The joke going into Cannes was that if you did a shot every time you heard the word “AI” you’d be dead in a few hours.
But if you chose "fragmentation," well, mes amis, your lifespan would be considerably shorter.
Le fragmentation is the television industry’s biggest issue right now. It’s everywhere and depending on where, it can be terrible, great or a bit of both.
But it’s a problem, not to mention one of the few things people can actually agree on the meaning of.
Why It Matters
The keynote I gave at both The StreamTV Show and Cannes is called Life After The Monoculture: How To Survive The Dark Ages Of Media and it’s all about the shock the industry is experiencing as what was once a system as predictable and orderly as the Roman Empire has now become as splintered and diffuse as Europe in the Dark Ages and has cast off so much of what made it stable.
Which is pretty much what everyone was talking about at Cannes.
Minus all the fancy Roman Empire analogies.
But there you have it: every piece of the greater media ecosystem seems to have shattered into mosaic-like pieces and no one seems quite sure about what to do about it.
There’s measurement, which was once delivered from a single source and now seems to be whatever The Person With The Most Power says it is. (Read our new report on Currency and Measurement for more.)
There’s the actual programming itself. People are watching TV on multiple platforms and multiple devices. They’re watching YouTube on TV even though they’re not “supposed” to. They’re spending their time on podcasts and TikTok and substacks and gaming and ChatGPT and all other forms of media that didn’t exist 20 years ago.
And each one takes another bite of their attention.
Worse still, the big media companies have not acknowledged that this is happening. They've buried their heads firmly in the sand, plugged their fingers into their ears and are happy pretending that it is 1997.
Or some year before the internet became a thing and everything made sense.
Which is why they all live under the delusion that they can somehow “win.”
That anyone can somehow win. That one company will reign triumphant above the others.
If AI did make a splash this year, it was through a series of nearly identical solutions designed to simplify the chaos for agencies by letting them talk directly to the interface, to let them vent their frustrations at chasing audiences around the media universe on an allegedly unfeeling bit of software.
And yet…
The fragmentation issue will continue to grow and audiences shrink into smaller and smaller bubbles as algorithms get better and better at sorting us into bubbles.
Not because they are evil, but because that is what they are designed to do—to serve up another piece of content that will keep people watching.
Algorithms, you see, have no sense of good or evil. They just are.
Fragmentation makes brands nervous because they don’t know where all their money is going. Or if it works once it gets there.
It makes agencies nervous because they can’t explain things as simply and cleanly as they once did. Or justify their fees. Or show clients the brilliant TV commercial they made that everyone in America is talking about.
That sort of commercial does not exist anymore.
No matter how much money you throw at it.
What was most fascinating to me about “fragmentation” was not so much how often I heard it, but from who: pretty much everyone, across every field, in every job function.
They were all worried about it.
As well they should be.
What You Need To Do About It
The thing is, there’s really not much to do about it other than just deal.
I mean it’s not like we can magically make the industry go backwards in time.
Though there is no shortage of people who are still trying to do so.
What we need to do is look forward, to accept that fragmentation is the new normal and figure out how to make the best of it.
AI can help.
AI is very good at doing things it would take thousands of humans thousands of hours to do in a way that is exceedingly cost ineffective.
So there’s that and at some point the little bubbles of media 2025 will become bigger bubbles and bigger bubbles still.
Now many of us will no longer be working in the industry by then, having long since retired to The Lakes At Boca Mar Della Vista, Phase 4.
So if we’re solving for fragmentation, we’re doing it for the next generation.
Which is as good a reason as any, if you think about it.
EXTRAS:
While You Were On The Croisette, Netflix announced that it was rolling out linear channels in France. They now join Amazon which recently rolled out a few of their own linear channels.
The only thing surprising about this is that it did not happen sooner.
I have been telling you about this for some time now.
Not because I am some sort of all-knowing genius (I mean I am, but that didn’t come into play here.)
I have been telling you about this because people at all the big SVOD services have been telling me for some time now that they are debating rolling out linear channels, which they correctly feel will increase the time a viewer spends watching their ad-supported tiers and will be particularly useful for library content.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Alan Wolk is co-founder and lead analyst at the consulting firm TV[R]EV. He is the author of the best-selling industry primer, Over The Top: How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry. Wolk frequently speaks about changes in the television industry, both at conferences and to anyone who’ll listen.
Week in Review is an opinion column. It does not necessarily represent the opinions of StreamTV Insider.