The connected TV (CTV) landscape just shifted. Amazon and Roku—two of the most influential players in digital streaming—have announced a strategic partnership set to transform how brands engage with audiences across screens. Their alliance marks a significant step in the evolution of media consumption, where on-demand content increasingly dominates as traditional linear TV viewership declines.
As streaming becomes the new standard, advertisers are hunting for smarter ways to target viewers who have migrated from cable boxes to connected devices. This collaboration brings together Amazon’s vast troves of retail and behavioral data with Roku’s wide reach into U.S. living rooms, opening new dimensions for data-driven advertising and integrated cross-platform campaigns. Expect refined audience segmentation, higher attribution accuracy, and more seamless user experiences.
Connected TV (CTV) refers to any television set used to stream content over the internet, whether through smart TVs, gaming consoles, streaming devices like Amazon Fire TV or Roku, or set-top boxes. These devices bypass traditional broadcast and cable systems, letting viewers access video-on-demand, live streaming, and exclusive app-based programming.
CTV has redefined the TV viewing experience, placing user control and content variety at its core. Unlike linear TV, which broadcasts on fixed schedules with limited interactivity, CTV platforms allow for on-demand consumption and personalized content recommendations. Viewers now curate what they watch, when they watch, and which device they use to access content. This digital-first dynamic has turned CTV into a primary screen rather than a supplementary experience.
Adoption metrics highlight a definitive shift. According to Nielsen’s 2023 “State of Play” report, CTVs are now in 88% of U.S. households, and streaming makes up 36.4% of total TV usage—a greater share than broadcast or cable. Smart TV shipments surpassed 200 million units globally in 2022, with growth projections continuing into 2025 (Statista, 2023). Audience behavior reflects this transition: over half of U.S. adults now spend more time watching streaming content than any other TV source (Leichtman Research Group, 2023).
This movement isn't fragmented; it's accelerating. As cord-cutting intensifies, advertisers are reallocating budgets. eMarketer data shows that U.S. CTV ad spend reached $26.9 billion in 2023, up from $21.2 billion in 2022, with expectations to hit $40.9 billion by 2027. These aren’t marginal shifts—they point to systemic change in ad buying strategy fueled by a growing, engaged, and data-rich viewer base.
Among CTV platforms, Roku and Amazon Fire TV command both consumer attention and advertising influence. Roku carved out its lead with over 70 million active accounts as of Q4 2023 (Roku Investor Report), while Amazon Fire TV matches that scale with an estimated 50+ million users globally, with a strong presence in North America and rapidly growing penetration in Europe and Asia-Pacific.
These platforms are more than entertainment portals—they shape what viewers discover and how they engage. Through proprietary user interfaces, exclusive content hubs, and voice-enabled search, they act as recommendation engines. Each viewing session creates a fresh stream of behavioral data, fueling deeper engagement cycles and enabling smarter ad delivery. For advertisers, these platforms present a front door to the digital living room, complete with measurable outcomes.
Linear TV offered scale but little precision. CTV flips that equation. Integrated with real-time data and user profiles, it allows campaigns to be tailored based on factors like location, device type, watch history, and even retail purchase behavior when linked with platforms like Amazon.
This level of granularity transforms CTV inventory into high-value, performance-driven media. Instead of approximating reach through demographics, brands can directly address segments defined by actual behavior. Every impression is an opportunity for precision, not just exposure.
Amazon operates one of the most interconnected ecosystems in digital media and retail. Fire TV, with over 200 million devices sold globally as of 2023, serves as the entry point into millions of living rooms. Through Prime Video, Amazon delivers original and licensed streaming content, ranking consistently among the top five streaming services in the U.S. by viewership share according to Nielsen's The Gauge.
This content backbone feeds directly into Amazon Ads, where advertisers can leverage first-party shopping and behavioral data to build granular audience segments. Unlike traditional platforms, Amazon merges media consumption habits with real-time commerce intent, offering marketers precision and scale in a single package. As of Q1 2025 , Amazon's advertising services generated over $11.82 billion in quarterly revenues, making it the third-largest digital ad platform behind Google and Meta.
Roku, meanwhile, commands a significant share of U.S. connected TV screens with its Roku OS, which powered about one-third of all smart TVs sold in North America in 2023. More than 80 million active accounts access content through Roku's platform, creating billions of ad impressions monthly.
The Roku Channel, offering free ad-supported content, draws tens of millions of viewers and expands inventory for advertisers. Underpinning its advertising engine is Roku’s OneView Ad Platform, a programmatic solution built natively for CTV, allowing campaign execution across Roku-owned and third-party channels. OneView blends first-party data, automated buying, and real-time measurement—a rare combination in the highly fragmented CTV space.
Amazon and Roku sit at the core of modern media consumption. They host massive proprietary audiences, control technical infrastructure, and own data pipelines that translate viewing habits into actionable insights. For advertisers, this means deterministic targeting at national scale without relying on third-party cookies or legacy demographic proxies.
Amazon’s retail-first advantage supplies unmatched intent and purchase data. Roku's CTV-first architecture offers precision in delivery and attribution. When paired, these platforms form a value chain that spans storytelling, targeting, and sales—all connected across the TV screen. The combined ecosystem captures both lean-back entertainment and lean-in commerce behaviors, creating a media environment where performance isn't implied—it’s measurable.
Both platforms enable addressable, outcomes-driven TV advertising at scale. Their convergence marks a structural shift in where and how advertisers reach consumers in a post-linear, screen-agnostic world.
This alliance hinges on complementary strengths. Amazon brings a robust commerce ecosystem and deep shopper data, while Roku contributes the largest TV streaming platform in the U.S. by hours streamed, as reported in Roku’s Q1 2025 shareholder letter.
Key elements of the agreement include:
This partnership recalibrates the dynamics of digital video advertising. Whereas Google controls YouTube through its vertical tech stack and Netflix is expanding ad capabilities via its partnership with Microsoft, Amazon and Roku are deploying horizontal scale. Their combined ecosystems now reach tens of millions of households, leveraging retail media precision with streaming-first engagement.
By merging inventory and data capabilities, Amazon and Roku present a powerful counter to Google TV’s integration and YouTube’s massive reach. Netflix, which only began offering ad-supported tiers in late 2022, lacks the retail spine or real-time shopper insights that Amazon routinely delivers. Unlike isolated platforms, this alliance benefits from commerce-originated first-party data, cross-device attribution, and commerce-to-content synergies that none of their rivals simultaneously possess.
The partnership is engineered for measurable outcomes:
Who benefits most from this deal? Advertisers seeking scaled reach, real-time consumer intent data, and outcome-driven measurement get a consolidated buying opportunity in a previously fragmented ecosystem. With connected TV ad spending projected to surpass $30 billion in the U.S. by 2025 (eMarketer), this partnership doesn’t just respond to market demand—it reshapes it.
Amazon and Roku are merging their ecosystems to streamline programmatic advertising in the connected TV (CTV) space. The alliance brings together Amazon’s cloud-scale ad tech stack with Roku’s demand-side platform and OneView ad-buying technology. Advertisers can now access premium streaming inventory with automated efficiency, optimizing campaigns without traditional friction points like manual insertion orders or disparate data sources.
At the core of this collaboration lies data—massive, granular, and actionable. Amazon contributes first-party retail data generated from over 300 million active customer accounts. Purchase behavior, browsing history, and Prime Video content interaction create a comprehensive consumer insight matrix. Roku complements this with real-time behavioral data from over 80 million active accounts, capturing viewing patterns, channel preferences, and device usage across millions of smart TVs.
With the integration of Amazon’s Sizmek Ad Suite and Roku’s OneView, advertisers achieve end-to-end automation—from audience selection and bidding to creative delivery and attribution. AI-driven optimization models adjust spend dynamically based on real-time performance signals like view-through rate, cost per completed view, and mid-funnel web activity tied to ads.
The result: programmatic buys that evolve mid-flight, optimizing not only for reach but for true business outcomes. Want to prioritize conversions in a specific geographic market? This tech stack recalibrates bids and creatives autonomously to deliver on that objective.
Brands using Amazon and Roku for programmatic CTV reported substantial efficiency improvements. According to Roku's internal data shared during the Q1 2025 earnings call, campaigns using OneView plus Amazon retail audiences achieved a 35% higher return on ad spend (ROAS) compared to traditional CTV buys. Additionally, cost-per-acquisition (CPA) declined by 21% for consumer goods advertisers when using combined shopper and viewer data for targeting.
Programmatic CTV is no longer an experimental channel. Through this partnership, Amazon and Roku have constructed a data-rich, automation-first platform capable of delivering personalized, scalable, and ROI-focused campaigns at speed.
By combining Amazon’s expansive commerce-driven identity graph with Roku’s first-party streaming data, the partnership creates one of the most robust audience targeting engines in connected TV advertising. This fusion enables marketers to move beyond traditional demographics and reach consumers based on purchase behavior, brand affinity, device usage, and streaming habits—at scale and with granularity. Roku's direct household data layer, paired with Amazon’s customer insight capabilities, opens unparalleled segmentation opportunities.
Marketers gain access to a new layer of actionable insights. Demographic profiles—age, household income, family composition—can now be enriched with behavior-based markers like content preferences, purchase history, search intent, and recent product exploration. For instance, a campaign promoting fitness gear can zero in on users who recently browsed yoga mats on Amazon and stream wellness content on Roku.
This granular targeting capability enables campaigns that adapt to seasonality, geography, and product lifecycle in real time. Companies launching new products, running limited-time sales, or entering new regional markets can deploy messaging with pinpoint relevance. Imagine delivering an ad for back-to-school supplies to parents in Florida in late July while simultaneously running ski vacation promotions in Colorado come November.
This isn’t about broad demographics. This is about buying intent, behavioral signals, and real-time relevance. When CTV targeting pairs Amazon’s data-rich ecosystem with Roku’s scale, marketers gain the levers to drive precise, actionable media plans that convert viewers into customers.
Retail media networks function as digital advertising platforms operated by retailers, allowing brands to buy ad space that directly interfaces with consumers during their shopping journeys. These networks monetize first-party shopper data and insert relevant, often product-specific, ads into e-commerce environments. Amazon stands as the most advanced example—with over $47 billion in ad revenue projected for 2025 (eMarketer) and a network that reaches across site, app, and increasingly now, living room screens.
With a deep history of using transactional data to drive marketing outcomes, Amazon has transformed retail media into a performance engine. It controls the full customer journey—from product discovery to purchase—and now expands that reach into connected TV (CTV) through its partnership with Roku, opening entirely new ad inventory fueled by real-time commerce data.
The union between Amazon and Roku embeds retail data into the CTV environment, turning passive viewing into shoppable moments. What does that look like in practice? A viewer watching a Roku channel sees a CTV ad powered by Amazon’s first-party shopper signals—perhaps featuring a product they recently browsed on Amazon.com or added to a wishlist. That ad then offers immediate purchase pathways, sometimes via on-screen QR codes, native integrations, or streamlined voice-enabled checkout experiences.
This is not just display advertising repurposed for television screens; this is commerce meeting entertainment. In practical terms, advertisers use insights from purchase behavior, product affinity, and even basket abandonment to craft CTV ads with conversion in mind—blurring the line between branding and performance.
Until now, performance marketing has been confined largely to digital touchpoints—search, social, and programmatic display. With retail media entering CTV, that changes. Brands will now attribute sales directly to television exposure, linking product impressions on Roku to orders fulfilled by Amazon. This kind of deterministic measurement removes guesswork from TV campaigns.
Expect media plans to shift. As CTV delivers both reach and measurable outcomes, high-growth DTC (direct-to-consumer) brands and mature CPG players alike will reallocate budgets toward this hybrid model. Amazon’s closed-loop reporting combined with Roku’s scale translates to a new advertising paradigm: every TV impression carries the potential of a confirmed sale.
This isn’t speculative—this is retail media meeting television in real time. How many other platforms can offer an end-to-end ad experience from streaming content to confirmed transaction within a single ecosystem?
Amazon and Roku are aligning their advertising platforms to build a connected, intelligent, and seamless ecosystem for brands. By fusing Roku's dynamic ad infrastructure with Amazon's robust DSP and retail media stack, they’re removing technical silos that previously forced advertisers to manage campaigns in fragmented ways. The result: consistent ad delivery across screens, synchronized messaging across channels, and real-time campaign optimization powered by unified data sets.
This platform connection opens new pathways for cohesive ad experiences across voice-enabled devices, mobile screens, and smart TVs. Imagine a viewer searching for a product using Alexa, then encountering a complementary ad on their Roku home screen, followed by a related promotion on their Fire tablet—every step of the journey stitched together with precision targeting and continuous measurement.
The collaboration sets the stage for advanced ad APIs and SDKs that offer shared metrics, targeting logic, and delivery frameworks between platforms. Amazon’s advertising console could integrate with Roku's OneView ad platform, enabling streamlined campaign setup and cross-channel creative management from a single interface. Expect dashboards that allow dynamic segmentation updated in real time, CTV ad pods that adapt based on purchase behavior, and bidding algorithms tuned to TV screen engagement metrics.
Brands won’t just reach audiences—they’ll move them through a strategically designed funnel across every Amazon or Roku touchpoint, eliminating the gap between impression and conversion that still exists in traditional CTV planning.
Amazon and Roku are eliminating silos in advertising measurement. Their integration enables a unified analytics framework that captures viewer behavior across smart TVs, streaming devices, mobile apps, and even eCommerce ecosystems. By combining Amazon’s vast retail data and Roku’s deep CTV insights, advertisers get a panoramic view of the consumer journey—from ad exposure to purchase.
No more fractured datasets between linear, streaming, and digital. This partnership aligns disparate measurement systems into one ecosystem. Campaign performance can now be tracked across Fire TV, Roku OS, Prime Video, and The Roku Channel—and correlated with real-world purchasing data. Instead of inferring impact, marketers see exactly which screen drove engagement, and when.
Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology from Roku plays a central role. It tracks what content a household is watching—even outside Roku’s walled garden. Overlay this with Amazon’s behavior and commerce data, and advertisers access unmatched granularity in audience profiling and response tracking.
Real-time reporting becomes the norm. Advertisers can adjust creative mid-flight, shift budget allocation daily, and identify performance plateaus as they happen. Multi-touch attribution models finally operate beyond last-click: now, each touchpoint in the media mix gets credit based on actual impact.
This level of precision reshapes how investment decisions get made. Redundant impressions can be throttled in real-time. High-performing creative gets surged while weaker variants get pulled. Marketers don’t just guess frequency sweet spots—they calculate them.
Budgeting becomes performance-led: CPMs align to ROI, not just reach. Waste drops, efficiency climbs. And because this measurement spans screens and signals, advertisers stop managing platforms—and start managing outcomes.
Agencies and advertisers now operate in a transformed CTV environment where Amazon and Roku’s combined forces create a powerful inventory pipeline. This shift delivers multifaceted benefits across the entire media planning and buying lifecycle.
To fully leverage this new data-rich, CTV inventory, marketers need to modify both targeting parameters and measurement frameworks. Consider these three steps to ensure seamless integration:
Media operations now benefit from fewer handoffs and faster campaign turnaround. Amazon’s advanced automation for creative assembly, paired with Roku’s dynamic ad insertion, means creatives can be personalized by shopping behavior, viewing history, or even geolocation—without weeks of manual coordination.
On the production side, this opens the door to scalable versioning. A single creative foundation can be adapted into dozens of audience-specific variants. For example, a brand selling running shoes can auto-generate different ad copies and offers for casual joggers, marathoners, and first-time buyers—all within the same campaign flight.
What else changes? The feedback loop. With unified insights pulling from both Amazon DSP and Roku OS data, agencies can now execute real-time optimizations across platforms. Responsive creative strategies, adaptive bidding, and granular ROI data shift the emphasis away from broad media buying into precision-led performance marketing.
How will your next campaign harness this power shift in connected TV?
The alliance between Amazon and Roku has sent an unmistakable signal through the advertising industry. Media buyers see the partnership not just as a consolidation of tech and inventory, but as a streamlined route to scaled, data-rich audiences. According to a May 2025 Digiday survey, 62% of U.S.-based media planners say the integration significantly simplifies cross-platform CTV buys—especially for omnichannel campaigns anchored in performance-based KPIs.
Agencies have started adjusting their CTV strategies in real time. Omnicom Media Group reportedly initiated cross-functional planning teams to reallocate portions of Q3 CTV budgets, anticipating performance lift via Amazon’s retail audience pools now accessible through Roku’s UI. Brands in fast-moving consumer goods, auto, and entertainment categories are bundling display, search, and CTV in a single programmatic buy—leveraging Amazon’s DSP with Roku native placements to close attribution loops.
Major players are not standing still. Alphabet has accelerated enhancements to YouTube's advanced TV ad offerings, with increased deployment of Video Action Campaigns optimized for living room screens. Disney, already operating one of the most robust ad-supported offerings via Hulu, is analyzing whether deeper first-party data partnerships with retail media networks like Walmart Connect or Target’s Roundel can counter Amazon’s commerce edge.
Netflix, moving cautiously but deliberately in its ad journey, may face pressure to deepen its relationship with Microsoft Advertising. Observers expect enhancements to Netflix’s ad-targeting capabilities to roll out by Q4 2025 , with speculation mounting around additional integrations with LinkedIn or Xbox for audience signaling. The competitive narrative is shifting from content libraries to data richness and tech agility.
The market anticipates a wave of strategic realignments. Retailers with strong data signals—such as Kroger Precision Marketing and Walgreens' media network—are exploring content partnerships or white-labeled DSP integrations. Meanwhile, Comcast’s FreeWheel and The Trade Desk are reportedly in talks about creating new interoperability standards aimed at easing campaign execution across fragmented CTV inventory sources.
Expect a surge in cross-industry alliances with unique combinations: telecoms with media firms, gaming consoles with commerce platforms, data houses with streaming originals. As Amazon and Roku redefine what’s possible in connected TV advertising, the competitive lines continue to blur—and those that don’t adapt quickly risk irrelevance.
©2025 American TV. All Rights Reserved
Disclaimer: All rights reserved. AmericanTV.com is a website for research and comparison as such, falls under "Fair Use". AmericanTV.com does not provide directly phone, TV, and internet service. All trademarks, logos, etc. remain the property of their respective owners and are used by AmericanTV.com only to describe products and services offered by each respective trademark holder. The use of any third party trademarks on this site in no way indicates any relationship between AmericanTV.com and the holders of said trademarks, nor any endorsement of AmericanTV.com by the holders of said trademarks.
We are here 24/7 to answer all of your TV + Internet Questions:
1-855-690-9884
1-855-690-9884