The Future Of Television Will Be Won Before The Screen Turns On

Television remains the dominant video medium across most markets, accounting for 2/3 of video viewing in Europe and Japan, and over half in North America and Latin America.

As television extends across operating systems, streaming environments, and connected devices, discovery and viewing behaviour are changing.

The key question is how value is built within this evolving journey.

People don’t struggle finding content to watch because there is too little of it.

Bango Research data suggest that choosing what to watch has become the experience itself.

That is not a minor inconvenience. It is a structural shift. Value moves from content to the decision environment surrounding it.

That shift matters more than it looks like.

The operating system redistributes power

Discovery no longer starts with a broadcaster, nor even the show. Competition increasingly sits with the television operating system layer. Samsung Tizen. LG webOS. Google TV. Roku. They are recommendation environments.  The home screen structures the offer and shapes decision. Prominence, partnerships, and interface design become strategic assets alongside programming. TV is extending its influence upstream, toward the environments that shape decisions before viewing begins. Crucially, this does not remove broadcaster power. It shifts where influence needs to be exercised.

Recent developments around Roku and Fox further illustrate how valuable the operating system layer has become within the ecosystem. The continued consolidation in this space underlines the strategic importance of TV OS control in shaping discovery and distribution.

Microdramas can reclaim power

The rise of microdramas is usually framed as a new content format competing for audience and viewing share. A more useful framing is that they allow broadcasters to move upstream in the decision process - before the television is switched on and before operating systems shape the available choices. This is not a creator-only shift. Major TV companies and studios, including Disney and NBCU, already invest in microdramas with Dramabox and Gammatime to influence viewing intent before audiences reach the platform.

A short-form episode watched during the day is not simply additional viewing. It keeps characters, stories and programmes cognitively active between viewing moments. When audiences later open Netflix, TF1+, ITVX or another service, the decision is no longer made from a blank slate.

In that sense, microdramas are not primarily a content innovation. They are a decision-shaping mechanism. While television operating systems influence choice at the point of entry, microdramas influence what enters the consideration set beforehand.

The strategic value is not additional viewing. It is greater influence over future decisions.

Memory is the real battleground

The same logic applies directly to advertisers: brand growth depends on how decisions are shaped and remembered.

As a result, advertising effectiveness is driven by memory structures.

A fragmented video ecosystem looks complex from a planning perspective, but it is also an opportunity: the same narrative can now pop up across day parts, screens, social feeds, short-form formats, home screens and long-form video.

When those experiences reinforce one another, memory structures strengthen. Recent research from Omnicom Media & Roku points in the same direction. Exposure across the home screen and video environments generated stronger brand outcomes than single format exposure.

The implication is important: decision and viewing environments do not compete with one another. They reinforce one another. The opportunity is not more impressions. It is more encoding, reinforcement, and retrieval. 

Not concentration. Orchestration.

Resilience comes from connecting contexts

The industry talks about fragmentation as if audiences are disappearing. They are not. They are navigating - across screens, formats, recommendation systems, and moments of the day.

The companies that succeed in this environment will not necessarily be those with the most content. They will be those that best understand the journey connecting those contexts together: how people discover, choose, watch, remember, and return.

Television's resilience has never come from dominating a single screen. It comes from connecting contexts across the day. The question is whether the industry is building strategy around people’s decision journey or still treating fragmentation as the core problem to solve.

Sources: The Global TV Group “The Global TV Deck 2025”, Bango “Subscription Signals”, Omnicom & Roku “The CTV Power Couple”