The quiet shift from distribution power to execution power

For most of the modern media era, the question of power was simple: Who owns the pipe? Who controls the means of distribution?

Broadcast networks, cable systems, streaming platforms. Whoever owned the pathway to audiences held the leverage. Content creators needed them. Advertisers needed them. The entire value chain bent toward whoever controlled access.

That calculus is changing. Not overnight, not dramatically, but steadily enough that the industry’s center of gravity is moving. The new question is not who owns distribution. It is who can move fastest.

Speed as structural advantage

Power in media is accruing to organizations that execute with velocity. Not just technical speed, but organizational speed. The ability to sense what is happening, decide what to do about it, build or adjust what is needed and deploy it before the moment passes.

This is not about agility as a buzzword; it’s about creating a competitive moat built on operational capacity.

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

That loop is the new infrastructure. It matters more than owning a platform because it determines whether an organization can capitalize on platform opportunity at all.

Distribution fragmentation has been discussed for years. Less discussed is how fragmentation affects internal operations.

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When content needed to reach three broadcast networks and a handful of cable channels, workflows could be linear. Production, post, playout. The pipeline was known. The requirements were stable.

Now content moves to dozens of endpoints simultaneously. Broadcast, streaming, social, mobile, regional variants, localized versions. Each with different technical specs, metadata requirements and delivery windows.

The question is no longer whether an organization can produce content. The question is whether it can orchestrate that content across all surfaces efficiently enough to remain economically viable.

“Power is moving toward organizations that can manage, move and reuse content efficiently across every platform,” said Rhian Morgan, product marketing manager at Pixitmedia. “With creators increasing output and distribution channels multiplying, the real advantage comes from who can orchestrate assets quickly and intelligently.”

Proper orchestration is the difference between capturing value from content and being buried by the cost of versioning it.

Infrastructure as leverage

There is a related shift happening at the infrastructure layer. As distribution fractures, interoperability becomes currency.

Organizations that can connect systems, move metadata cleanly and adapt workflows without rebuilding them have structural advantages over those that cannot. The ability to plug into multiple platforms and operate across them without friction is a form of leverage that compounds over time.

“We are seeing less power tied to individual platforms and more tied to how the infrastructure connects workflows,” Miguel Coutinho, head of NDI, said. “Organizations that have the most leverage are the ones that control interoperability, metadata and operational flexibility.”

This is why software companies and technology vendors are gaining influence while traditional distributors consolidate defensively. The former control the connective tissue. The latter seek to preserve scale in an environment in which scale alone no longer guarantees market power.

The cost structure mismatch

Part of what is driving this shift is economic. Many media organizations are still operating on cost structures built for a different era. Fixed infrastructure. Long-term contracts. Capital expenditures designed to amortize over predictable revenue streams.

But media demand is no longer predictable.

It is event-driven, platform-controlled and highly variable. A livestream that draws 10 million viewers one week and 200,000 the next. A series that gets greenlit, produced and canceled in a quarter. A platform that changes its algorithm and tanks referral traffic overnight.

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“The real pressure isn’t competition — it’s operating models that no longer match reality,” said Bo Kelleher, senior solutions engineer for the Americas at Techex. “Media demand is event-driven, platform-controlled and highly variable, while many organizations still run fixed-cost infrastructures.”

Organizations that can scale infrastructure elastically, shift resources dynamically and adjust operations in real time have a cost advantage that is difficult to overcome. They can take on work that others cannot afford to touch. They can experiment without betting the company. They can respond to platform changes without reengineering their entire operation.

What this means for legacy players

Legacy media companies built their businesses on distribution power. They negotiated carriage fees and retramission. They controlled primetime slots. They had relationships with advertisers that went back decades. Some of that still matters. But it matters less every quarter.

The organizations that are holding ground are the ones that rebuilt their operations around speed. They invested in cloud infrastructure. They adopted APIs and microservices. They restructured teams to move faster and made decisions closer to the work.

The ones that are struggling are still trying to extract value from distribution leverage that no longer exists. They are negotiating harder with platforms that do not need them as much as they need the platforms. They are trying to defend margins in businesses where the margin is execution efficiency, not market position.

However, there is a tempting narrative that the shift from distribution power to execution power is about the creator economy. That individual creators, unencumbered by legacy infrastructure, now have the advantage. That is partially true but incomplete.

Creators have distribution access that did not exist a decade ago. They can build audiences without a network deal. They can monetize without a studio.

But very few creators have execution infrastructure.

They are dealing with the same orchestration problems, the same versioning demands, the same need to move content across platforms efficiently. Most are doing it manually or with duct-taped workflows.

The organizations that win in this environment will be the ones that provide execution infrastructure to creators at scale. Platforms that handle orchestration, metadata, distribution logistics and operational complexity while letting creators focus on content.

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That is a different kind of power, but it is power nonetheless.

Looking forward

The shift from distribution power to execution power is not a temporary adjustment. Distribution will continue to fragment. Audience behavior will continue to change. Platforms will continue to shift algorithms and policies without warning.

In that environment, the organizations that can sense, decide, build and deploy faster than their competitors will accumulate advantage. Not because they own pipes, but because they do not need to.

They can operate across any pipe. They can adapt to any platform. They can move as fast as the market requires because their operations are built for velocity, not stability.

That is the new power structure. It rewards different capabilities, different investments and different organizational models. And it is already here.