Wurl Study Reveals Gaps in Content Transparency Across CTV Advertising

Wurl, a company operating in the streaming TV industry, has released its latest report, The CTV Trends Report: Addressing the Content Signal Gap, highlighting significant limitations in the information available to advertisers about the connected TV (CTV) inventory they purchase.

An analysis of bidstream metadata found that 89% of CTV ad requests lacked a usable programme name, while 15% carried little to no genre information. The findings point to persistent challenges in content transparency across programmatic CTV advertising.

The report comes as ad-supported streaming TV continues to attract growing audiences, although advertising investment has yet to match the increase in viewership. According to Wurl’s data, daily viewing hours increased nearly 12% year-on-year during the first eight months of 2026.

At the same time, eMarketer estimates that CTV accounts for approximately 20% of the time adults spend with media but receives less than a tenth of advertising budgets. Greater transparency and richer streaming content signals could help narrow this gap by providing advertisers with more information to make informed media-buying decisions.

Commenting on the findings, Dave Bernath, CEO of Wurl, said, “Free ad-supported streaming TV has spent the past several years proving that audiences will show up. As the market matures, the next question is how we create more value from that viewing – for advertisers, publishers, and the broader streaming ecosystem. That means getting smarter about the inventory itself and giving buyers a clearer understanding of what they’re buying.”

Key findings from the report include:

• Limited programme information: Nearly nine in 10 CTV ad requests lacked usable programme information, while channel details were also frequently missing.
• Inconsistent content classification: Thousands of different genre labels appeared within a two-hour period, highlighting the lack of standardisation across the CTV ecosystem.
• Gaps in data accuracy: Even when genre information was available, it did not always correspond with the content actually being shown on screen.

The report highlights a disconnect between the sophistication of CTV advertising technology and the quality of content signals available to advertisers. While contextual advertising solutions can analyse streaming content at the scene level in real time, fragmented data standards and inconsistent access to inventory continue to limit their wider adoption.

Addressing these challenges will require stronger connections between content intelligence, streaming inventory and programmatic demand.

Wurl is working to address these limitations through its Content Intelligence Platform, which connects contextual signals with premium streaming inventory. The platform combines Wurl’s access to streaming content with the capabilities of its data partners to add richer contextual information to the bidstream.

Moving beyond standard genre and programme metadata, the platform supports contextual signals such as scene-level emotions, object recognition and brand suitability.

Launched in September 2026, Wurl’s Content Intelligence Platform provides demand-side platforms (DSPs) access to more than 140 billion monthly signal-rich CTV impressions across the majority of ad-supported streaming inventory. The platform is designed to make advanced contextual targeting more accessible and scalable for advertisers.

The report, The CTV Trends Report: Addressing the Content Signal Gap, examines the information gaps affecting CTV advertising and outlines how improved content signals and transparency could help unlock greater value from streaming TV advertising.