Media Tech: Retrospective & Perspectives… Trends, Transformations, and what may be next

ENGLISH VERSION

By Guilherme Silva · Co-Founder & Exec. Chairman | CIS Group

With an ever-faster pace of change, the media industry occasionally takes steps that seem insignificant at first but ultimately redraw the entire map. Over the past 12 to 24 months, we’ve witnessed a series of small yet meaningful technological jumps. None seemed to be dramatic when considered alone. Together they pushed the industry farther from TV, as we have known it since the BBC made its first live transmission in 1936, and closer to an odd new hybrid trend where distribution, creation, and commerce will eventually blend into one stream.

Monetization got weirder. Subscriptions stalled at the margin; people kept the shows they loved and churned the rest. Ads came back, but not as they left. They’re shorter, more targeted, and often embedded inside the content itself. Creators on YouTube and TikTok discovered that brand deals and affiliate links beat pre-rolls. Newsrooms, watching CPM impressions slide and digital platforms capture most of the upside, tried it all: paywalls and memberships, quietly added events, e-commerce and sometimes even games. All converging on a simple idea: the closer you are to a specific audience, the more money you can make.

Production is getting both cheaper and more expensive. Cheaper because the tools improved. AI removed monotonous routine work: storyboards, rough cuts, captions, versions for each platform. Distribution is now a settings panel. Expensive because the bar rose. Viewers tolerate rough, but not boring, which means that you need craft, and craft still costs time and money. As production continues to shift from hardware to software and ultimately will kill the old “serialized workflows”, system upgrades will also require a team skills transition. Teams are becoming leaner but more technical and organizations will need multi-skilled people who can think critically, create content and, using AI agents, build the tools that power the production process.  Personally, I believe that AI combined with advances in 5G technology may substantially reduce, or even eliminate, the boundaries between field, studio, and remote work. And it will happen faster than most media organizations want to admit.

By far, the most interesting fight is over live. Big tech (Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google-YouTube, to name a few) keep buying tentpole rights in sports and entertainment. It’s not just about viewers; live events create the last predictable spikes of attention. Those spikes drive subscriptions, device sales, and retail. The leagues and teams like the money and the data. Traditional broadcasters still win on reliability and reach, but their economic moats are now much narrower. The new competition isn’t just another channel; it’s an ecosystem. Apple can justify sports to sell hardware. Amazon can justify sports to sell more of the 12+ million items they sell directly, not including front-store direct sales. Such cross-subsidy is hard to beat with GRPs in target audiences (gross rating points).

Meanwhile, YouTube kept eating the quiet hours of the day… It’s where some news, how-to, opinion, and an ever-increasing amount of children’s content now live by default. It has a better on-ramp for new media creators and a longer tail for old ones. A good number of media companies now think of themselves as suppliers to YouTube the way they once thought of themselves as suppliers to cable.

While “Content is still King,” the industry seems to be searching blindly for a model that separates the risky part (making things people want) from the safe part (getting it to them). Platforms own safe; creators own risky. The money flows through whichever side owns the relationship with the audience.

 

Is Broadcast really dying?

Broadcast TV isn’t dead at all, but it is changing its shape. One reason is technical. The next wave of terrestrial standards, including Brazil’s DTV+ (TV 3.0), blends broadcast and broadband. Over-the-air becomes addressable, interactive, and measurable. Broadcasters get the reliability and free-to-air reach of RF with the personalization and commerce of IP. That changes what a broadcaster can sell. Instead of a mass spot with fuzzy attribution, DTV+ allows for targeted ads with proof, app-like overlays, and shoppable moments. For viewers, the EPG turns into a home screen. For stations, the transmitter becomes a content delivery network.

 

What business grows out of that?

Possibly a three-layer stack:

• Free, ad-supported live and linear for reach and habit. Think local news, sports, and big cultural slots, but with addressable ads and live-commerce hooks.
• Hybrid on-demand delivered over broadband but promoted and discovered through broadcast. Missed the 8pm drama? It’s there instantly, with dynamic ad loads tied to user profiles.
• Data and services. If broadcast can authenticate devices, synchronize second screens, and run lightweight apps, stations can sell measurement, promotions, and transactions to local businesses. That’s where margins hide.

The “economics” shift from selling slots to selling outcomes. That’s closer to how platforms monetize now, but with a local advantage and lower distribution costs. The big risk is organizational, not technical. You need product critical thinking in companies that grew up around programming schedules.

 

Brazil vs United States

Brazilian and U.S. markets show how much context matters. In the U.S., pay TV penetration fell, broadband is ubiquitous in cities, and streaming fractured attention. The cable bundle’s collapse pulled broadcast down with it. Viewers still watch a lot of TV, but it’s scattered across apps and devices. Local stations have strong brands but weaker daily habits, except around weather and sports. Sports, increasingly, are leaving.

Brazil continues to be different and unique. Free-to-air always mattered more. A large share of households relies on broadcast for cost reasons and because coverage is good. National networks built daily rituals with “novelas” and news in a way U.S. broadcasters ceded to cable years ago. Distribution costs are lower for broadcasters than for pure streaming, and prepaid mobile plans can make video expensive. If your marginal hours of entertainment via broadcast are free and reliable, you use it. That gives TV an audience that advertisers still want. It also gives broadcasters the testing ground to leapfrog. When TV 3.0 lands, Brazil will move straight to a hybrid model where the mass audience and the digital tooling coexist, without passing through an extended cable era.

There’s also a cultural piece. In Brazil, certain shows are shared events, and the networks still shape the calendar. In the U.S., the calendar moved to platforms and personalities. When audiences have increasingly shorter attention spans and interact with content across multiple diverse platforms, mass media weakens. When attention re-aggregates daily at 8pm, TV keeps its power.

 

What should media companies do in this environment?

• Get closer to the transaction. If you make content, add commerce. If you sell ads, sell outcomes. If you own live, make it shoppable.
• Treat distribution as engineering, not syndication. Build for YouTube, FAST, and broadcast hybrids on purpose, not by repackaging.
• Invest in local and live. They’re defensible and improve with interactivity.
• Use AI to remove cost, not quality or taste. Let it do the repetitive jobs. Save human time for ideas and structure. Utilize talented smaller teams able to leverage and customize AI.
• Measure everything you promise. If you can’t prove it worked, someone else will.

The test for the next year won’t be who has the most content. It will be who controls the edges: the edge with the viewer and the edge with the buyer. Platforms are already there. Big tech’s advantage is that they can afford to lose money in the middle to win at the edges. Broadcasters can answer by using their reach to build direct habits and by turning the transmitter into a smart pipe. Creators can answer by building audiences that follow them across pipes.

The strangest part about the current moment is that the industry’s old constraints flip into new advantages. Broadcast’s one-to-many became a bug in the age of personalization. With TV 3.0-like systems, it looks like a feature again: one-to-many for the heavy lifting, many-to-one for the last mile. If you can do both, you’re not stuck choosing between scale and precision. You get both, and you can price both.

In summary, the steps taken by the Media Tech industry for the past 12 to 24 months won’t feel like a huge revolution. They will ultimately help redraw the map and will feel like lots of small, unglamorous changes to production back-ends, monetization strategies, and even more shifting patterns in how we unwind with media. But ATSC 3.0 / NextGen TV and TV 3.0 / DTV+ made it possible that one day we’ll look up and “TV” will mean a feed that can be free, targeted, live, and on-demand at once. The companies that survive will be the ones that learn earliest to speak all four dialects fluently.

One last puzzle that broadcasters must solve is to find the answer to a critical question:

What type of Partner, Systems Integrator, Service & Solutions Provider do I need to help me throughout a complex transformation journey and ensure success?

Follow CIS Group’s blog as we will soon discuss this critical topic…

• The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not constitute an endorsement or reflect the official views of any entity which I may be affiliated with.

Guilherme R Silva | CIS Group