This article was originally featured in VideoWeek’s 2026 Video & TV Buyer’s Guide.
Towards the end of 2024, “Convergent TV”, a term coined to describe the merging of television distribution platforms and technologies into a single viewing experience, duly entered the lexicon.
Less than two years later, the next phase of that convergence is taking shape at a time when every player in this business is shedding excess tonnage in a trading environment defined by vertical integration, where one company seeks to own the buying apparatus, the identity layer, and the supply paths through which advertising is delivered and measured.
Meanwhile, even as private pathways between broadcaster-owned and streaming-only platforms have coalesced, a third wave of fragmentation is already well underway, with YouTube chipping into the streaming market’s share of commercial viewing time.
TV’s New Operating Model
What was once just TV has morphed into an intricate ecosystem in which two sets of operational expectations, driven by the growing democratisation of inventory across audiovisual and digital teams, are ultimately converging on a shared set of principles for planning and buying video. While individual media owners retain strength in professionally produced and regulated content, media investment is increasingly consolidating within interoperable workflows that facilitate unified activation across multiple supply sources via guaranteed bookings or private auctions. And as media owners look to maximise yield, a greater proportion of inventory is set to flow into and be monetised through preferred buying platforms.
For marketers who want to differentiate their brand and borrow the equity of premium content, there is no alternative to television. It is no wonder, then, that as platforms unify fragmented inventory through curation, creative execution, identity, and measurement, demand is converging from every direction, across the remits of different media planning teams and the brand and performance budgets they manage.
As TV environments become more interactive, creating clearer pathways between exposures and outcomes, media buyers are increasingly able to attribute the impact of TV advertising at the point of sale. However, as commerce media blooms and brands lean in, agencies may feel obliged to push back, as an obsession with performance at the expense of brand building leads to short-term thinking. In reality, the fundamentals of TV advertising haven’t changed: short-term results are still built on long-term brand investment, and television is still one of the few media channels capable of delivering both at scale, and, arguably, the only channel with the power to make brands famous.
Convergence in Practice
The prevailing narrative is that the convergence of TV’s brand-building prowess and digital advertising’s targeting and measurement capabilities offers the best of both worlds, but success will require more deliberate trade-offs than that framing suggests. While buying models have converged around operational efficiencies driven by unified access to inventory, the environments and formats through which ads are delivered remain far more fragmented.
The Format Challenge
There is no doubt that TV’s connected era has been transformational, both as a shot in the arm for addressable advertising and the net-new brand experiences that have become available as TV manufacturers and operating systems have entered the advertising space. However, many of the formats now gaining momentum are not yet compatible with automated buying at scale, as they lack standardised creative specifications and placement dynamics that can be activated and measured consistently across disparate environments. Display and video ads held on TV home screens and menus manifest and behave differently across different media owners, which means buyers must either navigate these environments individually or work with partners capable of aggregating them.
The inevitable direction of travel is that, as media owners seek to diversify revenues, all forms of TV advertising will become widely available and bookable at a scale that reflects demand. Until then, the industry finds itself at a familiar inflexion point, where hands-on creative implementation and format-specific expertise are still required to connect the dots.
The Data Conundrum
The promise of precision targeting at scale is not just about access to addressable signals but about how effectively they can be stitched together or recreated across different environments. Targeting within closed ecosystems, where consented first-party data is available, is possible, but given that television is an inherently shared viewing experience, assumptions about highly granular targeting are often reconsidered, with a greater emphasis on demographic and contextual approaches. Still, the same inventory may need to be bought at scale in one campaign and curated in another, which is why buyers are increasingly turning to scalable data and targeting solutions that translate individual-device signals into proxy-based household activations on the TV screen.
Rapid progress is being made in this space thanks to advances in machine learning, and every setback, however public, will also lead to valuable improvements that strengthen the role of artificial intelligence, particularly when it comes to commercialising outcomes, in the future of TV advertising.
While traditional broadcast infrastructure may endure into the next decade, the consensus is that all video distribution, whether viewing is live or on-demand, will eventually be delivered via Internet Protocol. As the advertising industry moves towards consolidated planning and buying across IP-delivered viewing environments, the standards that orient television around premium content and brand safety will need to be upheld in the way that audience data is captured and utilised, with buying platforms set to play a greater role in ensuring that campaigns delivered across a network of media owners remain compliant against increasingly stringent regulations.
The New Standard
An integrated approach to measuring audience exposures across video environments using comparable metrics is now almost table stakes. In particular, there’s a growing expectation that data and insights can determine how open and closed ecosystems may work together to extend reach and frequency of impressions. Attention-based metrics, too, are growing in stature as advertisers look to optimise beyond delivery and towards exposures that influence behaviour. In 2025, a Teads industry pulse revealed that over half of UK marketers investing in Connected TV now prioritise measurement that demonstrates a clear return on investment.
In an age where buyers are more explicitly stating their needs and more ardently pursuing outcomes, the winners in the platform wars will be those capable of providing a deduplicated and complete picture of audience engagement across devices and environments, with planning and profiling insights that inform how media should be activated, both in the long and short term.
The next phase of convergence between TV and online video is not so much about removing complexity for media buyers as redistributing it. The buying process may be more unified, but inventory, targeting and measurement solutions remain fragmented and are maturing at different speeds. Recognising this nuance is critical, and the platforms and partners that equip and empower brands to navigate the new set of challenges ahead will also chart the next phase of growth for our industry.