Connected television in Spain has reached a point where nearly every internet user watches it, yet the advertising industry is still working out how to measure its impact reliably. IAB Spain this month published the fifth edition of its annual Connected TV study, revealing that 95% of Spanish internet users between 16 and 75 years old - approximately 34.3 million people - consume content through connected television. The study was presented on May 6, 2026, sponsored by Publiespaña and prepared in collaboration with Elogia.

The headline penetration figure has now held at 95% for three consecutive years - 2024, 2025, and 2026 - a plateau that the study's authors interpret not as stagnation but as structural maturity. For context, Spain's total population between 16 and 75 stands at 37.6 million according to INE data, with internet users representing 96% of that figure, or 36.1 million people. Connected TV users - those who access audiovisual content through the internet on a Smart TV or any device connected to a television screen - account for 95% of that internet population. Nine out of ten Spanish internet users, in other words, are active CTV consumers.

Methodology and scope

The study draws on two parallel research streams conducted in March and April 2026. The consumer survey covered 1,000 respondents - men and women aged 16 to 75 who use the internet - using computer-assisted web interviewing via online panels. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.2 percentage points at 95.5% confidence with p=q=0.5. The professional survey captured 104 respondents from across the digital advertising industry: agencies, AdTech and MarTech companies, publishers, and advertisers. That sample carries a margin of error of plus or minus 9.8 percentage points at the same confidence level.

The definition of connected TV used in both questionnaires is precise: audiovisual content accessed via the internet through a Smart TV, or through a TV connected to a computer, laptop, console, or other accessory device with connectivity. This definition encompasses everything viewed on the large screen, whether accessed natively by the Smart TV's own operating system or routed through an external device.

Who uses connected TV and how

Penetration is equal between men and women, both at 95%. Among age groups, 16 to 34 year olds and 35 to 54 year olds register the highest penetration at 97% each, while the 55 to 64 bracket sits at 91% and the 65 to 75 group at 90%. The average CTV user is 45 years old, works (62%), holds a university degree (51%), and lives in a household of 2.8 people. Those who do not use connected TV - the remaining 5% - skew older at an average age of 53, live in smaller households of 2.3 people, and the most common reason they give is simply lack of interest: 35% say they know the services but are not interested, down from 44% in 2025.

Devices and access

Smart TV penetration in Spanish households stands at 86%. Among CTV users, 76% access content directly through the Smart TV - a figure that has been stable at 75% to 76% for two years. Set Top Box devices, which include Fire TV sticks, Google Chromecast, Apple TV, and operator decoders, are used by 33% to connect a television to streaming services. Among those using Set Top Box devices, Fire TV and Google Chromecast are tied at 37% each within that segment, with Fire TV having declined slightly and Chromecast gaining a small amount year on year.

Smartphones are owned by 97% of users and used as a second screen by a meaningful minority. The dual-screen behavior is significant: 47% of CTV users report using another device while watching television, and 95% of those say that other device is their smartphone. What are they doing? 76% browse social networks, 55% browse the internet generally, and 9% search specifically for information about advertising they have just seen on the connected TV. That last figure is small but consistent with the study's broader finding that CTV advertising has measurable behavioral effects.

Viewing habits

Users declare an average daily viewing time of 130 minutes. More than half - 55% - say they watch between one and three hours per day. A further 20% declare three to five hours, while 16% say less than one hour. Households with children watch less, averaging 97 minutes. Viewing spikes in the evening: the 9 PM to 11 PM window is the clearest prime time period. A secondary peak appears around midday.

Most viewing is intentional. 85% of users choose content on demand rather than watching whatever is live at a given moment, though 49% still report watching content in real time as well. Two thirds - 66% - access platforms knowing exactly what they want to watch. Another 37% rely on platform recommendations, while 29% discover content through social media and 26% are influenced by the platform's home screen.

Series dominate content consumption at 80%, followed closely by cinema at 76%. News programmes come third at 42% and sports fourth at 39%, with sports growing among older male viewers. Households with children show a distinct content pattern: animation leads at 73%, followed by cinema and series, with educational programming rising to fifth position from seventh a year earlier.

Platform landscape

Netflix leads on both brand awareness and recent usage. 88% of connected TV users are aware of it, and 61% report having used it in the previous two weeks, up 6 percentage points year on year. Amazon Prime Video follows in second place on both metrics, with 78% awareness and 48% recent usage. YouTube ranks third at 75% awareness and 45% recent usage. Disney+ and HBO Max follow, while Movistar Plus+ ranks sixth for awareness but rises to second position by recent usage once age segments are accounted for - the 55 to 74 cohort uses it at substantially higher rates than younger viewers.

Of the 8% of users who know paid platforms but do not subscribe, 51% say a lower monthly price would be the main factor that would lead them to sign up. Free service offerings come second at 41%. Account sharing has declined as a driver: only 26% cite it in 2026, compared to 31% in 2025, reflecting the gradual acceptance of stricter sharing policies adopted by several platforms over the past two years.

Advertising perception and formats

Users tolerate advertising in connected TV environments but under specific conditions. 47% prefer ads placed before content begins - the pre-roll position. Post-content placement is the second preference at 29%, and ads displayed when opening the platform come third at 26%. Pause ads and main menu placements follow at 18% and 17% respectively.

What do users value most about CTV advertising? 53% cite the ability to skip some ads. 36% appreciate seeing fewer repeated ads than in other media. 23% value being able to see how long an ad break will last. The ability to interact with an ad - including scanning QR codes - is valued by 6%. Only 5% report ever having scanned a QR code from a CTV ad, down from 6% in 2025, suggesting that format remains at an early stage of adoption.

The display-in-menu format is the most remembered, cited by 41% of users, and rises to 51% among 16 to 34 year olds. The L-format is recalled by 34% and the pause ad by 27%. The preference ranking mirrors the recall ranking: menu display first, L-format second, pause third.

YouTube carries the highest perceived advertising presence at 89% of users reporting it shows ads, followed by AtresPlayer at 84% and Amazon Prime Video at 82%. Netflix sits at 55%, reflecting the mixed user base across its subscription tiers.

The professional perspective

104 advertising industry professionals participated in the separate survey. 96% say their organisation currently offers connected TV services to clients, a figure that reflects just how mainstream the channel has become in Spanish media planning. 90% say they perceive genuine interest in CTV's competitive advantages as an advertising medium.

The top five reasons given for offering CTV services are access to audiences consuming less traditional television (65%), adapting to changing audiovisual consumption habits (59%), reaching a key part of the planning target (29%), positioning it as an additional medium in the mix (26%), and greater flexibility compared to traditional TV planning (23%).

For campaign objectives, professionals use CTV primarily for incremental reach beyond conventional television, cited by 72%, and for audience segmentation (67%). More advanced applications - ACR-based contextual campaigns, cross-device campaigns, retargeting - lag behind significantly, reflecting an industry still building capabilities rather than deploying them at scale.

The KPIs most used to evaluate CTV campaigns are reach at 66%, view-through rate or completion rate at 65%, and incremental reach at 60%. Viewability and frequency each appear at 52%. Brand recall stands at 39% and consideration at 21%, while purchase intent and store visit lift appear in only 13% and 7% of professional survey responses respectively. The study notes that this focus on basic funnel metrics reflects a measurement approach that is still primarily tactical rather than full-funnel.

The measurement problem

The most revealing data in the professional section concerns trust in current CTV measurement. When asked how much confidence they have in measurement systems, roughly half - 48% - report full or substantial confidence. But 44% say they have neither much nor little confidence, and 8% report no confidence at all. That 44% middle ground signals persistent structural uncertainty.

The main barriers to further CTV investment are the absence of metrics validating results, cited by 52% of professionals, conflicts with traditional TV buying teams at 50%, and technological unfamiliarity at 44%. Lack of format standardisation, insufficient quality content inventory, and poor capping control each appear at around 20%.

This finding connects directly to earlier work from IAB Spain. In January 2026, IAB Spain published the first harmonisation guide for CTV bid request parameters, establishing P1 and P2 priority fields across 16 participating companies including Google, The Trade Desk, Smartclip, and Smartme Analytics. That initiative addressed fragmentation in how different Spanish streaming platforms communicate auction data. But the survey data suggests that standardisation work at the infrastructure level has not yet translated into confidence at the buying level.

The structural levers professionals identify as needed to grow CTV investment further are better measurement and attribution (48% identify it as a priority), improved data segmentation and interoperability (38%), and common measurement standards across platforms. This maps closely to what PPC Land reported on Spanish digital ad investment in February 2026: CTV grew 48.4% in 2025 to reach 174.9 million euros, yet remains at only 2.8% of total Spanish digital advertising - a figure that reflects both the speed of growth and the distance still to travel.

The benchmark: what 71 campaigns show

The 2026 study introduces a new chapter: an advertising efficacy benchmark contributed by Smartme Analytics. This section analyses 71 cross-media campaigns that included CTV in their media mix, executed during 2025 and the first quarter of 2026. The methodology uses ACR (Automatic Content Recognition) technology and pixel tracking across the major streaming platforms operating in Spain - Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, DAZN, Infinity, Atresplayer, Pluto TV, Disney+, and others. Results compare exposed and non-exposed audiences through a brand lift study design that controls for pre-existing brand attitudes.

The aggregate findings across all sectors show positive uplift at every stage of the marketing funnel. Spontaneous brand awareness among CTV-exposed audiences was 7.8 percentage points higher than among non-exposed audiences. Prompted brand awareness showed an 8.1 percentage point gap. Moving into mid-funnel territory, spontaneous advertising recall was 5.0 percentage points higher, prompted advertising recall 7.0 points higher, and brand consideration 6.7 points higher. At the lower funnel, purchase intent showed a 5.7 percentage point uplift, brand recommendation 7.8 points, and brand preference 4.6 points.

The sector breakdown reveals where CTV advertising generates the strongest lift. Retail and ecommerce shows the highest purchase intent uplift at 18 percentage points, accompanied by 10.3 points on prompted advertising recall and 7.3 points on prompted brand awareness. Energy sector brands show 10.8 points on purchase intent and 12 points on advertising recall. Restaurants and food service show 8.8 points on purchase intent and 14 points on advertising recall. Fashion and luxury brands benefit particularly from the premium streaming environment, with 14 percentage points on advertising recall and 13.7 points on prompted recall specifically.

Automotive brands show 9.2 points of uplift on prompted brand awareness, reflecting the large-screen advantage for visually intensive advertising. Beauty and cosmetics show balanced uplift across the funnel. Consumer goods and beverages show relatively modest brand awareness gains of 1.4 points but a stronger purchase intent lift of 6.7 points, suggesting CTV activates decision-making in that category even when brand-building effects are more limited.

The buying model

Programmatic buying is the dominant purchasing method for CTV campaigns in Spain, but not exclusively. 14% of professionals say they use programmatic exclusively for CTV. A further 56% use programmatic most of the time in combination with other methods. 22% use it occasionally, and only 6% do not use programmatic at all for CTV. On average, CTV accounts for approximately 25% of a total campaign budget when it is included in the plan. 3% allocate more than half their budget to CTV, while 19% allocate between 31% and 50%.

Regarding commercial models, the AVOD model is most widely recognised among professionals, followed by SVOD and FAST channels. Pre-roll video remains the dominant ad format used by 90% of professionals, followed by home screen display on Smart TVs at 74% and the L-format at 41%.

IAB Europe's virtual programmatic day in April 2026 noted that frequency management in CTV remains a persistent operational challenge for Spanish and European buyers, with ID fragmentation across household devices creating measurement gaps that SSPs and DSPs are still addressing. Magnite's Spain-specific research published in March 2026found that 87% of CTV viewers can recall at least some detail from an ad seen in their most recent viewing session - stronger recall than comparable digital video environments, a performance indicator that the IAB Spain study's benchmark data broadly confirms.

What the roundtable said

The study presentation on May 6 included a panel discussion with Marcela Inserni, head of digital awareness at L'Oreal grand consumption for Spain and Portugal; Elena Valles, digital marketing manager at Skechers Spain; and Maribel Vibancos, Media Solutions and Operations Lead at WPP. Their remarks provided practical context for the data.

Vibancos noted that CTV investment in Spain reached 175 million euros in 2025, multiplying by 18 times over the previous four years, and that the channel had become "practically indispensable" in media planning. She described how CTV was drawing budget simultaneously from traditional television and from digital display and video, because the combination of a full-screen premium environment with non-skippable formats offers a communication capacity that digital video formats could not match.

Inserni described L'Oreal's experience as a shift toward programmatic delivery, noting that the ability to reach specified audiences through CTV had improved substantially over recent months. She cited Netflix's announcement of post-roll formats in programmatic as a signal of where the market is heading.

Valles described Skechers' approach as a hybrid, using CTV primarily for brand awareness but gaining segmentation capabilities that allow the brand to reach different consumer profiles - running, football, casual adult - across its 3,000 seasonal product lines. She noted that pause ads, launched programmatically in a partnership announced during the panel, had delivered strong results.

Timeline

Summary

Who: IAB Spain, in collaboration with research firm Elogia and sponsored by Publiespaña, together with Smartme Analytics which contributed the advertising efficacy benchmark.

What: The fifth annual Estudio de Television Conectada, documenting CTV consumption penetration, viewing habits, platform usage, advertising perception, and professional industry views on investment and measurement. The study covered 1,000 consumer respondents and 104 advertising professionals surveyed in March and April 2026, and an advertising efficacy benchmark drawing on 71 crossmedia campaigns run between 2025 and Q1 2026.

When: The study was presented on May 6, 2026, at 10:00 AM. Field research was conducted in March and April 2026.

Where: Spain. The consumer survey universe is Spanish internet users aged 16 to 75. The professional survey covers agencies, AdTech firms, publishers, and advertisers operating in Spain's digital advertising market.

Why: The study matters for the advertising and marketing community because it documents CTV's transition from a growing channel to a structural component of the Spanish media landscape - one that now commands 25% of campaign budgets when included in plans, generates measurable brand uplift across all funnel stages, and yet still faces measurement confidence gaps that 44% of industry professionals characterise as unresolved. Understanding these gaps is material for media planners, advertisers, and technology providers deciding where to invest and what infrastructure improvements are still needed.

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