Disruption is nothing new for broadcasters. The industry has spent years adapting to shifting audiences, new platforms and changing economics. What’s different now is that disruption is continuous.
Audience fragmentation, AI-driven content discovery and platform-led competition are now structural forces reshaping how media companies create, distribute and monetise content. The uncomfortable truth is that many broadcasters are still responding with piecemeal fixes. The market, however, is rewarding those prepared to rethink their technology foundations altogether. Technology sets the terms of reinvention. But it is people with the courage and capacity to change that will determine whether broadcasters achieve their reinvention goals.
From channels to fluid ecosystems
Broadcast has been built around stable formats. Linear schedules, discrete distribution channels and predictable viewing habits defined success. That stability has gone. Audiences now move fluidly between live TV, streaming platforms, short-form social video, gaming environments and podcasts, often within the same hour.
That shift is already visible in viewing behaviour. According to BARB’s 2026 report What People Watched in 2025, live TV accounted for 45 per cent of total identified viewing on the TV set in December 2025, while on-demand streaming made up 38 per cent of viewing across the year.
That fragmentation is also reshaping what audiences expect next. Accenture research found that 86 per cent of consumers would be interested in a single destination that can provide all the services they want on one platform, and 41 per cent would be willing to pay for it.
For example, Netflix is evolving from a pure-play streaming library into a broader entertainment ecosystem, bringing together advertising, cloud gaming and live programming to drive retention, increase engagement and maximise revenue per user.
For broadcasters, this means the unit of competition is no longer the channel or the programme, but attention. Winning it requires systems capable of operating across formats, platforms and moments, not stacks optimised for a single mode of delivery.
Technology leaders increasingly recognise this shift, but execution often falls short. Many organisations still treat streaming, social video pipelines, advertising technology and data platforms as parallel initiatives rather than components of a single ecosystem. The result is duplicated effort, fragmented data and limited ability to move at audience speed.
The broadcasters pulling ahead are those building modular, cloud-native foundations that allow new products, experiences and revenue models to be launched and retired without re-engineering the entire business each time.
Optimisation versus reinvention
Generative AI has found its way into operations. Automated highlight creation, metadata tagging, localisation and marketing optimisation are delivering real benefits. But these gains are incremental. Only 3 per cent of organisations have a clear vision for how generative AI will reshape their business, and just 30 per cent feel prepared to rethink their operating models and processes around it.
Broadcasters are already experimenting in targeted ways. ESPN, for example, has trialled an AI-generated avatar to bring analytics-led commentary into its college football coverage.
These experiments show what is possible, but do not yet amount to fundamental reinvention.
The bigger shift lies in how AI rewires the media value chain end to end. When embedded across commissioning, production, distribution, advertising and audience engagement, AI changes how decisions are made and how value is created, not just how quickly tasks are completed.
Yet many broadcasters remain caught between ambition and readiness. Leadership teams talk about AI as transformative, while their technology estates remain siloed and their data fragmented.
True reinvention requires redesigning workflows. It’s deliberate choices about what should be automated, what should remain distinctly human and where new capabilities need to emerge. Done well, AI becomes a growth engine that opens new monetisation pathways.
Content discovery is shifting towards AI assistants and conversational interfaces. As audiences increasingly find content through prompts, broadcasters face a new visibility challenge. Being present on platforms is no longer enough. Content must be structured, licensed and surfaced in ways that ensure attribution, control and value flow back to the originator.
This brings technology and content strategy closer together. Decisions about metadata, rights management, APIs and data architecture now directly shape commercial outcomes.
Confidence in digital maturity remains high; 60 per cent of media executives say they are ahead of their peers in AI, yet 88 per cent still rely on rigid technology stacks that limit adaptability.
Legacy systems, fragmented ownership and underinvestment in core platforms create the illusion of capability while constraining change. Meanwhile, competitors built on modern digital cores can test, learn and scale more quickly. Forward-looking broadcasters are more selective. They invest where technology creates differentiation and partner where it does not to support continuous change without repeated disruption.
Designing for flow
After years of transformation, many organisations are tired. That is understandable, but stepping back now would be a mistake. The gap between tech-native platforms and traditional broadcasters is widening. Spotify’s model, built on shared data, cloud and identity backbones alongside decentralised teams, shows how stability and speed can coexist.
The next era of broadcast leadership will belong to organisations designed to move with their audiences. That requires shared foundations alongside teams empowered to innovate at pace, where experimentation becomes routine and new ideas can plug into the enterprise without destabilising the core.
Technology alone will not solve the industry’s challenges. But without treating it as the foundation of reinvention, broadcasters risk being optimised for a world that no longer exists.
