Fragmentation Was The Word Of The Day At Stream TV Show

It’s been eight years since I kicked off the first StreamTV Show by standing up on a chair in the cafeteria in the Tech Center Marriott and announcing “Everybody go in the other room, we’re about to start.”

So it has been quite heartening to see it turn into a major tentpole with well over 2,000 people in attendance, over 250 of whom made it in to see our TVREV Summit, which still kicks off the show.

The theme of this year’s Summit was “fragmentation” as in the massive upheaval following the collapse of the monoculture, the disruption we call “Feudal Media.”

Why It Matters

In our sessions we explored some of the main ways that fragmentation was impacting the media ecosystem.

We looked at how the TV OS is the new gatekeeper in firesides with Guy Edri of V and Ed Lee of Ventura TV OS. 

Jason Damata explored how we reach the masses when there’s no more mass media in a panel featuring Breno Barcelos from Google, Alex Belaidi from Spectrum Reach, Ingrid Mariotti from Wurl, and Ioanna Protogiannis from LG Ad Solutions.

A second Damata-led panel with Summit-sponsor David Purdy from Stingray, Scott Maddux from TiVo, Dilip Bala from Merzigo and Matt Smith from Magnite, looked at how to monetize video content in ways that go beyond the old school world of the 30-second spot. 

Cathy Rasenberger brought it all home by talking about the fast changing world of sports and sports rights with Peter Scott from PlayAnywhere, Jon Giegengack from Hub Research, John Turner from FloSports and Bo Han from Transmit as they looked at how what is being billed as the last bastion of the monoculture may soon turn out to be anything but as younger fans and their preferences take root and a wide array of sports fan bubbles takes hold.

The day ended with a rousing round of analyst improv, with a troupe composed of the aforementioned Rasenberger and Giegengack, Deadline’s Dade Hayes and Magid’s Mike Bloxham that focused on the recently announced Fox-Roku purchase.

General consensus was that it showed Fox had realized that the rules had changed and owning your own distribution was critical for anyone who owned content.

My take was a bit more cautious.

I worry that Omdia’s prediction, as seen in our most excellent new Special Report on the TV OS, that Walmart’s purchase of VIZIO will result in a precipitous loss of market share for Roku is about to happen. 

And that both companies’ lack of any real overseas footprint will be a long-term issue in an increasingly international business. (Unless, of course, it just positions them for Google or Amazon to eventually buy them.)

And that Roku’s non-Android operating system, which means that anyone creating a Roku app needs to find Roku-specific developers, will prove a further millstone.

But those are all caveats. Not deal breakers.

Moving back to fragmentation, it was on display elsewhere too.

Evan Shapiro spent the bulk of his keynote explaining how the industry is still focused on the monoculture-based consumption habits of the Boomer generation, ignoring the more Feudal Media based habits of Gens Z and Alpha, who prefer TikTok and vertical video and watching whilst on the toilet.

There’s a sense that many of those Boomers don’t actually get the Feudal-ness of TikTok and similar platforms, that it’s not a channel like NBC or even a streaming app like Netflix, but rather a series of disconnected bubbles created by algorithms that feed people the same content over and over, creating a narrower and narrower world view.

The role of the algorithm and the need to regulate it was a not infrequent conversation I had at StreamTV. Meaning how can we force some level of serendipity, how can we force the algorithms to open us up rather than box us in.

Which is a valid question, though I fear that an algorithm that performs altruistically will also be one people find useless, or worse, boring.

So there’s that too.

The topic of fragmentation came up again on a panel I had the luxury of just participating in, about the current spate of mergers. Maryam Mehrtash ably led Dade Hayes, New York Public Radio’s Christy Tanner and me in the discussion, where I brought up the notion that the inevitable mergers of a contracting industry only increase our feudal tendencies as people no longer identify with platforms or networks, but rather with the shows themselves, and so each show becomes its own unique bubble.

The merger thing also called back something Guy Edri talked about during our fireside: that the ultimate denouement of all these mergers would be a TV ecosystem with just two main operating systems, one open and one closed. Think Mac and PC for computers, iOS and Android for mobile.

It’s a valid prediction and the ramifications can either be benign or malignant, depending on how each system exercises its power. 

What it will likely do, however, is leave television much like YouTube or TikTok, with a vast array of options where the algorithm helps you to find your tribes, but where any sense of a broader community is all but impossible, given the vastness of the options.

What You Need To Do About It

If you are one of the many Boomers still running the industry, you need to adapt or die.

Sorry to have to put it so bluntly, but that is really your only option at this point.

The monoculture is not coming back, younger viewers are not going to have kids, move to the suburbs and become cable subscribers, and so you need to create a business model that works in this new ecosystem.

If you are everyone else, you need to keep riding the wave, adapting to the changes in the ecosystem and realizing that we are still in a period of massive flux.

TVREV is a great way to stay on top of all this. As is the StreamTV Show, which will be held in August in 2027 (no Cannes conflict) and will also be in Portugal this October.

See you there.