The upfronts have been morphing for years. It isnt a tight, single market anymore. It is multiple stacked upon on top of eachother.
To the numbers!
- MediaPost reports streaming commitments reached $13.2 billion last cycle, up 61% in two years.
- Linear slipped to $17.8 billion and fell 3% year-over-year.
- Media Dynamics has CPMs softening across the board:
- broadcast off 4.1%
- cable off 6.8%
- streaming and CTV off 7.6%.
More platforms are selling more inventory into the same advertiser demand pool. Meanwhile, price is absorbing the gap.
I was at 212NYC's "Portfolio Upfront" panel over at Amazon's NYC offices a couple of nights ago. The panel itself was pretty good. A sell-side platform exec from Amazon (Jenny Burke), the president of investment at Horizon Media (David Campanelli), and an ad tech leader from Freewheel (Larry Allen), all trading notes.
Their answers were very different depending on where in the market they sat.
So here's my thoughts from the three sides of the market.
The Sellers: Scarcity is the only pricing power left
If you're a seller, live sports is the entire pricing story. NBCU closed its last upfront cycle at the highest ad sales volume in the company's history, and basically all of that was the Olympics, Super Bowl LX, and the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
Nielsen says sports is pulling nearly 30% of ad-supported TV viewing in the 18-49 and 25-54 demos. Everything else...margin compression.
The FAST channels keep flooding the market with cheap inventory. Chasing profitability, Peacock, Max, Netflix, and Prime all raised ad loads. The pitch has had to evolve. It used to be "buy our reach, "and now it's basically "buy our stack."
You can see it in what the sellers are building. Disney is pushing DRAX Direct with The Trade Desk and DV360. NBCU rolled out its Performance Insights Hub and a bunch of new ad formats.
Paramount moved up its schedule reveal to April 15. Plus, they scattered advertiser meetings across three cities instead of doing one big New York stage.
Jenny Burke at Amazon described all of this as a "big simplification effort" from the panel stage, which is the polite framing. The less polite framing is that sellers figured out the content slate isn't enough anymore.
And Apple. The elephant nobody mentioned on the panel but I can only assume everyone is thinking about.
No ad tier yet, officially, but read the tea leaves. The rebrand, the price hikes, and all the ex-NBCU and Peacock executives they've been hiring paint a pretty clear picture. Whenever Apple turns the ads on, the premium AVOD supply gets more crowded than it already is.