Streaming TV for local business: what it is, what it costs, what it does.

Streaming TV, sold as OTT or CTV, is the advertising inside the apps on a connected television: the free ad-supported channels, the ad tiers of the major subscription services, and the apps the local stations and cable networks built. The ad looks like a television commercial because it is one. It runs full screen, it runs with sound, and on most of this inventory it cannot be skipped.

What changed is the buying. Instead of a station's broadcast footprint, you buy audiences: households in your ZIP codes, households that match your customer list, households that visited a competitor's location. The same spot that once required a five-figure broadcast schedule can run to a few thousand of the right households for a fraction of it.

Streaming TV is bought on a CPM, a cost per thousand impressions, and the rate depends on the inventory and the targeting, not on the size of your market. There is no minimum that requires a broadcast budget. A local campaign can start in the low thousands per month and still deliver real frequency to a defined audience, because every impression is aimed.

Our fee structure is the same here as everywhere else: a media markup and a management fee set as a percentage of ad spend, agreed in writing up front, so the cost of the plan is known before the first impression runs.

Streaming TV is a demand-creation channel. It makes people aware of you before they need you, so that when they search, your name is the one they type. It is not a click channel. Almost nobody clicks a television. The businesses that get the most from it pair it with search and social, so the demand the spot creates has somewhere to land.

The honest way to measure it is the lift around it: branded search volume, direct traffic, and the conversion rate of the households that were exposed. We report it that way, alongside the delivery numbers, because a completion rate alone tells you the ad played, not that it worked.

Every streaming plan starts with the audience: your service area, your customer profile, and your customer list where you have one. Creative is built for the medium, thirty seconds with the name and the offer up front, because the viewer cannot click and has to remember you. Frequency is capped so the same household does not see the spot twenty times in a week.

Then the wrap-around: the same households see your ads on social and find you at the top of search when they look. One audience, one frequency plan, one report. The streaming TV service page lists everything the work includes, and the discovery call is where the plan starts.