Fearless Predictions 2026: The Year Of Feudal Media
Rather than issue a series of rather pointless or obvious predictions (“YouTube becomes TV!” “Retail media rules the day!”) this year’s Fearless Predictions will focus on all the ways that our descent into Feudal Media will impact all areas of the media ecosystem.
But first, a definition:
Feudal media is what happened when the mass media monoculture that dominated the midcentury West collapsed.
Much in the way the Roman Empire in the West collapsed into a series of feudal entities that were largely disconnected from each other, so too has mass media, with its single sources of truth, collapsed into a series of disconnected bubbles scattered across a wide range of platforms from TikTok to Substack to old school broadcast TV.
In both instances, it is the loss of universal sources of truth—popular mass media outlets that everyone used as guideposts whether they actually believed them or not—that have caused the most disarray, in that they also result in the loss of any common cultural touchpoints.
In today’s feudal media that means people are increasingly cocooned inside their own bubbles, unaware of what else is going on in the world around them. Which results in an almost insurmountable degree of difficulty in getting any sort of message—commercial or political—out to a broad swath of the population.
So here are eight ways this is going to play out in the year(s) ahead.
1. The End of Objectivity
To go back to what I was saying about the “single sources of truth”, the reason I’m using that terminology is because most people did, in fact, believe that what they saw on The Today Show or read in the New York Times was true.
And if they didn’t, they believed it was false.
They did not, by and large, believe that something else was true, something perhaps only tangentially related to the thing the New York Times had said was true.
But that is what is happening today. Different truths spring up in different bubbles and people are unaware that other people have completely different takes. In fact, most never even see those different takes in order to dismiss them.
Several weeks back I’d written about how these ecosystems resemble Soviet media. Where users are fed the same set of lies and half-truths as gospel by a wide range of “influencers” across an equally wide range of mediums. And thus have no idea that what they’re hearing is not the conventionally accepted wisdom on the topic.
Regardless of whether that topic is a foreign policy decision or the wisdom of a fourth down field goal attempt.
It’s a problem for anyone trying to get news about a product across. Or a new show or streaming service.
How It Affects The TV Industry: Look for TV news to continue its current decline, becoming relevant to a small number of political insiders and online obsessives. 24-hour news networks will be hit hardest, while local news will feel the least impact as people still want to know about sports and weather.
Look for advertising to get more complex and more specialized too, as reaching people across all those bubbles with relevant messaging gets harder to pull off and as the ability to understand what the various audiences you’re speaking to believe is true also becomes increasingly difficult to figure out.
2. The Death of Expertise
The second trend mirrors the first in that the backgrounds we once expected people to have in order to perform certain jobs are no longer required.
And by “background” I mean some degree of experience doing the thing that they are doing.
We see it in the world of political podcasting where suddenly actors, comedians and the former host of a reality home decor series have become our top pundits. And where all it seemingly takes to be considered a “historian” is to have read up some on the topic.
It’s why someone like Jimmy Donaldson can become the multibillion dollar empire known as MrBeast on his own—no agents and studio heads needed.
The death of expertise is not necessarily a bad thing—it allows for a more open pathway to fame and fortune—but we do lose a lot if we get rid of all the people who actually know what they're doing.
There’s a parallel here to the rise of democracy too.
In the early days of the American experiment, there was a fear of what would happen if the masses were suddenly given the keys to the kingdom—people who had not been educated in the history of Greece and Rome, people who had never actually governed anything before, who were not born and bred for it.
Which is why we have such an elaborate system of checks and balances. And why, to date, things have not fallen apart.
One final note here is that craft will not disappear completely
There will always be a need for an HBO. For people who have learned the art of telling compelling stories.
Which is one thing AI is unlikely to be able to replicate. For now anyway.
It’s the stuff it can replicate, the Mr. Belvederes and 40 Day Bachelors, that will disappear.
How It Impacts The TV Industry: Look for streamers to continue to try and bring on creators and people who have worked in the creator economy to build new shows, everything from game shows and talk shows to actual sitcoms and drama. It will be exactly what they did with standups and sitcoms. The goal will be to replace much of the aforementioned filler content with something more monetizable that also has an international audience.
Look for most of the efforts to fail.
3. The Decentralization of Power
Drafting off the death of expertise is another trend we will see in the Feudal Media universe and that is the decentralization of power.
There is no more Rome.
Or Hollywood, as the case may be.
The growth of technology, AI in particular, means that the advantages Hollywood once had in terms of technology, production and distribution are fading.
Not overnight, but the grip is loosening and people around the world who have skills and talent but not 10 blockbuster movies on their resumes are realizing they can now start to compete with Hollywood on every front.
Especially given that streaming is global. And that AI can help dub and translate content into multiple languages.
As the technology changes, the other advantages Hollywood once had are easier to leverage as well.
Access to capital matters less when production and marketing costs are significantly less.
Automation makes the size of the labor pool less relevant.
And the willingness to take on risk—inherent in any creative endeavor— is going to be a non-issue for companies trying to break Hollywood’s grip.
The fact that production costs and salaries outside Los Angeles are considerably lower will be a factor too. This in many ways mirrors the fate of the auto industry, where strong unions made life better for workers, but also created the market dynamics that allowed lower cost competitors to steal significant market share.
How It Impacts The TV Industry: We will see a lot more programming from all across the world, both movies and TV series. Advances in AI dubbing will make the series more palatable to mainstream Americans. So less “we’ll borrow the plotline of this series”—how the Israeli hit Hatufim became Homeland, and more “this is great—now do a version for us that’s more globally accessible” that makes use of the original production teams and possibly even the original actors.
4. The End of Serendipity
I am hoping that this is just a short-term syndrome, but as algorithms take over what we watch and what is recommended that we watch next, the walls of the bubbles will only grow more solid and the ability to discover things we did not know we wanted will fade.
It is the end of what I’ve called the “90s record store experience” where you accidentally turn a corner and stumble on a band you’d never heard of, in a genre you have no passion for, and yet instantly fall in love.
The danger of the loss of serendipity is that we are served more and more of the same. But the sequels are rarely as good as the originals.
They’re not bad, mind you. They’re just not fresh and thus they don’t move us in the same way anymore, as our neurons have been trained to know what to expect.
So it all gets sort of boring and if you don’t know what I mean, look at the current state of the music industry with its wildly successful froth of nearly identical pop hits and nearly identical “alternative”, all of it served up by the algorithms of Spotify, YouTube and Apple Music which look for songs similar to the ones you’ve already liked, an ecosystem where AI-generated songs manage to become hits.
And then think about how that compares to the music scene of the latter half of the 20th century where entire new genres—disco, new wave, grunge—would spring onto the scene, bubbling up from underground, helped along by humans and word of mouth.
How It Impacts The TV Industry: TV has never been big on experimenting, but there have been periods: the Norman Lear era at CBS, where Fred Silverman took a chance that a sitcom called All In The Family would find an audience.
And HBO, which, if its new owners allow it to adhere to its heritage, stands to benefit most from the dominance of the algorithm.
That means letting it take a flyer on a show like Game of Thrones.
Because who, in today’s industry, would greenlight a show based on a series of fantasy novels beloved by Dungeons and Dragons fanatics, featuring a cast of largely unknown European actors, set in a quasi-medieval world with sets costing millions.
And if they had, what algorithm would recommend it?
Which is why HBO might wind up being the beacon that introduces the new and unlikely to the industry. Thus staunching a descent into sameness and boredom.
5. The End of the Mega-Hit
Without mass media and a culture that creates common cultural touchpoints across a broad cross-section of demographics, there is no path for creating the sort of awareness that is required for the creation of a mega-hit.
There are other factors too.
The death of the monoculture means there are fewer mega-stars, the sort of instantly recognizable celebrities who dominated the 20th century.
As the Feudal Media ecosystem takes root, what we’ll see is an array of celebrities, each wildly popular within a subset of bubbles, but not instantly recognizable to everyone on the planet the way a Brad Pitt or Marilyn Monroe were.
Shows, movies, podcasts, creators will all achieve fame within a certain universe but will be largely unknown outside that universe. Compare that to something like Friends or Game of Thrones, where even people who did not watch the show were well aware of it and, on a macro level, what it was about.
How It Impacts The TV Industry: Hit series and movies will no longer be the generational wealth creators they once were. They will be popular within certain sub-groups but it’s unlikely that streaming services will be able to recreate the impact of a Game of Thrones. At best they can hope for a Succession or White Lotus-like hit where the show’s popularity among the “chattering classes” gives it impact beyond the small number of people who actually watch it.
In a parallel development, shows and movies may become widely popular outside the US and then adopted by American audiences.
In both cases, marketing will play a key role in the show’s success and knowing how to generate buzz among every specific audience will be a valuable skill.
6. The Rise Of Niche Programming
One of the key features of Feudal Media is that You Are What You Watch.
Or, more accurately, that you self-identify with the various content bubbles you are a part of. And that many of those bubbles have very specific unspoken rules about what brands they like, what music they listen to, which public figures they like and which they mock.
As these bubbles rise, they will become valuable to their owners because the audiences are so passionate.
Meaning they watch longer. Engage more frequently. Become brand ambassadors to help grow the bubble. Happily purchase brand extensions on other media.
And they will respond favorably to brands advertising on their programming, at least in instances where the connection feels authentic and real.
How It Impacts The TV Industry: The rise of niche content, hundreds, if not thousands of little bubbles, portends a rise in the use of contextual targeting. Brands will come to understand that demographics are becoming an increasingly unreliable targeting mechanism, replaced by group identity. This will benefit bubbles with more dedicated users, creating a flywheel effect of sorts.
7. The End of Mega-Brands
The corollary to the end of the mega-hit is the end of the mega-brand.
The monoculture enabled the growth of megabrands. Coke, McDonald’s, Nike and Apple could not have become the behemoths they are absent the ability to reach the majority of the population all at once, multiple times each week.
That dynamic is gone now and so is the ability to create a new megabrand.
What we will see instead are newer niche brands growing to a decent size and then getting snapped up by megabrand holding companies like Mondelez who can help them achieve another level of growth.
But these brands can only grow so big. Without mass media they will never achieve the global status of a McDonald’s or Nike.
That means being a fan or even a casual customer will carry more weight. Everyone ate at McDonald’s at some point or another. But choosing a chain like Pret a Manger (which is owned by JAB, the same holding company that owns Panera, Krispy Kreme and Keurig) is a statement of sorts about who you are and what your values are.
Creating a very different challenge for advertisers than just reaching “anyone with a mouth.”
How It Impacts The TV Industry: Ads will need to be targeted based on values and identities rather than demographics. Broadbased Super Bowl type buys will still be popular for existing megabrands, but most other TV buys will become far more targeted. Expect to see more sponsored or branded content too as marketers fully embrace the notion that their brands are part of a “lifestyle.”
8. Sports Become More Valuable Than Ever
If there is one exception to the reign of Feudal Media, it is live sports. Sports, the Big Four anyway, all exist in a world beyond bubbles.
Yes, there will be fan bubbles around each team. Bubbles around fantasy leagues and statistics.
But the games themselves will be one of the few places that will continue to draw mass audiences, fans from all demographics and geographies.
They will, for now, be among our key cultural touchpoints, the one thing more people know about than don’t, the last remaining source of “water cooler conversation.”
How It Impacts The TV Industry: Ads during live sporting events will become extremely valuable as they become one of the only ways—if not the only way—to reach a mass audience.
They will also be the only way to reach more affluent viewers on TV. This is the group we’ve been calling “15 Million Merits,” educated, high income consumers who are willing to pay to avoid ads on all of their streaming platforms and likely have ad blockers on their browsers as well.
The increasing value of ads on sports will make sports rights even more valuable than ever and media companies will pay increasingly larger sums to secure them.
With the not all that unlikely caveat that it’s entirely possible that fans, younger fans in particular, gradually fall out of love with the Big Four sports, and live sports too descends into a series of small insular bubbles built around a broad range of sporting events.
