The standard Q4 story says holiday demand pushes connected TV prices up. The 2026 data does not support that as a blanket statement, and buyers who plan on it will misallocate budget. Streaming prices are soft across most of the market. What is rising is narrower: specific events, specific geographies, and the cost of being late.
The Baseline Is Falling, Not Rising
Start with what buyers just paid. Media Dynamics, as reported by MediaPost in August, estimated that 2026-27 upfront sales rose about 9% to $33.7 billion, driven by streaming growing roughly 30% to $17.2 billion. Prices moved the opposite way. The analyst behind the estimate described CPMs as down across the board, including streaming, with buyers pushing hard and free ad-supported streaming offering a cheap alternative to premium sellers. The reported streaming CPM was about $25.90, down from about $27.75. MediaPost’s headline put the overall decline at 6%; the per-platform figures do not reconcile exactly with that, so treat the direction as firmer than the decimals.
Programmatic CTV tells a similar story. Reporting on DataBeat’s monthly index showed US programmatic CPMs up sharply year over year in mid-2026, while connected TV pricing fell, a 12.3% annual decline in the June reading and a steeper drop in April, which the source attributed to oversupply. The April average DataBeat reported, $4.68, sits far below the $20 to $40 premium ranges that vendors quote for the major streamers, so the two measure different slices of the market. Read it as a signal about direction, not a rate card.
The reason is supply. Ad tiers at the large streamers, plus free ad-supported services, have added impressions faster than demand has absorbed them. A buyer who assumes a 15% holiday lift on top of last year’s rates is probably budgeting for a market that no longer exists in that form.
Where Q4 Pressure Is Real
Live sports and event inventory
The holiday premium lives in events, not in run-of-network streaming. Netflix said it sold out all in-game inventory for its 2025 NFL Christmas games, which averaged 23.7 million viewers by Nielsen. The league’s Christmas arrangement with Netflix runs across multiple seasons, so the 2026 games recreate the same dynamic. Amazon’s Thursday Night Football package includes a Black Friday game this year, with other holiday-period dates on the schedule. Sold-out premium events leave late buyers with fewer, more expensive options, which is a supply story, not a general price increase.
Political demand in specific markets
2026 is a midterm year, and political money lands in the same weeks as retail. A projection circulated by Perion, citing political forecasts, put midterm political advertising at about $10.8 billion, with CTV the fastest-growing piece at roughly $2.5 billion, up 20% on 2024. The same material projected national CPM increases of 5% to 15% in election windows, with battleground markets seeing increases of 40% to 50%. These are projections from a single secondary source, and they depend on how much political money actually flows through programmatic CTV. Still, the pattern is plausible: geography is the variable that matters. A retailer buying national reach may see little change, while the same retailer targeting a handful of contested states can see sharp ones.
Late scatter and make-goods
Buyers that wait for November also compete with advertisers who missed upfront commitments. Pricing data on this is thin and mostly vendor-supplied, so it is best read as risk management rather than a measured premium. The more reliable point is optionality: the buyer who holds back everything for scatter loses access to the best inventory, while the one who commits everything in advance loses the flexibility to react.
A Contradicting Signal Worth Keeping
Simulmedia, a TV advertising vendor, reported that in 2024 its average CTV CPMs fell from $15.36 in May through August to $13.55 in September through December, with the lowest rates just before Thanksgiving. That is one vendor’s data from one year, and it does not predict 2026. It does show that seasonality in streaming is not a one-way ratchet. Q4 can be cheaper in places because brands that mis-planned pull budget, because inventory expands for holiday programming, or because platform ad loads grow when viewing peaks.
Vendor guides that claim holiday premiums of 50% to 100% rarely show their data. Ask any agency quoting a Q4 uplift which transactions it is based on.
How Buyers Are Adapting
Commit earlier on the events that matter. Where a campaign depends on a specific game, premiere or holiday window, the commitment is made well ahead. Simulmedia’s own guidance is to secure November inventory through upfront deals while holding budget back for scatter. That logic holds whether or not you buy from Simulmedia.
Split the plan by geography. If a brand’s footprint overlaps battleground states, build those markets as a separate line with its own cost assumption and cap. National averages will hide the damage.
Shift weight to programmatic and curated paths where supply is loose. With programmatic CTV pricing soft, a buyer has room to negotiate. That means testing smaller guarantees, asking for price floors that reflect actual clearing prices, and reviewing which supply paths are producing the lowest effective cost per attentive impression instead of the lowest CPM.
Hold a measured reserve. A flexible portion of budget, deployed after October performance data arrives, lets a team move spend toward channels that are working. Most teams that overspend early do so because they have no mechanism to pause.
Check frequency across partners. Holiday campaigns run across several streamers and a demand-side platform at the same time, and the same households can be hit repeatedly. Cost per thousand looks fine while cost per unique household quietly rises.
What to Do This Week
Pull the last 90 days of CTV clearing prices from your demand-side platform and compare them with the CPMs in your holiday plan. If your plan assumes a premium the market has not shown, you are budgeting for money you do not have to spend. Then separate the buys that are tied to scarce events or contested markets from those that are not. Lock in the first group now, and keep the second flexible, because that is where the soft pricing gives you room to negotiate.
