There are times I feel like a prophet. Not the old school biblical ones with the big white beards who were always predicting doom and gloom, but rather one of those "digital prophets" in black turtlenecks and interesting glasses. FRAGMENTATION was the word of the day at IBC this year and it’s just a less clever way of saying "feudal media." (See what I did there.) But fragmentation is exactly what I’ve been on about for the past year. Mass media is over and it’s fragmenting into thousands of bubbles, each one totally disconnected from the next. Those bubbles live on a range of platforms from traditional and streaming TV to YouTube and TikTok to podcasts and substacks and Twitch. Fragmentation’s even more tricky in a place like Europe which already has close to 30 different languages to deal with. Which is likely why everyone was talking about it. Because, first and foremost, it’s going to make it even tougher to accumulate any sort of audience. COLLABORATION is something I’ve been urging the industry to start doing, to remember their enemies are Google, Meta and Amazon—not each other. So I was gladdened to hear first-hand about Freely, a major UK consolidation play that has all of the public broadcasters combining their content into a single app. That’s huge because public broadcasters like the BBC are a much bigger cultural force in the UK than in the US. And because it’s actually, you know, working. FASTs, on the other hand, are still struggling in Europe. This is not surprising. Free ad-supported streaming TV sprung up in the US because $100+ cable bills meant we had a surplus of cord cutters. And the size of the US meant antennas were often not an option. Europe has neither of these problems, so much less need for their free TV to be streaming. It’s why once a month (at the least) I get a note from an angry northern European pointing out that they already have free ad-supported TV thanks to their government supported broadcasters and I have to gently point out that “streaming” is the key word there. So there’s that too. Meaning that FAST is never going to be as necessary as it is in the US. And that’s before you get to the massive ad loads on traditional linear. Finally, it’s not as if AI had suddenly disappeared from everyone’s lips. If you’d like I can make you a chart of the various ways that people were using it so that you can compare the situations. I’ll be waiting if you change your mind. (I suspect Sam Altman’s mom is unaware of all the ways she influences her son’s little project.) Seriously though, AI seems to have faded into the background as an amorphous harbinger of all the things it could someday do, from dubbing entire catalogs on its own and making their mouths move like they were speaking the dubbed language to tagging hours worth of content, to, as I learned on a panel I moderated on AI and sustainability, optimizing all those kilowatt hours they eat up asking annoying follow-up questions in the most energy-efficient way possible. But mostly it’s that people are coming around to my take that despite all the hype, they are still too error-prone to let them loose on their own, without human handlers. Something I learned the hard way this week in Seoul, when I let Gemini direct me to a restaurant that did not actually exist. Something I only thought to check after 10 minutes of circling the block. That’s on me, though, as the AIs say. But only when prompted to apologize. |
