Industry Insights: Where power is shifting in the new media economy

The media economy is no longer defined by clear lines between broadcast, streaming and enterprise video. Those boundaries are collapsing into a single, interconnected ecosystem where infrastructure, execution speed and operational flexibility matter more than platform ownership alone.

In this Industry Insights roundtable, industry leaders examine where power is actually shifting as distribution fragments, audiences splinter and video becomes business-critical across sectors well beyond traditional media.

Part one of this two-part series examines how new buyers are reshaping demand, how the idea of “owning distribution” is evolving as parallel channels proliferate, and where economic and technological pressures are still being misread. The discussion is forward-looking, focusing on how execution and connected workflows are reshaping leverage, revenue opportunities and long-term audience strategy in the new media economy.

Key takeaways from this Industry Insights roundtable

• Power is shifting: Control is moving away from owning distribution platforms and toward organizations that can execute quickly, integrate workflows and adapt across formats and audiences.
• New buyers are emerging: Brands, enterprises and institutions now operate like media companies, driving demand for broadcast-grade video beyond traditional engineering-led buyers.
• Distribution is being redefined: Owning distribution increasingly means controlling experience, data visibility and monetization logic rather than relying on a single platform or channel.
• Operational pressure is rising: Fixed-cost infrastructure, cost volatility and growing complexity are quietly eroding margins as media demand becomes more event-driven and variable.
• Flexibility defines advantage: Organizations that automate, interoperate and evolve faster than legacy models gain leverage in an increasingly fragmented media economy.

Where is real power shifting in the new media economy?

Rhian Morgan, product marketing manager, Pixitmedia: Power is moving toward organizations that can manage, move, and reuse content efficiently across every platform. With creators increasing output and distribution channels multiplying, the real advantage comes from who can orchestrate assets quickly and intelligently. Those that build smarter storage and delivery pipelines will hold the real leverage.

Jared Timmins, SVP, innovation, Diversified: Real power is shifting away from who owns distribution and toward who owns execution. The advantage now comes from digital velocity: sensing audience behavior, deciding fast, shipping fast, and learning continuously. Whoever controls that loop controls the market.

Miguel Coutinho, head of NDI: We are seeing less power tied to individual platforms and more tied to how the infrastructure connects workflows. Organizations that have the most leverage are the ones that control interoperability, metadata, and operational flexibility. If your systems talk to each other, you can keep up with changes in formats or audiences while operating more efficiently and reliably.

What new types of buyers or use cases are you encountering that didn’t exist three years ago?

Jared Timmins, SVP, innovation, Diversified: Brands, enterprises, venues, and institutions now think like media companies. They’re building always-on channels inside intelligent spaces and expecting broadcast-grade outcomes without broadcast-era friction. The buyer is no longer just engineering; it’s marketing, IT, and operations combined.

Krish Kumar, CEO, Wowza: Video adoption has quietly expanded beyond the teams and roles that traditionally owned it, with the fastest growth now coming from operational and mission-critical use cases. We’re seeing this reflected in buyers such as transportation agencies streaming traffic and incident data in real time, public safety teams using video as evidence and decision support, and healthcare providers enabling remote diagnostics and monitoring. It also includes OEMs embedding video into robotics, industrial systems, and other regulated platforms. 

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Ryan Hansberger, head of R&D, NDI: Our user base now includes enterprise IT teams, solution architects, cloud service providers, educators, and creators, not just broadcast professionals. With a strong demand from diverse industries, including financial services, healthcare, government, and large enterprises, security and reliability are critical. At the same time, creators and educators are producing professional-grade content using everyday devices.

Lelde Ardava, COO, Veset: As broadcast tools and technology have become more accessible, we’ve started to see more and more brands, rights holders and digital-first publishers launching their own linear and FAST channels alongside traditional broadcasters. These direct-to-consumer channels often operate with smaller teams than traditional broadcast operations may have and are typically launched with shorter timelines. The availability of cloud-based broadcast tools makes this possible because it allows content owners to distribute their content without investing in broadcast premises, hardware and teams of engineers to run it all.

What does owning your distribution look like when creators, brands and broadcasters all operate parallel channels?

Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: Owning distribution today means maintaining control over playback quality, data visibility, and monetization logic regardless of where content is viewed. Rather than relying on a single platform, media companies must ensure their content performs reliably across devices, operating systems, and business models. This shifts ownership from platform dependency to infrastructure resilience.

André Rosado, head of product, AgileTV: We have seen that owning distribution today is less about owning infrastructure and more about maintaining control over service direction and user experience. Control increasingly comes from flexibility rather than ownership of assets. Being able to aggregate, adapt and evolve services over time is more valuable than building everything internally. In a fragmented media landscape, agility is a key competitive advantage.

David Mauer, VP, channels and alliances, LucidLink: When creators, brands, and broadcasters all run parallel channels, owning your distribution becomes less about controlling a single platform and more about reducing friction across the entire workflow. The constraint is no longer reach; it’s how quickly and reliably large volumes of media can move between teams, tools, and regions. In practice, ownership looks like a shared, cloud-native foundation where content lives once but is accessible everywhere it needs to be — across storage, compute, and post-production environments — without constant copying or handoffs.

Lelde Ardava, COO, Veset: We live in a multi-channel world where brands and content owners reach their audience through numerous channels, from streaming services to social media and websites. If content owners can control when and how their content is delivered, and how it is presented, across these various channels, they can monetize better, build loyalty and experiment more easily to find out what works best. This is driving content owners to want to manage their own playout, so they can set their own schedules, maintain consistent branding, and adapt their content for different regions, all without relying on a single operator or aggregator.

What emerging pressures — economic, competitive or technological — are media companies still underestimating?

Bo Kelleher, senior solutions engineer, Americas, Techex: The real pressure isn’t competition — it’s operating models that no longer match reality. Media demand is event-driven, platform-controlled, and highly variable, while many organizations still run fixed-cost infrastructures. That mismatch is quietly eroding margins and slowing growth.

Rhian Morgan, product marketing manager, Pixitmedia: Rising storage, egress, and compute volatility is catching many off guard as resolutions increase and libraries expand. Fragmented archives add to the strain, slowing automation and limiting how quickly content can be monetized. The pressure point is shifting from content creation to the operational systems that support it.

Jared Timmins, SVP, innovation, Diversified: They underestimate how fast costs explode when complexity grows faster than automation. They also underestimate how quickly AI moves from “helper” to operator amplifier, resetting expectations for speed and scale.

Michael Lantz, CEO, Accedo: Much of the industry, myself included, had expected the economic situation to have eased somewhat by now but it hasn’t really played out as anticipated. Consumer demand for OTT video services is still growing, but it is clear that consumer media budgets are not growing as previously expected. Additionally, although revenue from advertising on streaming services has grown, advertising on traditional TV is declining at a faster rate, so advertising revenue has not returned to material growth as expected.

David Mauer, VP, channels and alliances, LucidLink: While most media companies are focused on the “AI arms race,” they are drastically underestimating the “AI value gap” — the chasm between deploying tools and achieving measurable ROI. The pressure isn’t just technological; it’s the volatility of the discovery funnel as AI-driven search (Google AI Overviews, LLM agents) compresses the path from curiosity to consumption. Organizations that rely on “cleverness over clarity” will find their content invisible in an era where AI agents, not humans, are increasingly the primary “discoverers” of media.

G. Morgan, EVP, sales, Globecast Americas: Many organizations are underestimating how quickly legacy distribution models, particularly satellite-dependent workflows, are becoming economically and operationally fragile. The pressure is not just technological but systemic, as spectrum constraints, rising costs, and audience expectations converge at once. The biggest risk is assuming there is still time to wait, when the transition is already underway.

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Krish Kumar, CEO, Wowza: As video shifts from discrete projects to always-on systems, pressure is building in places many organizations didn’t originally plan for, and over time the ones that succeed are those designing systems that remain dependable as technical and economic conditions evolve. When video becomes business-critical, cloud pricing that fluctuates with usage, bandwidth and storage tied to continuous streaming, and AI workloads layered onto live pipelines can scale costs faster than expected, with early architectural decisions often dictating long-term financial exposure. At the edge, where capture and processing happen outside centralized environments amid uneven connectivity, constrained hardware, and strict security and compliance needs, reliability and control tend to outweigh rapid feature expansion, and teams that plan for these conditions early are better positioned to maintain stability as deployments grow.

What will define competitive differentiation: brand trust, speed, personalization, technology stack, creator alignment or cost structure?

Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: Competitive differentiation will increasingly be defined by the ability to deliver consistently high-quality, reliable playback across fragmented platforms and devices. Brand trust, personalization, and creator alignment quickly erode if viewers encounter buffering, playback failures, or inconsistent experiences. A resilient technology stack that prioritizes performance and reliability ultimately underpins speed, cost efficiency, and long-term audience loyalty.

If you could shift one structural aspect of today’s media ecosystem to accelerate innovation and sustainability, what would it be?

Kristan Bullett, CEO, Humans Not Robots: Businesses are formally required to focus on creating value for their shareholders, with that value typically assumed to be purely financial. Without broadening this definition, sustainability and innovation cannot serve as true guiding principles for the business. Shifting the focus toward customers allows innovation and sustainability to follow as outcomes rather than aspirations.

Derek Barrilleaux, CEO, Projective: Aversion to change. It’s so difficult to get customers to evolve how they work, but without change, you can’t improve things. The landscape is changing whether or not we choose to accept it, so it’s better to take action than to have action taken against you.

What can traditional media learn from creator-led audience development strategies — particularly around frequency, authenticity and format agility?

David Mauer, VP, channels and alliances, LucidLink: Traditional media must learn to authenticate the narrative before they polish the production. Creators at Monks or individual influencers succeed because they prioritize frequency and radical authenticity over corporate “slop.” Audiences in 2026 crave a “behind-the-scenes” cadence that traditional broadcasters often over-edit into oblivion.

How does the rise of creator-first consumption influence expectations for pacing, tone, visual language and storytelling?

Jared Timmins, SVP, innovation, Diversified: Audiences expect faster pacing, platform-native visuals, and authenticity over polish. Lean-in social experiences are clearly outpacing lean-back entertainment, and that expectation is bleeding into everything.