Wurl at StreamTV Show 2025: Where the CTV industry stands (and what comes next)?

Last month, the Wurl team headed to the Mile-High City to mix with the high-flyers at StreamTV Show in Denver, CO. This premier event draws together the brightest minds and leaders in the Connected TV (CTV) industry to delve into the latest innovations, discuss evolving consumer behaviors, and forecast the future of streaming media.

We sat down with execs from Google, Tastemade, FilmRise, Gracenote, The Trade Desk, Vizio, Samsung, and others to unpack what’s working, what’s next, and where the biggest opportunities still lie.

YouTube on CTV: The elephant in the living room

Wurl’s GM of the Americas, Dave Bernath, addressed StreamTV with a keynote that urged the industry not to repeat a familiar mistake: underestimating the insurgent. Just as legacy players shrugged off Netflix 15 years ago, many today still fail to grasp the scale and momentum of YouTube’s rise on the big screen.

YouTube is now:

• The #1 streaming service in the U.S.
• The #1 platform in all of TV by watch time
• Dominant across all demos — especially 65+, its fastest-growing segment

And remarkably, it got there without pulling many of the traditional levers — no big licensing deals, no significant premium content investments, and no revenue-sharing with platforms.

Dave clearly outlined that YouTube is already shaping television. If we don’t evolve our models now, we risk watching history repeat itself—again. He closed his keynote with a question for the industry: what is your YouTube strategy?

Monetization: Maturing, not plateauing

In a panel led by Wurl’s Ingrid Mariotti, the conversation around monetization opened with a candid take: yes, CTV viewership continues to grow, but monetization still lags behind.

The primary culprit? A mix of legacy buying habits and a fragmented programmatic ecosystem that hasn’t fully caught up to the scale of today’s streaming inventory.

Wurl and fellow panelists from Google, Tastemade, and FilmRise agreed — the model is maturing, not plateauing. Profitability is trending up. Brand experimentation is accelerating. And with the right data infrastructure and collaboration, CTV is on track to match its audience scale with revenue performance.

Key innovations are helping to close the gap, including:

• Creative optimization and technology to match ad emotion with scene tone
• Server-side unwinding from Google to reduce latency and improve render rates
• Partnership models combining premium inventory with scaled delivery

UX and discovery: The new battleground for attention

Wurl’s Dave Bernath joined a panel of platform leaders to unpack a growing reality in CTV: the user experience has become the battleground for viewer engagement. As audiences move fluidly between platforms and content types, discovery needs to feel intuitive, personalized, and fast.

Rather than treating FAST channels as a last stop for aging libraries, Wurl and partners like Tastemade are leaning into FAST as a first window strategy — delivering exclusive originals that break the mold of what ad-supported streaming looks like.

Meanwhile, OS platforms are rethinking their role in driving active discovery:

• Roku’s Sports Zone and Featured Free personalize discovery
• Vizio’s WatchFree+ integrates rich metadata for smarter surfacing
• Samsung TV+ is leaning into destination-based navigation with AI curation

The shift? From passive, lean-back viewing to active, personalized content engagement — TV is evolving into a platform that connects the right viewer to the right experience.

Contextual advertising: CTV’s best-kept performance secret

Wurl’s Scott Dahlgren joined executives from Curve, Anoki, and Gracenote to explore how contextual advertising has moved far beyond genre-based targeting. In today’s CTV environment, effective contextual strategies hinge on:

• Scene-level signals
• AI-powered matching of ads to content moments
• Bridging the signal gap in a fractured ecosystem.

Scott highlighted how Wurl’s BrandDiscovery solution uses emotional alignment — matching the sentiment of the ad to the tone of the content — to boost engagement and brand lift. It’s proving to be a scalable solution for programmatic CTV.

Contextual targeting is no longer just about relevance — it’s emerging as a key tactic for brands aiming to optimize for performance.

Final thoughts

CTV has moved from experimental budgets to a core line item in media plans, proving its value with measurable reach, flexible targeting, and improved ad outcomes. But sustained monetization will depend on more than just scale — it will require:

• Better data infrastructure
• More collaborative economics
• Smarter, viewer-first content discovery

As Wurl’s Ingrid Mariotti put it, CTV must deliver “the best of digital and the best of TV.” With innovation accelerating across content, ad formats, and platforms, the path forward is clear. Now it’s about execution.

Want more insights on CTV? Explore the latest CTV Trends Report.