10 Stats Showing the Powerful Partnership of Live-Streamed Sports and CTV Advertising
As the big game approaches on Sunday, it's a fact that live sports telecasts are moving to streaming — at Usain Bolt speed. Last year's Super Bowl was the most streamed big game ever. Amazon Prime’s Thursday Night Football is another example of live-streamed sports taking over, and the NBA and other major sports leagues are following the NFL’s lead. As more fans embrace streaming to watch live sports, the world’s biggest brands are following these consumers by shifting significant investment to CTV advertising.
The 10 stats below show why streaming’s ability to offer more than linear TV — such as enabling enhanced campaign measurement and advanced creative (like interactive and DCO) — is poised to increase the growth of CTV advertising on live-streamed sports.
1936: The Berlin Olympics, starring American sprinter Jesse Owens, is the first sporting event to air on live TV. The motion and drama of sports and television have been a natural partnership ever since.
2001: One of the first sporting events to be live-streamed on TV was the 2001 Ohio State spring football game. It kicked off a transformation in sports broadcasting, viewing, and advertising.
93: In 2023, an astonishing 93 of the top 100 most-watched TV shows were NFL games and related programming. Sports are a primary driver of television viewership — on both linear and streaming.
90 million: A report by PWC projected that the number of U.S. viewers who stream a sports event at least once a month will increase to 90 million in 2025 — compared with 57 million in 2021.
23.5 billion: NBCUniversal streamed 23.5 billion minutes of Olympics coverage during the 2024 Games, according to eMarketer. During the Olympics, Peacock notched eight of its 10 highest streaming days in its history.
70%: The shift of live sports to streaming isn’t only a phenomenon in the United States. Seven in 10 United Kingdom CTV users stream live sports.
$40+ billion: CTV advertising spending is anticipated to surpass $40 billion by 2027, according to eMarketer, which would amount to more than 100% growth since 2022.
$61 billion vs. $30 billion: eMarketer has projected that viewing of streaming has surpassed linear in 2024. However, the growth in ad spending isn't keeping up with how quickly eyeballs are shifting to linear TV in viewership this year. Despite this inexorable trend toward streaming viewership, brands are spending about $61 billion annually on linear vs. just $30 billion on CTV advertising.
76 seconds: Interactive CTV ads generate an average of up to 76 additional seconds of engagement compared with standard pre-roll video. And they achieve an engagement rate 4.5x that of standard video on mobile and 3.8x that of standard video on desktop.
0.89%: The engagement rate for interactive CTV ads with QR codes has more than doubled to 0.89% from 0.37% in the first half of 2024 compared with all of 2024, according to Innovid data. This growth indicates consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable interacting with QR codes on their TV screens.
Learn more about the power of CTV advertising on live-streamed sports. Download Innovid’s report, “Winning Big with CTV Advertising on Live-Streamed Sports.”
