As the television industry has grown more complex, so too has the relationship between content and advertising. Once a relatively contained ecosystem centered on scheduled linear programming and familiar commercial breaks, TV has been reshaped by the rise of streaming and shifting audience viewing preferences.
Today, audiences move fluidly across broadcast, cable and streaming, consuming a mix of live, scheduled and on-demand programming. Together, these environments create a television landscape characterized by diverse viewing patterns, business models and approaches to advertising.
Content viewership remains essential to understanding the television marketplace, but viewership alone does not provide a complete picture of where advertising is being consumed.
To bring the advertising side of the marketplace into focus, Comscore has launched The Score Report, a monthly resource showing how measured television ad exposure is distributed across broadcast, cable and streaming, as well as among the publishers and owners that make up the television ecosystem.
At the center of the report is Share of Ad Exposure Time, a metric representing the percentage of total measured television ad viewing time attributed to a platform, publisher or owner during a given reporting period.
Content-viewing measures show how audiences distribute their time across programming, platforms, and providers. Share of Ad Exposure Time focuses specifically on the advertising viewed within that time.
The two will not necessarily align, and that distinction is exactly why measuring Share of Ad Exposure Time is valuable. Audience scale, time spent with ad-supported content and advertising loads all affect how content viewing translates into ad exposure. Even when programming carries advertising, an environment with fewer ad minutes per hour may account for a smaller share of ad exposure than its share of content viewing would suggest.
In August 2026, The Score Report found that 43.2% of measured television ad exposure occurred across broadcast, 34.5% across cable and 22.3% across streaming.
These figures are not a ranking of platform performance or viewer experience. They show the relative contribution each platform made to measured television ad exposure, providing a view of the marketplace that content viewing alone cannot.
The report’s trended data shows that the platform mix is not static.
Over the 12 months ending in August 2026, streaming’s share of measured television ad exposure increased from 16.1% to 22.3%, a gain of 6.2 percentage points. The most notable change was not a single monthly spike, but streaming’s movement into a higher and so far sustained range. Beginning in February, it accounted for at least one-fifth of measured ad exposure every month, after remaining below 19% throughout the preceding five months.
Over the same period, cable’s share declined from 37.3% to 34.5%, while broadcast’s share declined from 46.6% to 43.2%.
Taken together, the data points to a gradual rebalancing of television ad exposure rather than an abrupt replacement of one platform by another. Streaming is accounting for a larger portion of the marketplace, while broadcast and cable collectively still represented 77.7% of measured ad exposure in August.
Looking across months helps marketers distinguish temporary fluctuations from sustained shifts and explore potential drivers, including seasonality and programming events.
Live sports offer one example. February’s combination of the Super Bowl, Winter Olympics and NBA All-Star Game coincided with streaming’s move above one-fifth of measured ad exposure. In June, increases in share for Tubi and Peacock, which provided Spanish-language coverage, also pointed to the potential influence of the World Cup.
As ad-supported streaming evolves, balancing ad loads and repetition with the viewer experience will be essential to avoiding ad fatigue and sustaining audience engagement.
Analysis of the platform-level distribution establishes the broad shape of the marketplace. The Score Report’s publisher and ownership data shows which companies account for that exposure.
Publisher rankings reveal how measured ad exposure is distributed within broadcast, cable and streaming. Within streaming, for example, YouTube and Tubi have consistently held the top two positions, while the third position has changed hands across Amazon Prime Video in May, Netflix in June, Peacock in July and Hulu in August. These changes reveal competitive movement beneath streaming’s broader growth trend.
Ownership views bring properties together under their parent companies, providing a broader picture of each company’s presence across the television ecosystem.
The Score Report also provides market-level views, showing how local platform mixes compare with the national picture. In August, the platform mix in most of the top 10 markets mirrored the national ranking, with a few notable exceptions: cable accounted for the largest share of measured television ad exposure in Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, D.C. Broadcast led in the other seven markets, accounting for nearly half of measured ad exposure in Houston (49.8%) and Phoenix (49.5%), while streaming had the smallest share in all 10 markets.
As new editions are published, The Score Report will build a longer-term view of the television advertising landscape, giving buyers and sellers a common reference point for interpreting developments across platforms, companies and markets.
Dan Lanzano, President of National Ad Sales at Nexstar builds on this sentiment, “Nexstar welcomes greater transparency into how advertising reaches audiences across broadcast TV, cable, and streaming. By providing a clearer picture of advertising exposure across platforms, The Score Report delivers valuable insights that empower advertisers to make more informed investment decisions and better understand the evolving media landscape.”
Content viewing tells us where audiences spend their time. The Score Report provides another essential perspective: where advertising is being viewed and how that exposure is distributed across the television marketplace.
Visit The Score Report to explore the latest findings.