The streaming wars, measured through competitive spend data

The Situation

A subscription streaming platform needed to understand how competitors were shifting advertising spend in response to subscriber growth slowdowns. The strategy team was preparing for a board meeting where they needed a competitive response plan — but publicly available data was months old.

Traditional ad intelligence tools provided aggregate digital spend figures but couldn’t show how competitors’ spending was shifting across channels over time. For a streaming platform, seeing whether competitors were increasing spend on performance channels versus brand channels has very different strategic implications.

The Approach

Roblec mapped the streaming category’s major players by estimated advertising spend across channels — including Meta, Google, programmatic display, and CTV — over a rolling multi-month window. The analysis tracked month-over-month trends and channel concentration ratios for each competitor.

This gave the strategy team a time-series view of how each competitor’s channel mix was evolving: which platforms were gaining share of each competitor’s budget and which were losing share.

The Finding

The trend data revealed a significant shift in competitive behavior. Two of the platform’s three major competitors had materially changed their channel concentration over a six-week period. Spend on performance-oriented channels (Meta, Google search) had declined as a share of total budget, while CTV and broader programmatic display — channels typically associated with brand and retention messaging — had increased.

The pattern was consistent across both competitors and accelerating. Roblec’s month-over-month trend data showed this was not seasonal variation but a sustained reallocation representing 30-35% of each competitor’s total digital budget.

This signal arrived six weeks before the competitors’ public earnings calls confirmed the underlying cause: subscriber growth was decelerating, and retention had become the strategic priority.

The Outcome

The strategy team used Roblec’s competitive spend trends to inform their own budget planning. Rather than benchmarking against competitors’ previous spending patterns, they adjusted their own channel mix to reflect the market shift that the trend data had revealed.

The six-week lead time proved valuable. By the time public earnings calls confirmed the subscriber growth slowdown, the platform had already reallocated budget. Competitors who waited for public confirmation were still in planning cycles.

The head of strategy summarized the value: “We were making decisions based on current competitive behavior, not last quarter’s reported numbers.”