Executive Summary

In our current golden age of CTV, everything can be streamed. With so much content to choose from across TV, movies, sports, and creator channels, discovery becomes a bigger challenge.

Enter AI. In 2026, a new wave of AI-driven personalization will shrink the time it takes viewers to find their next watch. Streaming platforms will become more responsive to individual tastes. Meanwhile, more publishers will invest in building the kind of personalization algorithms that have driven success for Netflix and YouTube.

The challenge of matching users to the right TV content is not really new, but it has gotten worse. In 2025, streaming viewers spent as much as 20 minutes on average to find their next watch,² up from 7.5 minutes in 2019.³ In 2026, AI-driven recommendations will reverse the trend.

These recommendations will be expressed at both the platform and app level. Upon firing up their TVs, viewers will encounter more personalization on the home screen and throughout the OS experience, receiving tailored suggestions as they search and browse titles. And for streaming publishers that take advantage, personalization will improve engagement and reduce churn — helping them catch up with Netflix, the OG of content personalization.

Roku's Home Screen Top Row displays personalized content recommendations.

Netflix's vaunted recommendation engine has long made its viewing experience stickier. Its recommendations influence a whopping 80% of viewing hours⁴ and expand its “effective product catalog” roughly 4x compared to a non-personalized system.⁵ Lately, Netflix has teamed up with OpenAI to improve discovery further with conversational search and other capabilities that can identify the best shows for an individual at a particular time.⁶

Netflix is far from the only innovator in personalized TV. YouTube’s content recommendations drive 70% of viewing on its platform.⁷ As of August, the share of hours originating from Roku's content recommendations on the Home Screen more than quadrupled YoY.⁸

“Roku has invested heavily in giving viewers the most personalized experience possible, and we're now doubling down on those efforts,” said Preston Smalley, VP of Viewer Product, Roku. “When viewers power on their Roku devices in 2026 and beyond, we want the discovery process to feel more effortless than ever.”

We expect other streaming apps to follow. Free, ad-supported streaming options — such as The Roku Channel, Tubi, and live linear streaming channels — have a huge opportunity to boost popularity and retention by combining AI tools with first-party data. Of course, personalization in streaming is not only about surfacing the right content. It’s also about how entertainment is presented to viewers, such as highlighting specific actors, athletes, or clips that appeal to a viewer’s individual tastes. In this way, AI will become “boring” in 2026 as it fades into the background, invisibly making how we find content more seamless and efficient.

For advertisers, AI and automation have already boosted the precision and efficiency of their streaming campaigns. As a result, audiences are seeing more ads that resonate — something we know they want. Seventy-two percent of viewers⁹ in a Roku study last year said they pay more attention to ads that reflect their interests and shopping habits.

In 2026, we predict personalized TV advertising will grow considerably thanks to supply and data integrations such as those Roku has with Amazon, The Trade Desk, and other partners. Steady improvements in identity resolution across streaming apps and platforms will accelerate this process.

“AI and programmatic are transforming how we activate client data, unlocking a new level of performance in CTV,” said Jim Kensicki, US Head of Activation, WPP Media. “By connecting our AI-powered solution, Open Intelligence, with rich data from our own ecosystem and partners like Roku, we’re translating cross-platform signals into more intelligent targeting and personalized creative. This ensures that we reach the right audiences at optimal moments of receptivity, with messages that are relevant to their needs and context.”

During their meteoric rise, powerful new Gen AI models have already affected two critical performance channels: search and social. With search in particular, AI summaries are replacing the need for traditional search results — causing traffic and ad volume to decline. This puts marketers and media companies in a challenging position, as they seek to preserve access to their audiences in a changed world.

In 2026, both marketers and publishers will look to CTV, which is largely insulated from the most disruptive effects of gen AI. Beginning in the second half of the year, marketers will move budgets out of those channels and into CTV. Specifically, we believe up to 50% of streaming advertisers will subsidize CTV ad spend increases with budgets siphoned from search and social.

After all, people still want to watch a season finale — not a synopsis of the finale. And when we talk about “TV-caliber content,” that implies a dedication to high-quality production values. Not incidentally, TV audiences continue to gravitate to reality content, whether that means reality TV or polished creator videos — which is the very opposite of “AI slop.”

To take these one at a time:

Search: The rise of “zero click” searches has already dinged ad volume, with consumers who embrace AI “answer engines” clicking through only about half as often as they do in traditional search.²⁰ For marketers, this trend will shrink the surface area for intent-based search ads and erect a barrier between their brand and consumer research. For publishers, the impact is more existential, as AI overviews threaten crucial monetizable traffic.²¹

Social: Gen AI has seriously blurred the lines between synthetic and authentic content, which comes with risks. In November 2024, AI-generated articles surpassed human-written articles in quantity,²² and 58% of consumers say they often can't tell the difference between real and AI-generated content.²³ The avalanche of “AI slop” creates brand safety headaches for marketers, with offensive content up 72% YoY.²⁴ The result raises questions about the future viability of a channel that already provides diminishing returns for some growth marketers.

By contrast, streaming is protected from many of these pain points. The channel continues to provide a safe and high-attention media environment — along with an improved ability to measure outcomes.

“CTV continues to play a pivotal role in the evolving digital advertising landscape,” said Jamie Finstein, Vice President, Media Center, IAB. “Brands recognize its value across the media mix, driving awareness at the top of the funnel while also delivering on business outcomes."

CTV ads deliver strong levels of viewer attention and measurable impact, and advertisers are taking notice. Already, 36% of advertisers who plan to spend more on CTV will redirect those dollars from social, according to IAB, while 32% plan to reallocate those budgets from paid search.²⁵ It’s reasonable to think the proportion of advertisers opting to move money from search and social over to CTV will increase again in 2026.

When the brand fatty15 wanted to drive awareness²⁶ of its healthy-aging supplements, for example, it chose interactive CTV ads over cluttered social media environments. Its successful campaign drove more than 97,000 page views and a 120% return on ad spend.

While neither search nor social will go away soon, pressures on both channels will lead many advertisers to “hedge” their media mix by ramping up CTV spend in Q3 and Q4.

Wellness brand fatty15 used Roku Action Ads to drive over 97,000 page views.

“As AI destabilizes search and social becomes a minefield for brand safety, CTV remains a resilient, well-instrumented channel where we can innovate under the hood while preserving the integrity of the content relationship.” said Soumitro Tagore, VP of Engineering and Advertising, Roku.

The creator economy is booming, with some 50 million creators making and monetizing content for 5 billion social media users globally, according to Deloitte.²⁷ While social media platforms enabled their rise, the next wave of growth for these video content innovators is likely to come from streaming.

In 2026, creators will expand their presence on connected TV through licensing, ads, and more. And at least one major streaming service beyond YouTube will add a “creator” tab to make it easier for users to find popular creators.

Operating like full-blown production studios, creators are at the forefront of innovation in storytelling, with the most successful among them building TV-scale fanbases. YouTube, again, has been a driving force here. Its centrality to the creator economy has propelled it to a leading position in CTV — with 12.9% of total TV viewing.²⁸ YouTube spent $32 billion on content in 2024, according to KPMG, representing a growth rate well beyond other media giants.²⁹

Creators, however, have made significant inroads beyond YouTube. Tubi launched its “Tubi for Creators” program in June and now has episodes from MrBeast, Jomboy Media, Alan Chikin Chow, Steven He, and others.^{30, 31}

Additionally, many popular podcasts have evolved to include video — making them well-suited for TV devices.

But years before these developments, Roku and other platforms saw the value creators can bring to viewers. In 2023, we partnered with Jellysmack to launch FAST channels with popular creators,³² which we know can attract new audiences and expand our content catalog. Samsung is also bullish on creators. Samsung TV Plus has partnered with Mark Rober, Dhar Mann, Michelle Khare, and other creators to bring their content to the service.³³ That includes launching a FAST channel with Rober and co-producing original programming with Mann.³⁴

These bets are paying off: In August, viewership of creator-led content on The Roku Channel grew nearly 80% in streaming hours per household YoY.³⁵

“Viewers want content that aligns with their interests,” said Lisa Holme, Head of Content, Roku. “That's why Roku has long supported creators through The Roku Channel, giving our viewers access to some of digital's most popular media innovators.”

Marketers should expect even more creators to make the leap to CTV in 2026, and their streaming activities will be multifaceted. For example, CTV ads will help some popular creators extend their existing ecommerce and sponsor activities through interactive and native streaming ads units, such as ads on the Roku Home Screen and Roku City. CTV also gives creators a sense of validation and lets them command higher rates, enabling them to scale and reach wider audiences.³⁶

“When creator content runs alongside the programming that audiences already watch on television, we see greater ROI using creators’ name, image, and likeness across social platforms,” said Ryan Detert, CEO at Influential.

For marketers, this shift will let them partner with creators to engage fan communities on the largest screen in the home. Between Q3 2023 and Q4 2024, shoppable activations that combine talent and stories were shown to boost engagement by 378% across NBCUniversal properties.³⁷ That hints at a large opportunity.

Today, US viewers spend more time streaming on Roku-powered devices⁴² than watching traditional broadcast television. With nearly half of all US TV streaming taking place on a Roku device,⁴³ we have a unique perch to understand the changes reshaping the industry.

We pride ourselves on giving advertisers the authenticated reach and innovative tools they need to meet their business objectives. When Roku brings better TV for everyone, we all win: viewers, advertisers, and partners.

We look forward to helping you successfully navigate these trends in 2026.