Analysis: Streaming’s growing pains highlight an industry still catching up to its own ambitions

The conversations happening inside broadcast technology circles right now share a recurring pattern: the problems facing streaming operators are no longer about whether to embrace digital distribution, but about how to manage the consequences of having done so.

A recent Industry Insights roundtable brought together executives from across the broadcast and streaming ecosystem – platform strategists, infrastructure vendors, adtech specialists and measurement experts – and while their perspectives varied, several consistent themes emerged that reflect where the industry actually stands, as opposed to where it hoped to be by now.

The control question is reshaping platform relationships

Perhaps the most significant shift described across the roundtable was in how broadcasters relate to the platforms through which they distribute. The dynamic, for years tilted heavily toward the platforms, appears to be rebalancing, though not without friction.

“Broadcasters are no longer the junior partners in these relationships,” said Krzysztof Bartkowski, CEO of Big Blue Marble. “As they evolve into full-scale streaming operators, they’re demanding transparency on audience data, revenue attribution and performance metrics, and platforms that can’t provide it will lose premium content.”

That’s a meaningful statement, though the roundtable also made clear that leverage remains unevenly distributed.

Broadcasters with first-party data now negotiate from a position of strength, but CTV platforms still hold significant leverage through their control over the home screen and content discovery.

The tension between those two realities – broadcasters with greater sophistication and data than ever, platforms still controlling what viewers actually see first – is shaping commercial and technical negotiations in increasingly complex ways.

“We’re seeing increased tension around data ownership and monetization models. Broadcasters want deeper access to first-party data and more flexibility in how they manage subscriptions, advertising, and bundling while platforms are still balancing their role as both enablers and gatekeepers,” said Mrugesh Desai, VP of North America at Accedo, on the data ownership question specifically.

Advertisement

The result, Desai said, is “more structured, and sometimes more complex, commercial and technical negotiations,” a description that tracks with what other roundtable participants observed about the overall shift in how broadcasters engage with distribution partners.

“Broadcasters know their workflows now in a way they simply didn’t a few years back, and that changes what they ask for from platforms,” said Roberto Musso, technical director at NDI. “The conversations are more technical and more specific, covering ingest flexibility, monitoring, and data sharing rather than just distribution reach.”

Infrastructure decisions are compressing timelines, but creating new complexity

On the operational side, cloud and hybrid playout emerged as a clear point of consensus. The ability to launch a new channel in days rather than months was cited repeatedly, and for good reason: it changes the economics of experimentation.

“While it may take months or even longer to launch new channels with traditional playout systems because dedicated hardware needs to be sourced and installed, with cloud playout, channels can be created and launched within a matter of hours,” said Martins Magone, CTO of Veset.

That speed, however, introduces a different set of challenges.

Scaling from a handful of FAST channels to a larger portfolio surfaces operational problems that were easy to absorb at smaller volumes.

Srividhya Srinivasan, co-founder and CTO of Amagi, described scheduling as growing “exponentially harder” as portfolios expand, with metadata errors that were once minor annoyances “suddenly affecting discoverability, compliance, and monetization at scale.”

Musso framed it plainly: “Going from two channels to ten surfaces problems that were easy to miss at smaller scale. Metadata gaps, scheduling errors, and signal inconsistencies that someone caught manually before just start slipping through.”

The implication is that speed-to-market is a real gain from cloud infrastructure, but it requires deliberate investment in automation and standardized workflows to avoid creating operational debt that compounds over time. The operators who appear best positioned are those who built repeatable processes before they needed them.

Automation is advancing, but human oversight isn’t going away

Automation came up consistently throughout the roundtable, and almost as consistently did its limits. The industry has moved well past debating whether to automate and is now working through exactly where the boundaries should sit.

Jonathan Smith, VP of sales and business development at Net Insight, described the most successful models as those that allow organizations to “define parameters and guardrails and provide brand alignment rather than manage resource-heavy day-to-day operations.” The goal, in his framing, is rule-based schedule automation that preserves editorial intent while reducing manual intervention.

Desai pointed to high-profile errors in AI-generated news summaries as a reason for caution, arguing that “a phased, incremental approach combined with fine tuning and iteration is also essential because it allows for testing and validation, to check the quality of outputs before moving on to the next stage.”

Advertisement

That caution is probably warranted.

The roundtable’s adtech respondents described similar patterns in monetization workflows: automation handles scheduling and ad insertion as a performance baseline, while humans retain oversight for editorial nuance and quality control.

Ad economics are under real pressure

The advertising picture painted across the roundtable was more complicated than the headline growth numbers for streaming and FAST might suggest. CPMs have dropped as inventory has expanded. For smaller or niche FAST channels without strong audience targeting or differentiated content, securing premium rates is increasingly difficult.

“As more inventory enters the market, lower CPMs can create the appearance of efficiency, but that doesn’t always hold up under scrutiny,” said Justin Rosen, SVP of data and insights at Ampersand. “If identity signals are unreliable, advertisers may be reaching the wrong households more often than they realize, which erodes the value of those impressions.”

That point about identity quality ran through multiple ad-related responses and connects to a broader measurement problem the roundtable surfaced repeatedly.

Rachel Herbstman, VP of data innovation at Ampersand, described one of the biggest gaps as the instability of identity across platforms.

“Advertisers may think they’re reaching the same audience across environments, but in reality, those identity frameworks often don’t align, making it difficult to consistently connect exposure to outcomes,” Herbstman said. “Until the industry addresses that foundation, measurement and attribution will continue to reflect approximations rather than reality.”

On the technology side, server-side ad insertion has matured significantly and is now considered standard infrastructure. What hasn’t matured at the same rate is the ecosystem around it.

Hadar Tel Mizrahi, senior product manager, targeted ads and recommendations, Viaccess-Orca noted that measurement consistency, attribution and cross-platform reporting still lag behind expectations, even as the core delivery technology has stabilized.

“The industry focus has shifted from simply inserting ads reliably to improving transparency, identity resolution, and advertiser confidence across fragmented CTV environments,” said Viaccess-Orca.

Advertisement

Live content remains the clearest point of differentiation

Across content strategy, adtech and local broadcasting, live programming appeared as the most consistent differentiator. The reasoning isn’t complicated: live events create a specific reason to show up at a specific time, which no catalog of on-demand content can replicate.

“Live and event-based programming remains one of the most effective ways streaming services differentiate themselves, particularly through sports,” said Rick Young, SVP and head of global products at LTN. “These events create real-time viewing moments that audiences actively seek out, making them especially valuable in today’s fragmented media landscape.”

Young also noted that production and distribution workflows are evolving to support greater customization around live content, with rights holders increasingly requiring “multiple versions of the same event, including localized graphics, alternate commentary, and platform-specific advertising.”

That connects to an area the roundtable flagged as still developing: the infrastructure required to deliver different ad loads, graphics packages and commentary tracks across simultaneous distribution paths for a single live event.

Reinhard Grandl, chief product officer at Bitmovin, described the stakes clearly.

“With live content, there’s no second chances, so issues such as CDN outages, latency spikes, encoder instability and playback errors must be identified and resolved before the viewer’s experience is affected,” he said.

The measurement problem ties everything together

If one thread connected nearly every conversation in the roundtable, it was measurement. Specifically, the gap between the data that streaming generates and the industry’s ability to act on it coherently.

Streaming produces far more granular behavioral data than traditional linear broadcasting ever did. Completion rates, session depth, return visit frequency and drop-off points all offer information that raw view counts never could. The problem is that most organizations are still working on normalizing those signals across platforms before they can use them effectively.

Part of that difficulty is structural.

Most measurement frameworks were built around browsers and mobile apps, then retrofitted to connected TV — and the seams show. Device identifiers on connected TVs are inconsistent, background processing behavior varies by manufacturer, and there is no universal standard for what constitutes a view across different device environments.

Paul Davies, head of marketing and partnerships at Yospace, put the stakes in commercial terms.

“Measurement is at the center of unlocking ad value, yet measuring ads consistently and reliably at scale across the variety of devices that viewers use, is a real challenge for the industry,” he said. “A more standardized approach to measurement is needed to deliver consistency and build advertiser confidence.”

The picture that emerges from the roundtable, taken as a whole, is of an industry that has made genuine progress on distribution, infrastructure and monetization — but is still building the connective tissue required to operate coherently at the scale it has already reached.