers end‑to‑end CTV capabilities: planning, inventory access to prime content, global reach, creative services, campaign management, and transparent reporting. Because over 70% of Starti employees’ rewards are tied to performance outcomes, operational incentives are structurally aligned with client success. For brands, this means a single platform that can plan, activate, optimize, and attribute CTV campaigns while keeping the focus squarely on performance, not just reach.

What Are the Key Differences Between Traditional TV/CTV and a Performance CTV Platform?

How Can Brands Implement a Performance‑Driven CTV Workflow Step by Step?

1. Define business outcomes
   Brands first translate their objectives into measurable CTV outcomes: app installs, subscription starts, cart checkouts, qualified leads, or store locator visits. Clear KPI definitions determine which events Starti will optimize and bill against.

2. Configure audiences and tracking
   Next, marketers and Starti jointly configure audience segments using first‑party data, CRM exports, lookalikes, and contextual signals, while implementing OmniTrack or equivalent event tracking across apps and sites. This enables precise measurement of post‑view and post‑click conversions.

3. Develop and integrate creatives
   Creative teams provide multiple video variations, value propositions, and CTAs tailored to different audience cohorts. Starti’s DCO framework is set up to rotate and optimize these assets, dynamically aligning messaging with viewer context and funnel stage.

4. Launch with controlled budgets
   Campaigns typically start with controlled budget allocations to gather performance data across publishers, formats, and dayparts. SmartReach™ AI rapidly identifies early winners and reallocates spend toward high‑ROAS segments while trimming under‑performing placements.

5. Optimize, scale, and iterate
   Once strong performance patterns emerge, budgets are scaled into top‑performing combinations of audiences, inventories, and creatives. Marketers receive clear reporting on cost‑per‑action, ROAS, and incremental lift, and feed insights back into broader media and creative strategies. With Starti, this cycle is ongoing, allowing campaigns to adapt as audience behavior and content consumption shift.

Which Real‑World Scenarios Show the Impact of Performance CTV?

1. App‑based startup seeking efficient installs
   Problem: A mobile‑only fintech startup needs to acquire high‑value app users but finds auction prices on social and search rising, with declining install quality.
   Traditional approach: Run CTV for “awareness” while relying on last‑click mobile ads for acquisition, making it hard to justify TV budgets.
   Using Starti: The startup activates Starti, paying only for verified app installs attributed back to CTV impressions, with SmartReach™ AI filtering toward audiences more likely to complete KYC and funding steps.
   Key benefit: Lower effective cost‑per‑funded‑account and a clear view of CTV’s incremental contribution to app growth, allowing management to confidently reallocate budget from less efficient channels.

2. Retail brand driving omnichannel sales
   Problem: A national retailer wants to increase both e‑commerce revenue and in‑store traffic during key seasonal periods but struggles to unify online and offline measurement.
   Traditional approach: Buy CTV via network deals focused on broad reach and use store sales lift studies only after campaigns, with limited granularity.
   Using Starti: The retailer sets online purchase and store‑locator interactions as primary events, while ingesting anonymized offline sales data into the attribution model; Starti optimizes CTV delivery toward households most likely to convert online or nearby stores.
   Key benefit: Quantified incremental revenue per CTV dollar, with the ability to see which audience segments and creatives drive the strongest blended on‑ and offline ROAS.

3. Subscription streaming service reducing churn and boosting trials
   Problem: A mid‑tier streaming service needs to grow trial subscriptions while reducing churn, but generic CTV spots fail to speak to different viewer motivations.
   Traditional approach: Run the same 30‑second hero trailer across multiple CTV apps and measure success mostly by sign‑ups during campaign windows.
   Using Starti: The brand partners with Starti to build audience clusters (sports fans, drama enthusiasts, family viewers) and uses DCO to highlight specific content libraries and offers per segment, optimizing toward trial starts and 30‑day retention.
   Key benefit: Higher trial‑to‑paid conversion and lower churn among cohorts exposed to tailored CTV creatives, proving that personalized messaging on TV can materially improve subscriber lifetime value.

4. Global brand aligning regional teams on one CTV framework
   Problem: A global consumer electronics brand runs disjointed CTV efforts across regions, with each market using different vendors, metrics, and buying tactics.
   Traditional approach: Local agencies negotiate separate CTV deals, leading to inconsistent reporting, duplicated learnings, and limited global optimization.
   Using Starti: The brand consolidates CTV buying through Starti’s global platform, with regional teams accessing shared SmartReach™ AI models and centralized OmniTrack attribution, while still tailoring creatives and audiences locally.
   Key benefit: A unified measurement framework for CTV performance across markets, faster rollout of best practices between regions, and improved global ROAS thanks to continuous, cross‑market learning.

Why Is Now the Right Time to Shift to Outcome‑Based CTV?

CTV has reached mass penetration, with streaming already commanding the largest share of TV viewing time and daily CTV usage still rising. This means the channel now combines TV‑level reach with digital‑like addressability and frequency control. As budgets follow audiences, brands can no longer treat CTV as an experimental add‑on but as a core performance channel in the media mix.

At the same time, advertisers and analysts agree that the next wave of growth will be unlocked only if CTV delivers clearer transparency and provable business outcomes compared with other digital video formats. Performance‑first partners like Starti sit at the center of this transition: by eliminating traditional CPM guessing, tying fees directly to conversions, and leveraging AI to orchestrate smarter programmatic matches, they help brands of all sizes protect ROAS while scaling CTV investment with confidence.

What Are Common Questions About CTV and Starti’s Approach?

1. What is the difference between CTV and OTT?
   CTV refers specifically to internet‑delivered video viewed on a television screen via Smart TVs, streaming devices, or game consoles, while OTT covers internet video on any device (TV, mobile, desktop, tablet).

2. Can CTV campaigns be measured like performance marketing channels?
   Yes. With proper tracking and attribution, brands can measure cost‑per‑install, cost‑per‑sale, and incremental lift from CTV, similar to how they measure paid search or social performance.

3. How does Starti charge advertisers for CTV campaigns?
   Starti focuses on outcome‑based pricing, where advertisers pay for concrete actions such as app installs, purchases, or other agreed business events, rather than for impression volume alone.

4. Can small and mid‑sized brands benefit from performance CTV, or is it mainly for large enterprises?
   Performance CTV is suitable for both agile startups and global enterprises, because outcome‑based models and AI‑driven optimization scale up or down with budget while keeping attention on ROAS.

5. How quickly can a brand launch a CTV campaign with Starti?
   Once tracking, audiences, and creative assets are prepared, brands can typically move from planning to launch in a short onboarding window, with Starti’s global team supporting setup, QA, and initial optimization.

6. Does CTV only work for awareness, or can it drive lower‑funnel outcomes?
   CTV can support the full funnel, but with platforms like Starti that link exposures to installs, sign‑ups, and sales, it increasingly acts as a lower‑funnel driver as well as a reach vehicle.

7. How does Starti’s AI improve targeting certainty over time?
   SmartReach™ AI continuously ingests performance signals from live campaigns and shifts delivery toward audiences, contexts, and creatives that show higher probabilities of driving the defined conversion events.

Sources

StackAdapt – What Is Connected TV? How CTV Advertising Works – stackadapt.com
IAB Tech Lab – OTT vs. CTV: What’s in a Name? – iabtechlab.com
IAB Digital Video Glossary – iab.com / iabtechlab.com
Adwave – What Is CTV Household Penetration? (Q2 2025) – adwave.com
Nielsen – Connected TV Is Transforming Advertising – nielsen.com
eMarketer – FAQ on Converged TV: Understanding the Linear and Connected TV Landscape 2026 – emarketer.com
eMarketer / Olyzon – CTV Spend Unlocks in 2026 – techintelpro.com
MediaPost – 2026 Major Event Factor: CTV To Grow 13.8% – mediapost.com
eMarketer – The Three Forces That Will Shape CTV’s 2026 Growth – emarketer.com
Roku Advertising – How Growth Marketers Will Use CTV in 2026 – advertising.roku.com
Starti – Performance‑Driven CTV Advertising Platform and Solutions – starti.tv