• by Wayne Friedman , May 20, 2019

Since the first of the year, national TV advertising touting video streaming services saw much lower overall spending, partly due to Winter Olympics comparisons in 2018.

At the same time, according to iSpot.tv, it has yielded comparable impressions from the same number of airings.

From the first of the year through mid-May, $191.1 million was spent on national (and regional) airings of TV commercials versus $330 million a year ago.

This year, Amazon Prime Video ($45 million); Hulu ($31.5 million); Sling TV, ($22.7 million); Netflix, ($21.9 million); and Amazon Fire TV ($14.8 million) were the leading spenders.

This amounted to 15.4 billion impressions from 73,415 airings. A year ago, live video streaming marketing on national TV generated 16.7 billion impressions from 73,619 airings.

In 2018 through five months, DirecTV Now totaled $86.5 million, with Hulu at $83.7 million; Netflix at $52.3 million and Amazon Prime Video at $26.9 million.

A year ago, video streaming services bought heavily into much of sports TV programming -- including the high-rated Winter Olympics on NBC, which alone amounted to $40 million in media spend.

For the most recent three-month period, February 19 through May 19, Sling TV had 12,967 airings of its ads, with Hulu at 7,653; ESPN+ at 5,048; Curiosity Stream at 4,016; Amazon Prime Video at 3,679; and Amazon Fire TV at 3,238.