Ten out of ten. That is how many tracked markets had streaming outspend cable on legal advertising, with no exceptions. Taqtics is a full-stack programmatic law firm marketing agency with direct access to premium CTV inventory. Its analysis of AdImpact spend data found streaming beat cable in all ten markets measured in December 2025. It beat cable by roughly four to one.
The clean run, before the dollars
A trend has exceptions. A ten-for-ten result doesn’t. In the ten-market December cohort, streaming spend outpaced cable spend in every market. Cable did not win a single one. It did not come close in most of them.
Then come the dollars. Across the ten markets combined, legal advertisers put $20,118,747 a month into streaming. They put $4,533,423 into cable, a 4.44-to-1 ratio. That gap holds market by market, not just in the combined total.
“Streaming” and “CTV” describe the same line item in this data. They are not two separate categories. AdImpact tracks connected-TV and streaming inventory as one field, and this piece treats it as one number throughout.
The ten markets, and the win column
The December cohort is a named, dated group. It covers Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington DC. All ten were measured from the same AdImpact snapshot, dated December 2025.
Streaming’s margin isn’t uniform. Atlanta puts 48% of its legal ad budget into streaming, the highest share of the ten. Washington DC puts in the least, just 3%. Los Angeles runs highest among the rest at 33%. The result is unanimous even though the margin inside it varies widely market to market.
Cable never wins, but it isn’t shut out everywhere
Here is where the claim needs a boundary. “Cable never wins” is a strict-win count. It was checked market by market across a wider 35-market panel. That panel includes the ten December markets plus markets measured earlier, in September and October 2025. Across all 35, cable wins zero head-to-head matchups against streaming. Streaming wins 33.
The other two are ties, not cable wins. Salisbury and Harrisonburg both come out with streaming and cable spend running dead even. Both were measured in the September 2025 snapshot, outside the December ten. A tie is not a loss for cable. Rounding “cable never wins” up to “streaming always beats cable” overstates what the data shows. The honest version: cable has not won a single market outright. It has managed to draw even in exactly two. Both sit outside the ten-market group this piece leads with.
Methods
The finding comes from AdImpact’s legal-vertical media-spend panel, re-cut by Taqtics. The headline figure and the $20.1 million to $4.5 million total cover ten markets. Those markets are Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington DC. All ten came from a single December 2025 snapshot. Win-count comparisons run market by market, streaming dollars against cable dollars, within that snapshot.
The “cable never wins, two ties” figure draws on a wider 35-market panel. That panel mixes three separate measurement windows, September, October, and December 2025, because different markets were captured at different times. The wider set is not a national sample. It’s 35 specific markets tracked at three different points. This piece keeps that group separate from the ten-market December cohort rather than blending them into one number.
“Streaming” refers to connected-TV and streaming inventory, a single field in the underlying data. It is not split into two categories anywhere in this reporting.
What this does and doesn’t show
This is spend, not audience. It describes where legal advertisers are choosing to put media dollars, market by market. It says nothing about where legal advertising audiences are actually watching. It says nothing about how many people saw an ad on either channel. It says nothing about which channel produced more calls or cases. A budget shift toward streaming is a decision advertisers are making, not proof that viewers already made the same move.
It’s also a snapshot, not a forecast. The December cohort captures one month. Markets move budgets around from one buying cycle to the next. A ten-market result this clean is still ten markets. It is not the full 35, and it is not the country.
Why it matters to a media-buying decision
A trend invites debate about how long it will hold. A result with zero exceptions in ten markets is harder to argue with, even with the caveats attached. For a law firm deciding where the next dollar goes, the honest reading is narrower than “streaming has won.” In every market checked, the advertisers already spending real money made the same call. They chose streaming over cable, by close to four to one. This breakdown compares CTV buying against broadcast, cable, radio and other legacy channels, for firms weighing the same decision.
Cable isn’t gone from the mix. It still gets funded in every one of these markets. It just hasn’t won a single one outright. The two markets where it managed a tie sit outside the group carrying this finding.
About the author
Jared Reagan writes on legal-vertical media spend for Taqtics. Taqtics is a full-stack programmatic law firm marketing agency with direct access to premium CTV inventory. The agency’s analysis of AdImpact spend data is cited throughout this piece.
Source: FG Newswire