How AI Is Opening Streaming TV Advertising to Canadian SMBs

Three years ago, if you ran a small business in Canada and wanted to put an ad on streaming TV, the door was basically closed. Production costs, minimum ad spends, the whole machinery of a real TV buy: none of it was built for a business running lean. Only 40% of Canadian SMBs even considered streaming a viable channel back then.

New research says that door is opening. A study commissioned by Amazon Ads, conducted by Opinium among 300 Canadian B2C marketing decision-makers at small and medium businesses, found that AI-powered tools have changed what “realistic" means for a small advertiser. Seventy-three percent of respondents now agree that AI has made streaming TV and other video ad formats a genuine option for their business for the first time.

It is not just streaming. The same shift shows up across the board: 75% say AI has opened up audiences, channels, or formats that felt out of reach three years ago, whether the barrier was cost, complexity, or simply not having the resources.

What changed

The barriers were never a mystery. Among SMBs who ruled out streaming TV three years back, 71% pointed to cost and 46% pointed to minimum spend requirements that made no sense for a business their size. Streaming TV was built for national advertisers with national budgets, not the shop down the street.

What AI changed is not the channel itself. It changed the cost of trying:

• 88% say they are likely to use AI to create advertising assets
• 65% say they are likely to use AI specifically to produce streaming ads
• 51% say AI enables faster optimization
• 46% say AI helps them find customers quickly enough to protect a limited budget

The result is a channel that used to require an agency retainer now within reach of a business running its own marketing.

What streaming TV buys them now

So what do SMBs actually think streaming TV buys them, now that it's on the table? Among those interested in TV or streaming TV advertising:

• 58% say it helps them reach new audiences
• 52% say it improves brand awareness
• 39% say it improves credibility

That credibility number stands out. It is not something a display ad or a boosted post tends to deliver. There is something about a business showing up on a screen usually reserved for national brands that changes how a customer sizes them up, whether or not the ad itself is any good.

Beyond streaming: going cross-border

The same pattern shows up outside of streaming TV entirely. Cross-border campaigns have historically demanded resources most small businesses do not have: creative adapted for different languages and cultures, targeting and optimization managed across countries, all before a single ad runs. In Canada, 27% of respondents who called cross-border campaigns inaccessible three years ago now say they are more accessible.

The follow-through is showing up in outcomes, not just sentiment. Seventy percent say AI-enabled advertising activity has supported business growth, 38% say it has supported expansion into new countries, and 30% say it has shifted brand perception.

Where human judgment still sits

None of this reads as SMBs handing the keys over to a machine. Among Canadian businesses using AI to support advertising, the final decision-maker is:

• 48% the business owner
• 26% AI-powered tools working alongside a human
• 18% the marketing lead

No Canadian SMBs reported a fully automated decision with zero human review.

That is a meaningful detail in a survey commissioned by a company selling AI ad tools. The pitch is not “let AI run your campaigns." It is closer to: AI does the heavy lifting on speed and cost, a person still decides what goes out the door.

Our take

Three years is not a long time for an entire advertising channel to go from “not for businesses like mine" to “worth trying." What is happening here is less about streaming TV specifically and more about who gets to compete for attention. When the cost of producing a decent video ad, or adapting a campaign for a second market, or optimizing week over week, drops far enough, the businesses that could never afford to play in those spaces suddenly can.

Seventy-three percent of Canadian SMBs surveyed say AI will matter to their competitiveness going forward, and they are already looking past execution toward using it for content generation, strategic planning, and audience segmentation. Whether that plays out at the scale this research suggests is worth watching. But for a Canadian small business owner who wrote off streaming TV a few years back, it might be time to take another look.

This piece draws on research commissioned by Amazon Ads and conducted by Opinium among 300 B2C marketing decision-makers at Canadian SMBs, part of a broader 4,100-respondent survey across 14 countries. Data was collected between April 7 and April 23, 2026.