In late 2025, Meta quietly launched Reels TV, bringing Instagram content onto the living room screen. Most people wrote it off as a novelty. Reports have since emerged of Meta engaging supply-side platforms and TV hardware makers (including Magnite and Comcast’s FreeWheel) in conversations about how it might plug into streaming inventory at scale.
Before going any further, there’s a clarification worth making: this isn’t Facebook or Instagram on your TV. When I first heard about it, my instinct was to picture a social feed on the big screen, and that wouldn’t work. What Meta is actually exploring is closer to an Audience Network model for CTV, plugging its demand and targeting into third-party streaming inventory via supply-side platforms (SSPs) and TV manufacturers, using CTV as another touchpoint in its full-funnel optimisation loop.
It’s a much more interesting proposition than it first sounds. And I think it matters for two reasons that are really two sides of the same story.
The opportunity nobody’s really talking about
Traditional TV advertising has always had a prohibitive floor. You needed tens of thousands of pounds just to get in the room, before production, before agency fees, before anything. The result is that TV has always been a channel for brands with big budgets and dedicated media teams.
CTV has already started to chip away at that. Self-serve platforms like Hulu and Roku now offer entry points from £500. But the interface and expertise required have still kept many smaller advertisers on the sidelines.
Meta’s self-serve model is different. It’s the platform that taught millions of small business owners to run their own advertising, without an agency or media planner, without a minimum spend. If Meta can extend that same simplicity into CTV, a local business owner already running Meta campaigns could find themselves on TV, in the same campaign, optimising toward the same outcome, through the same interface they already know.
That’s a structurally different thing from anything CTV has offered so far. The major holding company brands won’t immediately migrate their linear TV spend to Meta; that’s not the prize here. The more interesting opportunity is the enormous pool of advertisers who have never been able to touch TV at all.
The harder question
Here’s where it gets more complicated, and where I think the conversation hasn’t gone far enough yet.
This isn’t Meta’s first attempt to own video inventory. Its 2014 purchase of LiveRail, a video SSP, eventually had to be written down. Poor supply quality and fraud made the business unworkable. The current partnership-led model looks like a direct response to that experience. But it creates a different kind of problem.
Google built YouTube CTV into its full-funnel stack so effectively partly because it owns YouTube. It controlled the pricing, which meant CPMs were competitive enough for the algorithm to learn and scale naturally. Meta is accessing third-party streaming inventory, and CTV CPMs typically run three to ten times higher than its own social placements. Adwave Q4 2025 data puts average CTV CPMs at $20-$40, versus Meta’s $6-$9.
The question is whether Meta’s algorithm will naturally find a performance signal on inventory at that price point, or whether some degree of spend steering will be needed to give it enough data to work with. It’s not a straightforward problem. And it’s a meaningful one for advertisers to understand, because the answer shapes how much confidence we should place in the early performance claims.
We’ve seen from our own Unified CTV work at Brainlabs that when you manage audience holistically across publishers, frequency-capping across YouTube and Netflix for example, the performance lifts are significant: 51% over-delivery on reach targets, 342% product search lift. The underlying principle of unifying CTV into a broader performance system works. How Meta applies that principle with inventory it doesn’t control is the story worth following.
What we’re watching
The broader context makes this worth taking seriously. BARB (Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board) data shows 20.8 million UK homes now have access to an SVOD (subscription video on demand) service, with streaming accounting for 38% of total UK TV viewing in 2025. The IAB forecasts CTV ad spend growing 13.8% in 2026. The audience and the money are moving in the same direction.
No formal product has been announced, and the plans remain fluid. What is clear is that Meta has been actively engaging supply partners (SSPs, TV manufacturers, ad servers). And that activity, sustained over time, points to something more than theoretical interest.
The questions around inventory economics, algorithm transparency, and SMB accessibility are the ones we’re exploring directly with Meta now
Whether this reshapes TV advertising or becomes another LiveRail will come down to how Meta navigates the gap between the demand it controls and the inventory it doesn’t. Those answers are coming. They’ll be worth paying attention to.
