How sports streaming has rewired holiday advertising—and what to measure now
TL;DR Summary
The 2025 holiday season is on track to cross the $1 trillion threshold—and sports streaming has emerged as an unexpected centerpiece. Fifteen years ago, a $107 cable bill pushed households toward Netflix. Today, this behavioral current has cascaded into Christmas Day NFL streaming audiences rivaling broadcast TV’s biggest spectacles. For marketers, the mid‑season window that lies between Thanksgiving Weekend and Christmas shipping cutoffs represents an undervalued part of the seasonal calendar: a chance to optimize campaigns, extend attribution windows, and capture conversions standard measurement often misses. Here’s your playbook for how to measure what matters now.
A Season of Record Scale
The tree is up, the lights are strung—and out in the wild, a trillion dollars is changing hands.
That’s right: According to the National Retail Federation, holiday 2025 total retail sales are expected to top $1 trillion, the first time U.S. seasonal commerce crosses this watershed mark. Adobe Analytics forecasts about a quarter of this total—$253 billion—to occur online. The season that kicks off with pumpkin spice and culminates with champagne has become, to use the technical term, ginormous.
Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday 2025 results confirm the trajectory:
- 203 million shoppers over the 5-day weekend—a record high, exceeding NRF’s forecast of 187 million
- Black Friday: almost $12 billion in U.S. online sales, up 9% YoY
- Cyber Monday: $14 billion in U.S. online sales, up 7% YoY—the largest single online shopping day ever recorded
- Cyber Week total: $44 billion online, up 8% YoY
- BNPL (buy now, pay later) crosses $1 billion in a single day for the first time
Yet for all the focus on Black Friday/Cyber Monday, a highly consequential stretch of holiday commerce is nigh, hiding in plain sight.
The Quiet Engine Between Frenzies
Black Friday claims the breathless coverage; Cyber Monday sets the records; the feverish final days before Christmas generate theatrical urgency. Between Thanksgiving Weekend fireworks and the panic of overnight shipping, December 5 through December 18 is the quietly potent mid-season engine of holiday commerce. Here, deal‑hunters become gift‑givers. Free shipping banners morph into deadline countdowns. Awareness amassed during November begins a breathless conversion run.
And in a twist few foresaw, sports streaming has become the period’s live wire—blending live entertainment, communal attention, and measurable consumer intent to rewire cross-platform holiday marketing. Let’s dive in and unpack!
From Cable Bills to Connected Plays
Our story begins with neither technology nor consumer insight nor app, but a cable bill.
In 2010, the average U.S. household paid $71 per month for cable television. By 2018, it was $107. Annual increases of 5–8% compounded until consumer tolerance snapped. Cable executives had their reasons—content costs, network fees, shareholder expectations. Consumers had a simpler reason: The bill was too high.
Netflix provided an answer, having launched its streaming service in January 2007 as a modest curiosity—1,000 titles, clunky interface, buffering that tested patience. But Netflix grasped something cable executives didn’t: When a passable alternative to $107/month costs $7.99, you don’t need to be stellar—just good enough.
The subscriber trajectory tells the story. In 2011: 23 million; by 2013: 44 million. By 2025: 302 million worldwide. Every cable price hike handed Netflix another subscriber; every cord-cutter emboldened the next. By 2013, Smart TV makers were preloading streaming apps, turning what had been a dumb appliance into the first at‑scale connected‑identity device in the living room—a quiet hardware revolution that would later underwrite CTV measurement itself.
Then in February 2013—just as post-holiday credit card bills landed—Netflix premiered House of Cards, the first prestige drama produced for streaming, releasing all 13 episodes simultaneously. Orange Is the New Black followed. Subscriber growth accelerated 33%. Continuous access birthed the binge-watching phenomenon.
Within six years, media executives responded by fragmenting television beyond recognition: Disney+ launched. Apple TV+ launched. HBO Max, Peacock, and Paramount+ followed in rapid succession. Friends departed Netflix for HBO Max. The Office fled to Peacock. Content scattered across platforms like wrapping paper strewn over the living-room floor on Christmas morning.
The streaming wars were in full force.
In a Senate Hearing Room
Here’s where we detour through a Senate hearing room.
In September 1987—back when holiday shopping meant crowded malls and layaway counters—a journalist named Michael Dolan walked into Potomac Video in Washington, D.C., and asked the store clerk for a list of every tape Judge Robert Bork—then a controversial Supreme Court nominee—had rented over the past two years. The clerk handed over a list of 146 titles. Dolan published them in the Washington City Paper as The Bork Tapes.
The contents were hilariously mundane: Hitchcock, British costume dramas, a smattering of musicals. Not a whiff of scandal. Congress, naturally, panicked. If a Supreme Court nominee’s video habits could be exposed so easily, what about theirs? Within 13 months, the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 was signed into law, criminalizing the disclosure of video rental records without consent.
Fast-forward 3+ decades. The same law—drafted with Blockbuster in mind—constrains how CTV publishers share show-level data in programmatic bid requests. When you wonder why streaming measurement is harder than it should be, why programmers cite “privacy concerns” when you query which shows your ads run against—the ghost of Robert Bork’s rental card is haunting your clean room.
A judge’s fondness for Hitchcock begat a privacy statute begat a CTV transparency gap. Nobody planned this—it happened anyway.
When Sports Reclaimed the Now
As platforms multiplied, a problem emerged: Scripted content could be paused, saved, binged at leisure. Generated no urgency, no appointment. No reason to subscribe now rather than eventually. When audiences could watch anything anytime, appointment viewing evaporated.
Live sports fixed this. You can’t binge a game that hasn’t happened yet—and you can’t wait until January to watch Christmas Day football. Live sports deliver what no algorithmic feed can: collective, simultaneous, urgent attention.
The Rights Rush
Super Bowl 2024 drew 123.7 million viewers—at the time, the most-watched broadcast in U.S. television history.
Super Bowl 2025 topped this with 127.7 million viewers. For insights on this record-breaking event, see Super Bowl LIX: Streaming and Advertising Mania.
What followed was an arms race that would make defense contractors look restrained. Amazon secured Thursday Night Football for approximately $1 billion annually—15 regular-season games plus a Black Friday matchup. Viewership topped 13 million by 2024. YouTube won NFL Sunday Ticket at $2 billion+ per season, ending DirecTV’s 30-year hold. Apple TV + Major League Soccer inked a 10-year, $2.5 billion deal.
And then Netflix did something nobody saw coming.
On May 15, 2024, the streaming giant announced a three-year deal to stream NFL Christmas Day—its first major live-sports foray. The Christmas 2024 debut exceeded every projection: Kansas City vs. Pittsburgh and Baltimore vs. Houston both pulled upwards of 24 million. Combined, nearly 65 million unduplicated US viewers tuned in across both games—the most-streamed NFL contests in history.
Beyoncé’s halftime performance peaked above 27 million viewers. #BeyonceBowl overtook #Christmas as the top trend worldwide. Netflix sold out every advertising slot. By August 2025, they had already sold out their holiday 2025 inventory.
NFL Christmas Day 2025 sets the stage for a historic tripleheader spanning two streaming platforms. Netflix carries Dallas vs. Washington at 1:00 PM EST and Detroit vs. Minnesota at 4:30 PM. Amazon Prime Video closes with Denver vs. Kansas City at 8:15 PM—the Thursday Night Football slot landing on Christmas night.
For holiday marketers, the reach is unprecedented: massive, engaged audiences spanning two streaming platforms. The median TNF viewer age runs 7 years younger than linear NFL broadcasts. The attention is undivided, appointment-driven, and unlike the background noise of holiday movie marathons, actively anticipated. For marketers, these are synchronized national moments, and they’re unmissable.
The Coin Flips That Got Us Here
Except none of this was inevitable.
In 2009, cable companies made a serious run at NFL Sunday Ticket. DirecTV had held the exclusive since 1994, but the contract was up for renewal. If Comcast or Verizon had won those rights, streaming may never have become the urgent frontier for live sports. Cable would have bundled Sunday Ticket with internet service, locking households into legacy packages for another decade.
Or consider the Smart TV itself. By 2024, myriad operating systems were fighting for your living room, including leaders Samsung Tizen, LG WebOS, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Google/Android TV, and Vizio’s CastOS. If any of them had achieved Windows-level dominance, identity resolution would be routine and measurement clean. Instead, fragmentation became the defining feature—and defining headache—of CTV advertising.
The path we’re tracing wasn’t a thoroughfare. It was a series of coin flips that somehow all landed heads.
The Second‑Screen Surge
Thanksgiving Weekend 2022 was the unassuming dress rehearsal. The shift began that Black Friday, when 20 million Americans tuned in to watch USA vs. England in the World Cup—setting streaming records across platforms. The weekend revealed something advertisers couldn’t ignore: Not only were fans taking in live sports in a new way, but they were also shopping on their phones while watching the game.
Now, for the 2025 holidays, second-screen behavior defines the season. During drives, fans scroll retail apps or check gift lists. Advertisers sync banners and shoppable overlays to live plays. Shopping carts open during commercial breaks. Two-thirds of NFL viewers simultaneously engage with social media, while 51% shop while actively watching live games, with the latter figure climbing to 61% among Gen Z fans.
This holiday season, mobile devices account for 56% of online spending—$142.7 billion, up 8.5% YoY. Five years ago, the lion’s share of online purchases happened on desktop. The tablet on the couch and click after the kickoff are where everything tightens: media behavior, retail habits, and adtech measurement colliding at once. Cross-platform holiday marketing now pulses with the unpredictability of a live game—measured in real-time, across screens, calibrated to the rhythms of sports and shopping.
The Payment Rails Wrapped Up in Your Holiday
And there’s another thread tightening in the background.
In 2019, a handful of fintech startups—Klarna, Affirm, Afterpay—began offering buy now, pay later at checkout. This season, BNPL is projected to cover $20 billion in holiday spend. Cyber Monday 2025 crossed $1 billion in BNPL transactions—the first time the payment method broke this figure in a single day.
What does this have to do with your holiday streaming impressions? More than you’d think.
BNPL removes the friction between “I want to give this” and “Can I really afford this right now?”—which means the time to conversion after CTV impression compresses wildly. A viewer who sees your ad during the Cowboys game on Christmas Day can split the cost into four payments before halftime. The gap between awareness and purchase shrinks from days to minutes.
Payment rails, it turns out, are tangled up in your attribution story whether or not you invited them. When 25% of holiday shoppers finance gifts through an app on the same phone they’re using as a second screen, the lines between media, commerce, and credit blur.
Back to That Mid-Season Holiday Window
Hot-off-the-press Black Friday and Cyber Monday results confirm that holiday 2025’s opening weekend has performed above expectations. We are very much on track for that $trillion retail season.
What happens next is where the real game is played.
The mid-season window—roughly December 5 through December 18—presents characteristics often missed by standard measurement:
- Purchase intent shifts from deal-hunting to gift-fulfillment—from “What’s on sale?” to “Will it arrive in time?”
- Average order values climb as shoppers move from self-purchasing to recipient-focused buying.
- Shipping deadlines around December 14–18 create urgency spikes that force decisions.
Most importantly, the nature of influence changes. Early-season awareness campaigns—including those sports streaming impressions—convert through different channels than the ones delivering the original exposure.
Data Fragmentation and the Measurement Race
Streaming generates precision metrics—pause, skip, completion, in‑ad purchase—but each platform guards its garden. By 2024, clean rooms emerged as the neutral meeting ground for truth. Federated data collaborations (IAB Tech Lab, WFA North Star Framework 2025) enable privacy‑safe attribution across CTV, mobile, and retail media.
Still, the challenge remains: connecting the first impression to the last conversion without losing the middle of the story.
Kochava and Samba TV have teamed up to unify measurement across a plethora of streaming platforms as well as linear TV. Read all about it.
Mid-Season Metrics That Matter
By early December, Cyber Week’s heat fades and measurable intent peaks. For marketers navigating the mid-season window, several priorities crystallize. What you track from December 5 to 18 may determine your January ROI.
Shipping Deadline Spikes
The windows around December 14–18 (ground shipping cutoff) and December 21–23 (expedited, last-chance, pray-it-arrives options) consistently generate purchase urgency. Compare conversion rates during these periods to your baseline. The surges quantify the extent to which deadline pressure moves your category.
CTV Halo Effect
Brand search volume serves as a leading indicator of streaming campaign effectiveness. According to a 2025 Premion/Advertiser Perceptions study, 7 in 10 advertisers report that live sports on CTV outperform other premium content in brand awareness, favorability, and recall—with the majority of website traffic occurring within days of airing. This signal often appears before direct conversions, providing early validation while the season has room for optimization.
Acquisition vs. Retention
Holiday campaigns frequently blend new customer acquisition with returning customer engagement. Distinguish newcomers from loyalists. A $40 December CAC may outearn cheaper retargeting if you capture a fresh relationship.
Extended Attribution Windows
Here’s a journey unfolding right now, encoded into your data:
December 4: A viewer catches your brand spot during Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime. She’s curled on the couch, phone in hand, but doesn’t click—there’s nothing to click. The brand registers anyway: a flicker of recognition filed in her memory.
December 8: Over lunch, she looks for the brand on her phone. Your search ad captures the click, but she’s back in meetings before she can buy.
December 12: A retargeting banner finds her on Instagram. She taps, browses, adds to cart—then her kid needs a snack before the school holiday concert starts in an hour.
December 15: Frantically realizing the ground-shipping deadline, she navigates directly to your site and completes the purchase.
Under a 24-hour view-through window, the TNF impression gets zero credit. Direct traffic claims the conversion. Your CTV buy looks like a cost center—which it isn’t.
Extend to 14 or even 21 days, and suddenly the data tells a different story: That first impression was the spark.
Set Up January Now
The best part of holiday measurement? January—when the wrapping paper’s gone, the returns are done, and you can finally see what actually happened. To make this moment count, be sure to lock in your definitions now. View, visit, conversion need to mean the same thing across every channel and data source. Because your best impressions don’t always close on schedule. A Thursday Night Football spot on December 11 might not become a sale until Christmas Eve—or later. If your measurement framework isn’t ready, you’ll miss the rest of the story.
The Payoff
Let’s trace the chain one final time.
Cable companies raise prices to protect margins. Consumers defect to a $7.99 alternative. Netflix proves the model, then shows it can make prestige television. Streaming wars fragment content across myriad platforms. Audiences scatter—until live sports brings them back. Amazon buys Thursday nights. Netflix buys Christmas Day. Smart TVs become identity devices, but multiple operating systems fight for the living room, fragmenting measurement. A 1988 privacy law written for Blockbuster constrains what data can travel in a bid request. Buy now, pay later compresses the conversion window. And somewhere in your dashboard, an impression from Thanksgiving Weekend is about to drive a December 16 sale—if your marketing tech stack can see it.
It starts with a journalist’s curiosity about a video store rental list.
It ends with a Christmas Eve shopper deciding whether to finance gifts via four payments.
The Story Isn’t Over
The sequence we’ve traced is still in motion. This time next year, a new streaming entrant could own an entirely new sports package. A privacy regulation could close a measurement loophole (or open one). The only certainty is that holiday season 2026 will be shaped by connections nobody’s made yet—and very few will see coming.
Capturing the Full Holiday Picture
Amid all the complexity, unified measurement becomes the connective tissue cross-platform holiday marketing demands. Where standard attribution misses the spark that begins a purchase path, extended measurement exposes its full value. Where device boundaries sever insight, identity resolution rebuilds it.
Kochava’s infrastructure links streaming impressions to mobile actions to in‑store visits—revealing the complete customer journey throughout the season.
The tree is up. The gifts await. The mid-season clock is ticking. Ready to capture what others miss? Contact our team to build a measurement framework that makes every holiday touchpoint count—from the first Black Friday football impression to the final Christmas Eve conversion.
