Comcast: TV + Streaming Doubles Return

One screen is a tactic. Two screens is a plan.

That's the short version of a new report from Comcast Advertising. On October 1, the company released its Multiscreen Performance Report, and the headline number is a big one: campaigns that pair traditional TV with streaming delivered a 2X incremental return on ad spend compared with campaigns that relied on just one tactic.

Those same campaigns also drove 2.4X more website visits.

Comcast built the report on first-half 2026 campaign data and outcome measurement from three partners, Innovid, Clarivoy and Mastercard, as PPC Land reported.

Most people will read the headline and think "buy more channels."

I read it a little differently. Because when you look at where the extra reach actually comes from, the hero of this report is streaming.

The Number Everyone Will Quote

Let's start with the headline.

"Incremental" is the word doing the heavy lifting. Incremental return means the sales your ads actually caused, not every sale that happened to show up after someone saw a commercial. If you've read our piece on alpha vs. beta incrementality, you know that's the number that matters.

Comcast says that number doubled when brands ran TV and streaming together.

Comcast's own Dawn Lee Williamson, Chief Revenue Officer for Media Solutions, put it this way: "When TV and streaming are paired together, it helps brands capture attention and stay top-of-mind to help drive the measurable results they need."

That's the pitch. Now here's the part I'd circle.

Streaming Found the Homes TV Couldn't

According to the report, traditional TV delivered 71% of the unique reach on these multiscreen campaigns. Streaming delivered 21%. Only 8% of households were reached by both.

Read that again. More than one in five households these campaigns reached were found only on streaming.

PPC Land ran the math: streaming added roughly 27% more households on top of what linear TV would have reached on its own.

Those aren't leftovers. Those are the cord-cutters, the cord-nevers and the people who only watch through an app on the big screen in the living room. You can't buy them on cable, because they're not on cable.

That's the real reason the combo works. It's not magic. It's math. You're reaching people you were missing before.

Live Sports on Streaming Was the Standout

This is the stat that jumped out at me.

According to Comcast, sports streaming campaigns around the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, March Madness and the FIFA World Cup hit 52% unique reach, and captured hard-to-reach households 10X more effectively than TV alone.

We've said it for a long time: live sports is the most premium inventory in CTV. Nobody is half-watching overtime. And now the biggest seller in TV is telling you that streaming sports reaches the people regular TV can't.

Streaming Holds Attention Better Than Social

The report also says TV exposure drives 36% more time spent looking at an ad than social media, and 2.2X higher brand recall.

Here's the interesting part. Those two numbers line up exactly with a study published in September by FreeWheel, Comcast Advertising's own media and technology arm, with the research firm MediaScience. In that study, streaming viewers looked at ads for 71% of their running time versus 52% on social, and two streaming exposures produced 53% unaided brand recall versus 24% for social.

That study was run on streaming.

So whichever way you read it, the attention win belongs to the big screen in the living room. Not the phone in someone's hand.

The Honest Asterisk

I'd be doing you a disservice if I didn't say this part.

This is a seller's report. Comcast sells both TV and streaming ads, and it picked the data and the partners. That's normal in our business, and it doesn't make the numbers wrong. Comcast also has a household-level view of its footprint that very few companies have.

But a few things aren't in the release. "2X" is a ratio, not a dollar amount. It doesn't say what the actual return was, or exactly what counted as "one tactic."

So treat 2X as a strong direction, not a promise. The way to know what TV plus streaming does for your brand is the same way you know anything in marketing: read it on your own sales. Your orders, matched against where your ads ran, will tell you what a press release can't. That's what we mean when we say triangulate.

What Smart Brands Should Do With This

Stop thinking in single tactics. If your plan is "we tried streaming once" or "we're a cable brand," you're leaving reach on the table. The report's whole point is that the screens work better together.

Make streaming the reach engine. That 21% of households only found on streaming is the growth. If you're already on linear TV, CTV is how you reach the homes you're missing.

Split premium and scale on purpose. Not all streaming is the same. Know what goes to premium inventory and what goes to FAST. Start with the two-bucket rule for FAST vs. Premium.

Plan around live sports. If sports fits your brand, streaming sports is where hard-to-reach households show up in a big way. Lock it in early.

Watch your frequency. Two screens can mean the same household sees you too many times. Coordinated buys beat stacked ones. Here's how we think about frequency caps.

Keep score on your own numbers. Cost per order by channel, by publisher and by geography. That's how you'll know if your version of "2X" is real.

The Final Take

The biggest name in TV just put out a report that says, in so many words: TV alone isn't enough.

The extra reach came from streaming. The standout reach came from streaming sports. The attention numbers line up with a streaming study.

For CTV, this isn't a threat. It's more proof that streaming is the piece that makes a TV plan work, and that the brands winning right now are the ones who stopped choosing one screen and started planning for the whole living room.

That's how we build every campaign at CS & Co. It's baked into the CS Method™. Want to know where CTV fits in your mix? Find out if CTV is a fit.

Cory Poccia
CEO, CS & Co. Marketing Studio™

Comcast Says TV + Streaming Doubles Your Return. Here’s the Part That Matters for CTV.