Back in 2018, when The StreamTV Show was still the Pay TV Show, I launched the first TVREV opening track by standing up on a chair in the breakfast room of the hotel and announcing that we were about to start our session to pick up their coffee mugs and come inside.
What a long, strange trip it’s been.
This year the show moved to yet another level, with a brand new location and a much bigger crowd.
How much bigger?
The TVREV track that opens the show has always been a draw. People respond well to our ability to explain complex topics in plain English without dumbing them down.
We don’t make grandiose predictions, but we’re not afraid to call bullshit either. Which, I’ve learned, is no small thing.
Despite all that, I was more than a bit taken aback when I looked up from my notes to start our Future of Streamonomics track and found that the room was filled to capacity. As in people were in all 200 seats plus another dozen or so against the wall. (In a fire safety compliant way.)
I started in on my keynote, Life After The Monoculture: How To Survive The Dark Ages Of Media and passed the baton to Cathy Rasenberger, who was moderating our first panel, The State Of FASTs.
At that point I was able to look at my phone and saw that it was blowing up with texts about how the line to get in was so long it was snaking around the corridor.
I figured they were being polite and then Bango’s Giles Tongue sent me this photo with a note that said “Omg queue is 100 people!”
Slow and steady does, it seems, win the race.
So a big thank you to everyone who got in and a big mea culpa to everyone who didn’t: we misjudged the appeal and the crowd size.
Lesson learned for next year. And there will be video.
So now some lessons learned from our sessions and from others.
From the aforementioned panel on FASTs, one highlight was Stingray’s David Purdy and moderator Cathy Rasenberger talking about the lessons FASTs might learn from the cable industry of yore, that rather than dismissing cable as a dead castoff medium, as many in our industry tend to do, the smart move is to see what lessons can be learned from the old days, lessons that are applicable to pretty much any content business, and embrace them.
The old world may still have something to teach the new.
From my conversation with LG Ads’ Matt Durgin, the lesson was that a successful FAST service needs to take marketing by the horns, to work to create its own brand and branding and basically act like it was a YouTuber, finding and nourishing a devoted fan base.
From Jason Damata’s panel on Local TV, my big takeaway was that local is becoming national and national is becoming local—the line is blurring quickly. And that the impact of political advertising keeps growing every cycle, which is why Needhams’ Laura Martin, in a subsequent conversation, noted that it was most definitely a growth market.
Comscore’s Joe Ruthruff did a stellar job of describing the difference between “measurement” and “currency.”-- which is that currency is all about settling on a standard for the actual transactions—what stats will determine how much sellers are charging for their ads, and how much are buyers paying for them. Whereas measurement is more about raw numbers and eyeballs.
Check out our new report on Currency For The Streaming Era to learn more.
For the final panel on Contextual Targeting, the big insight was that data around what emotional cues audiences respond to is already being used to inform and iterate creative. That’s particularly useful for categories where there is no obvious emotion associated with the brand.
Zooming out to lessons from the rest of the show, there were three that stood out.
First was something Cinedigm’s Erick Opeka said (as related by Dade Hayes) about how FASTs need to start looking at TikTok style algorithms to program their linear feeds. Which, if you think about it, is pretty much all of FAST, because if you have an algorithm feeding you what to watch next, I’m not seeing how that is different than a linear channel. That has massive implications for all of TV, FAST and Flix alike, as younger consumers, brought up on algorithms, increasingly prefer that more personalized interface.
Which brings me to the next insight, from Mapmaking Moptop Evan Shapīro, which was that we effectively have two distinct media ecosystems, one geared towards older Millennials, Xers and Boomers that is still centered around human-curated traditional media and one geared towards Alphas, Zoomers and younger Millennials that is mostly centered around algorithmically-curated digital media.
It got me thinking about when (and if) the crossover would occur, when the sort of emotionally resonant storytelling that has been a hallmark of human culture since caveman days would make its presence known on YouTube and TikTok.
Or do the kids, as the aforementioned Martin argued, not have a need for that sort of emotionally resonant storytelling at a time when AI has changed the world.
We will know soon enough.
The final insight was the growing popularity of fictionalized dramas on short form apps. Lior Friedman opened my eyes to the massive success of ReelShort, an app that specializes in short, serialized clips, shot in 9:16 format, that consistently ranks among the top-downloaded iOS apps—it was #1 in Entertainment in the US this past January.
Even more remarkable given the business model: users (the app is targeted to young women) get to watch the first few episodes for free. Though once they get hooked, they need to pay to unlock the rest of the story using “coins”, digital tokens that are in-app purchases. Since viewers don’t always use up all their coins on a single show, there’s an incentive to find yet another show.
And if that sounds a lot less like Quibi than it does the business model of your local drug dealer, well, you would not be wrong.
So those are my big takeaways this year, from one of the only shows where I feel like I actually learn something, a show where people are actually there to go to the sessions rather than having meetings or imbibing pink wine.
It’s why, to bring things full circle, I spend so much time and effort developing our TVREV programming there.
Why It Matters
What strikes me most about this year's insights is how they all point to the same underlying tension: we're living through a fundamental rewiring of how content gets made, distributed, and consumed. The FAST operators learning from cable's playbook, the blurring of local and national, the shift from human curation to algorithmic feeds—these aren't separate trends. They're all symptoms of an industry trying to figure out what works when the old rules no longer apply.
The generational divide Evan Shapiro highlighted isn't just about viewing preferences—it's about two completely different concepts of what media should be. One side values the craft of storytelling, the other values the efficiency of algorithms. One seeks emotional resonance, the other seeks instant gratification. And somewhere in the middle, we have apps like ReelShort proving that maybe you can have both, if you're willing to think like a drug dealer rather than a traditional media executive.
Which brings me back to that overflowing room on day one. The reason 200+ people showed up wasn't just because they wanted to hear the latest industry gossip or catch up on acronyms. They came because they're all trying to solve the same puzzle: how do you build a sustainable content business when everything from measurement to monetization is being rewritten in real time?
What You Need To Do About It
The answer, as always, is that there isn't one answer. But there are clues. And if this year taught me anything, it's that the companies willing to borrow wisdom from unexpected places—whether that's cable TV, TikTok, or yes, even drug dealers—are the ones most likely to figure it out first.
Now, about those Cannes rosé meetings...
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.