This period holds a mirror to what we face at present, with the market at the time moving from the old, big CRT televisions to flat panel. Like now, it also seemed that a lot of those companies were just adding bits and bobs to legacy TV set-ups without thinking long-term strategy. “We came along,” Neal continues, “and started from a blank sheet of paper, designing a digital TV from scratch. As a result, we took over the world. Within five years, almost every television manufacturer you can think of was using M Star silicon in its products. We ended up with a very dominant worldwide market share simply because we started again. I think BBC iPlayer and YouTube were the first apps that we began to port.” Neal believes we are now at the tip of a very similar-scale iceberg, citing another world-changing example that many of us can remember well. “There’s an analogy I would like to use – relating to the mobile phone industry back in 2006. The leaders at that stage were Nokia and Ericsson, and then two things happened. The first was that you were able to get high-bandwidth internet on the phone. The second
was that the processor in the phone became very fast. The end result was the birth of smartphones.” This allowed Apple and Google to suddenly usurp the number-one spot that had been defiantly held by the previous mobile behemoths for many years. And it was the data and processing power upgrades that were the culprits. “Now if you fast-forward to the present, the same two things are happening again. Most people’s homes now have fibre or very high-bandwidth broadband, and the processors inside a television set have followed the same route that the smartphone went through. “What that means is the television is going to run new forms of applications and entertainment that were not thought about five years ago. This is a time where we will see the smart TV era begin to run its course and what we call the ‘intelligent TV’ era will begin to rise.” Paras Chugh recently co-wrote a report on the wider industry that took a similar view. It is called ‘Media leaders can explore the next growth wave of agentic AI to reclaim control’. The report claims that ‘broadcasters have
First wave: The ‘media trilemma’ to the ‘media trifecta’ Solved through distribution platforms leveraging first-party data
User-generated content (UGC)
Legacy broadcasters
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Engagement Monetisation
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Content Personalisation (reach)
Reach
Distribution platform
Media trilemma
Media Trilemma trifecta
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Engagement
Monetisation
Commerce Ad targeting (monetisation)
Community Vertical shorts (engagement)
Premium OTT platforms
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Select big tech platforms have approached elements of what we describe as the media trifecta, accounting for a significant share of global digital as spend, according to EMARKETER.
Engagement Monetisation
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