Global SVOD to be dominated by five platforms with combined paid subscribers totaling 1.2 billion, according to a new Digital TV Research projections that factor in the effects of COVID-19.

Advanced TV channels stand to benefit from a scatter market fattened by advertisers' withholding of budget money from this year's upfront. But making budget decisions about nontraditional media with much less lead time than usual could prove challenging, says Simulmedia's Dave Morgan.

With overall ad budgets hit by the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic, and various U.S. regions expected to be in varying degrees of reopening for months to come, local media buyers are showing increased interest in addressable media, in particular -- both OTT/CTV and linear.

With its new OneView DSP and impressive user growth stats, Roku believes it's positioned to grab advertising share from linear, which, it asserts, is headed into massive, permanent disruption because of a COVID-driven shift to OTT.

The study aims to develop guidelines for the emerging practice of merging smart TV ACR data and STB data to leverage the advantages of each and create large-scale, granular datasets capable of measuring all forms of TV viewing.