Streaming TV Commercials Are Bewildering, Repetitive, and Growing Like Crazy
Peacock, Paramount+, Discovery+, and HBO Max are elbowing into the big, messy $11.3 billion market of streaming TV ads.
Ben Chappell was binge-watching The X-Files on Hulu recently when he kept seeing the same ads for sports betting apps again and again. He estimates that over three hours he watched the same commercials many times. (Hulu says it caps the frequency a user can see the same commercial at two times per hour, four times per day, or 25 times per week. Customers can exceed those limits when additional ads are sold by third parties.)
“It’s complete overkill,” said Chappell, 37, who lives in Lakewood, Colo., where sports betting is legal and ads from the industry are flooding the zone. “Maybe I’d watch them if it wasn’t the same commercial over and over.”