When Your Audience Isn’t Yours

For most of television’s history, IP value accumulated inside environments broadcasters could largely control. Decisions about when content appeared, how often it returned, and what surrounded it were not incidental. They shaped recognition, familiarity, and trust, and, in turn, economic value. Discovery was designed. Repetition was intentional.

That logic still underpins how much of the industry thinks about IP. The problem is that it no longer describes where IP value is first formed. This matters because the audience behaviours that now shape IP value increasingly occur outside environments the IP owner controls.

Today, the environments most effective at building recognition and return behaviour are often those in which IP owners exercise the least control over when, why, and under what conditions audiences encounter their work. This tension now sits at the centre of television strategy, and it is most clearly exposed by YouTube.

YouTube unsettles traditional television organisations precisely because it refuses to behave like broadcast. 

What is often interpreted as risk or loss of control is, in fact, the mechanism through which it creates value.

Broadcast television did more than distribute content. It structured the conditions of that content encounter. Schedules were editorial decisions rather than logistics. Repetition was a tool for building familiarity rather than a waste. Scarcity protected attention by limiting choice and concentrating focus. Because those conditions were stable, the formation of value was comparatively legible. Even with blunt measurement, cause and effect could be inferred because the system itself did not continuously reconfigure around the viewer.

That stability trained the industry to associate IP value with designed prominence. If exposure could be planned and defended, value could be managed.

In comparison, FAST platforms reintroduce elements of broadcast logic into digital environments. Channels are scheduled intentionally; repetition is designed; and genre or tonal consistency shapes expectations. In that sense, FAST restores continuity rather than relying purely on on-demand choice.

This makes FAST effective at maintaining known IP and sustaining audience presence over time. What it does not do is materially change how IP is first discovered, or why audiences return before making any explicit commitment. Scheduling decisions operate at the level of the channel or catalogue, not the individual encounter.

FAST preserves continuity. It stabilises value that already exists. It does not fundamentally alter the conditions under which IP familiarity first forms.

YouTube operates on a different logic altogether. 

In most cases, audiences do not first encounter IP by entering its branded channel. They encounter it through recommendations, search, clips, or adjacency, often without associating it with a channel or a label. Recognition forms before intent. Return behaviour precedes subscription. Trust begins to accumulate long before loyalty is explicit.

This is not incidental. YouTube is optimised around encounter rather than destination loyalty. Content is placed where attention already exists, rather than waiting for audiences to arrive deliberately. Repetition is adaptive rather than scheduled, shaped by context rather than by a fixed plan. For IP owners accustomed to designing exposure, this feels unstable. There is no guaranteed prominence, no protected context, and no predictable cadence. Yet this instability is precisely what allows familiarity to compound before ownership exists.

The power of YouTube comes with a cost. 

IP owners retain control over what they create - tone, quality, coherence, and commercial framing, but they do not control when content resurfaces, what it competes with, or how often it returns to the same individual. 

Within branded channels, editorial intent remains intact. Outside them, where discovery and repeated exposure occur, attention is reallocated by systems optimised for platform-level outcomes such as relevance and continuity. This is not a platform failure, nor a weakness of IP. It is the structural condition of operating in environments where audience behaviour sits outside owned relationships.

The real shift, then, is not from broadcast to digital, or from linear to on-demand. It is that IP value increasingly forms before audiences enter environments the IP owner controls. YouTube does not replace broadcast or FAST; it operates earlier in the value chain, shaping recognition and return behaviour upstream of schedules, apps, and destinations.

The trade-off is clear. Ongoing exposure and long-tail familiarity are gained at the expense of certainty, timing, and guaranteed visibility. What television gives up is not quality control, but the ability to decide when IP value accumulation begins. The strategic risk is not that it forms outside owned environments, but that traditional television does not yet know how to recognise that value when it does.