become aggregators of leading IP and distribution platforms, but still struggle with profit margins’; however, ‘publicly reported data indicates that tech-native platforms such as Netflix have achieved operating margins in the 30% range and annual growth of over 20% in recent reporting periods’. Chugh shares his thoughts on the origins of this issue: “In the 20th century, the media broadcasters were the people running the show. They had control over all three of the pillars – which I call the ‘media trifecta’. They had reach, engagement and monetisation. They had strong control over their distribution channels, they had all the ad spends attributed to them and they were not just running the monetisation but also the culture.” The reference to the birth of smartphones is something Chugh also observes, but in a different light from Neal. “The first wave of disruption was the internet and smartphones,” he explains. “Both of these disrupted two pillars of that media trifecta. What the internet took was distribution, and as a result it took monetisation. The second pillar of the trifecta, which is engagement, collapsed with the advent of smartphones.” Where does the value lie? Both Chugh and Neal have made it clear: the industry is at a make-or-break point when it comes to harnessing agentic AI. Next, we need to understand the opportunities available and how to implement them strategically. An innovative example arose in July 2026, when Fetch. ai and RedSquid TV announced the world’s first operator- grade agentic AI TV platform – combining Fetch’s AI technology with RedSquid’s end-to-end TV operating system. Founded in 2017, Fetch.ai is a decentralised, blockchain-based machine-learning platform that builds autonomous AI agents to automate everyday tasks and economic transactions. “Some of our core products include ASI, which is our own, agentic LLM,” expands Minaricova. “It connects all the agents in the background and provides a user with their own personal AI. We also have agents that are registering in AgentVerse, which is a marketplace where anyone can build an agent, with its own tools and tech stacks. The agents can find each other, negotiate, transact and communicate.” Like the approach back in the day with M Star, RedSquid is looking to rebuild television sets from the ground up, and partnerships with the likes of Fetch.ai demonstrate the company’s strides to reach that goal. “There will be two types of applications that will emerge in the next few years,” Neal highlights. “There’ll be ones that make your life easier but that will cost the TV maker or the AI vendor. But then there’ll be applications which the user will like to use – but actually offer the AI vendor a chance to start monetising through the television.” Unlike conventional smart TV platforms, RedSquid TV controls the complete software stack. This unique architecture with embedded edge-AI hooks enables Fetch to tailor its agentic platform specifically for RedSquid TV, allowing autonomous AI agents to become deeply integrated within the operating system itself. As edge
AI capability advances, those agents will increasingly execute directly within the television, reducing latency, lowering cloud costs and enabling faster, more private and responsive experiences. The result presents a fundamentally different kind of television. Rather than navigating apps and menus, viewers simply express an intent: “Plan a family movie night,” “book the holiday featured in this documentary,” “order everything I need to cook this recipe.” Behind the scenes, intelligent AI agents discover content, compare services, coordinate smart home devices, manage subscriptions, complete purchases and orchestrate digital services all on behalf of the household – and that’s all through natural conversation with the television. Minaricova also highlights the enormous opportunities this brings when it comes to personalisation. “In one household you could have several TVs, watched by young children, adults, seniors, etc. Everybody has slightly different preferences and is consuming content in different ways.” Agentic AI handles this by unlocking a hyper- personalised viewing experience, which reacts and adapts autonomously to the varying preferences of different members of the household. As well as personalisation, a core opportunity found in Chugh’s report is a sense of control being returned to broadcasters. “Going forward,” he says, “IP-based content will be extremely valuable, as it provides soul to the content, which is currently missing in a lot of the AI slop we see across many distribution platforms at the moment. That would be the first important opportunity to grab as media broadcaster. “I recently met the chief AI officer of Hasbro,” he adds. “And they had a really innovative use case, which they termed ‘behavioural licensing’.” Hasbro owns a diverse portfolio of major IPs such as Transformers and Peppa Pig . It, like many others, has had to confront the challenge of people using AI to create fake content based off the IP, leaving it unable to monetise it. “What they decided to do is complete the picture,” Chugh continues. “They recently partnered with ElevenLabs to create licensable content of the voices or even videos from its IPs, which means any brand can come along and license the use of them officially. That means the quality would not deteriorate, and the brand are therefore happy because they are then able to create IP-led content at scale.” Another set of opportunities that emerged from Chugh’s research centred around content moderation and localisation. “These were already important considerations long before agentic AI reached the market. All the major tech giants were already moderating social media content through analytics and tools already available. But, with agentic AI, this is only going to accelerate and start to become affordable for the smaller players in the market and local broadcasters too.”
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