PORTSMOUTH, N.H.—Even though younger audiences are more likely to be active on multiple platforms, a new study suggests that their tendency to spread their disposable time across more platforms and types of content than any other generation has not reduced their interest in viewing sports.

Hub Entertainment Research's latest wave of “Evolution of Sports – What’s the Score?” finds that sports viewership is up, and it's rising fastest among younger fans.

Fans under age 18 are about seven times more likely to say they're watching more sports on TV than they were a year ago, rather than less, which is more than double the ratio seen among fans overall.

Among teens who say they're watching more, more than 2 in 5 credit a genuine, growing interest in sports overall or in a specific team or athlete.

In contrast, older fans (ages 55-74) are more likely to point to simply having more free time — not rising interest — as the reason for increased viewing.

“One factor driving the success of sports today: younger fans are just more interested than the generation before them,” said Jon Giegengack, principal at Hub and one of the study authors. “But as with scripted content, their fandom is diffused across multiple kinds of media and content. It shows up as a YouTube stream, a group chat during the game, watching live stats on social while the game is on. The industry is built to reach the fan who plans their Sunday around kickoff. Now they need to adapt to fans that watch the game on TV and spend the rest of the week following it everywhere else.”

The research also suggests that they're finding sports through creators and social, not appointment TV and that for younger fans, social platforms aren't a supplement to sports coverage, they're becoming the main event.

The survey found that 45% of fans under 35 get “most” or “all” of their non-live sports content from social media, more than four times the rate among fans 55 and older.

In addition, creators are increasingly carrying the games themselves, not just the highlights: during the FIFA World Cup, a single YouTube channel in Brazil streamed 104 matches — more than twice as many as the country's national broadcaster.

For younger fans, the second screen is part of the game, not a distraction from it, the study found.

With scripted TV, a phone in hand usually means divided attention. Sports works the other way: the second screen is mostly pointed back at the game. And that is far truer of young fans than older ones.

Among fans 13-34 who use social media during a live game, 62% say what they are doing on that second screen is about the game itself. Among fans 55-74, only 33% say the same.

The gap is widest on the most social behaviors: 65% of younger fans posting to social during a game are posting about that game, versus 29% of older fans. Purpose-built tools are game-related for nearly everyone, with 89% of 13-34 and 85% of 55-74 following live stats saying it is about the sport they are watching.

These findings are from Hub's “Evolution of Sports: What’s the Score?” Wave 6 report, based on a survey of 3,814 U.S. sports fans ages 13-74, conducted in July 2026.

LONDON—A new study finds that nearly three in four US TV viewers regularly use their smartphones for other media while watching television. The finding highlights the growing competition for audience attention between TV and mobile video, according to new Omdia consumer research.

The study also found that this isn’t simply an issue for younger age groups. Omdia reports that simultaneous media use is becoming increasingly widespread across older age groups:

• Among 55–64-year-olds, simultaneous media use has risen from 42% in 2023 to 56% in 2026.
• Among 45–54-year-olds, it has increased from 62% to 73% over the same period.
• Among 35–44-year-olds, the direction is also upwards, from 69% to 76% during that time.

The findings highlight how competition for viewers’ attention is extending beyond TV programs and streaming services to the smartphone screen. Short-form video, in particular, is increasingly competing for viewers’ attention even while the television remains on.

“We don’t have a content problem. We have an attention problem,” said María Rúa Aguete, global head of media and entertainment at Omdia. “Three in four US TV viewers are using their phones while watching TV, and increasingly what they are doing is watching more video. The battle is no longer simply TV versus mobile. Both screens are on. The question is: which one has your attention?”

Short-form and vertical video are playing an increasingly significant role in this shift, the data shows.

Viewers are becoming accustomed to highly personalized, instantly accessible video experiences on smartphones, adding another source of competition for traditional television and streaming services.

For broadcasters, streaming platforms, advertisers and content owners, this changing behavior reinforces the need to consider TV and mobile as part of the same viewing experience, as audiences increasingly move their attention between the two, the Omdia researchers explained.

“The future isn’t TV versus mobile. It’s TV and mobile,” added Rúa Aguete. “The companies that understand how audiences move between those screens, and how to capture attention on both, will be best positioned to win.”

The findings are based on Omdia’s latest research into changing video consumption habits, the attention economy and the growth of short-form and vertical video, presented by Rúa Aguete at IBC 2026 in Amsterdam.

CHANTILLY, Va.—BIA Advisory Services has updated its 2026 U.S. Local Advertising Forecast and is now projecting that total local ad revenue will reach $186.1 billion, up $1.6 billion (+0.9%) from the firm's April 2026 estimate of $184.5 billion and approximately 9% year over year from 2025.

The increase is driven primarily by higher political ad spending heading into the midterms, along with continued strength in mobile.

The stronger than expected political ad spend is particularly good news for local TV stations as most of the growth has been flowing into TV station broadcasts and TV station digital platforms, the researchers said.

Overall, BIA is now projecting the TV over-the-air and TV digital/OTT ad revenue will hit $19.8 billion in 2026.

The firm also released a preliminary outlook for 2027 that sees growth in mobile and underlying local ad growth, particularly in Legal Services vertical, that will offset the end of the election cycle in 2027 and keep next year’s local ad spend essentially flat compared to 2026.

Excluding political advertising, the 2026 forecast is now $176.4 billion, up $0.3 billion (+0.2%) from the prior estimate of $176.1 billion and 3.9% over 2025, reflecting steady, broad-based growth across the underlying local ad market.

“Political spending came in higher than we anticipated in April, with most of the incremental spending flowing into TV OTA and TV OTT,” said Senan Mele, vice president of forecasting and data analysis, BIA Advisory Services. “Legal Services was also notable in this update, reaching $9.3 billion, up 4.6% from the prior forecast. Despite higher media costs and a more fragmented media environment, law firms continue to invest heavily in television, both linear and streaming, where the ability to reach large audiences and generate qualified leads continues to drive demand.”

BIA now projects $9.7 billion in 2026 for local political spending, up from $8.4 billion in the April forecast, which is an increase of $1.3 billion concentrated almost entirely in video. TV OTA and TV OTT together captured $1.2 billion of that increase, reinforcing broadcast and streaming video's role as a preferred vehicle for political campaigns.

The new data shows that mobile keeps compounding, and AI reshapes search.

Mobile remains the largest local media category tracked by BIA, projected to grow to $45.3 billion in 2026 (excluding political), an 8.9% year-over-year increase. This growth comes as competition intensifies in A.I.-fueled search advertising, a category that local advertisers have traditionally relied on to reach consumers across mobile devices.

“Google, OpenAI, Amazon, and Apple are all positioning themselves to capture a larger share of advertising tied to AI-powered search,” said Mike Boland, executive in residence, BIA Advisory Services. “Google’s Gemini is increasingly becoming an extension of its advertising business, while OpenAI, Amazon, and Apple are developing their own approaches to monetize search and discovery. For local advertisers, the bigger question is where consumer intent will emerge and which platforms will capture it. Mobile will be a critical battleground as that shift unfolds.”

BIA also highlighted some of the growth categories heading into 2027.

BIA's first look at 2027 projects total local ad revenue of $186.5 billion, essentially flat versus 2026. About $9 billion in underlying, nonpolitical growth is expected to nearly offset an $8.6 billion decline in political spending as the election cycle ends. Political spending is projected to fall to approximately $1.1 billion in the 2027 off-cycle year.

BIA’s Mele explained that “political spending will decline sharply after the midterms, but the underlying nonpolitical market has continued to grow and should offset much of that decline. We expect the overall local advertising market to remain essentially flat in 2027, with continued growth across core categories helping to support the market in an off-cycle year.”

Beneath that stable topline, several categories are projected to grow well above the market average. Real estate leads at +9.8%, followed by leisure and recreation (+5.9%), automotive (+5.1%), restaurants and food (+4.4%), and financial services (+3.7%).

“2027 makes clear that the underlying growth in local advertising is broader and more durable than the political cycle alone would suggest,” said Rick Ducey, managing director, BIA Advisory Services. “Political spending has accelerated the market and delivered a strong two-year period for broadcast and streaming video, but the more important story is what happens beneath that surge. Core categories continue to expand their investments across an increasingly diverse media ecosystem. That sustained, multi-platform demand, and the media channels that capture it, will shape the next phase of local media.”

For more information on the data, which comes from BIA ADVantage and to access the updated forecast, contact advantage@bia.com to request a demonstration.

As broadcasters transition to remote and hybrid production, KVM systems are undergoing a major evolution.

In our latest TV Tech Guide to KVM & Remote Workflows, we explore how IP infrastructure and cloud technologies are reshaping KVM operations—and why these systems remain crucial for delivering a low-latency, reliable, and seamless production chain.

To access the Guide click here.

Your Fall Planning Guide Is Now Available!

As the industry enters the busy fall season, TV Tech is taking a look at the new gear and technology that has been introduced over the past six months. In these pages, we're highlighting the hardware, software and services in an easy-to-use format, giving you the essential information you need in an era of "doing more with less."

Access the Guide here.

VIENNA—In the runup to IBC2026, the 10th annual Video Developer Report from video streaming solution provider Bitmovin highlights some of the major issues facing streaming media that will be top of mind at the show, with live latency and costs ranking as the industry’s top two problems.

The report finds that low latency for live streaming has overtaken controlling costs and is now the number one concern for 36% of respondents, making it the top challenge facing video teams today. This is followed by controlling costs at 35% and maintaining consistent monitoring and analytics at 28%. Finding the root cause of streaming issues and ad insertion are also major challenges for video providers today (both at 27%).

The latest edition of the report also indicates that AI has stopped being an add-on feature and is now deployed across the entire stack, often with agents operating the workflow.

Of the 486 respondents, 98% report using AI or ML for video with nearly half (46%) using AI tools every day. Only 2% report no plans for AI at all, with 4% of respondents not AI tools at all.

Audio transcription, translation and foreign dubbing are the most common applications cited by respondents (48%), followed by content recommendations (34%), visual quality and optimization (30%), and then tagging and categorization, personalization, and scene, shot boundary and ad placement opportunity detection, all come in joint fourth place (28%).

The report also highlights how expectations around low latency have shifted over time as the cost and complexity of delivering low latency has become clear.

In 2020, 60% of respondents expected low latency of less than five seconds, but that's now down to 16%, while 28% expect latency under 10 seconds. That said, sub-second latency still matters in certain use cases such as live sports, betting, auctions and interactive formats. It is this commercial need for more efficient video delivery that is driving the interest of MOQ. The report highlights that 28% of respondents plan to use MOQ in the next 12 months.

“It’s hard to believe that we’ve been producing this report for 10 years, and what a rollercoaster ride the last decade has been for the video industry,” Stefan Lederer, CEO and co-founder, Bitmovin, commented. “As we proudly present the 2026/27 report, it’s clear that AI is running the video stack, advertising is the primary revenue engine, QoE and observability have become foundational layers, and the business case for MOQ has never been stronger. But what really stands out this year, is just how fast the technology is developing - the last 3 months alone have reshaped what is possible for video developers to build and achieve. I can’t wait to see what another 10 years of the Video Developer Report will bring.”

This year's edition draws on insights from professionals across broadcast, OTT, and beyond, and for the first time includes analysis and contributions from industry analysts Jan Ozer and Dan Rayburn, alongside input from Bitmovin's partners and customers.

The Bitmovin Video Developer Report 2026/27 Edition is now available for download.

Bitmovin will be exhibiting at IBC from September 11-14 (hall 5, stand 5.F72). For more information, and to book a meeting, visit: https://bitmovin.com/ibc/.

New data from Parks Associations finds the Ruku player and operating system remains the most popular streaming media system in the U.S. with 43% of Americans reporting that a Roku device is their most-used streaming media player.

The Parks Associates’ Tech Ecosystem Dashboard, which includes data and analysis from surveys of 8,000+ US internet households, also found that 17% say their primary smart TV runs on Roku OS.

The Parks researchers noted that Fox Corporation’s planned acquisition of Roku for $22 billion highlights the strategic value of owning the platform that connects consumers to content, advertising, and streaming services.

“Roku’s strength is its reach across the connected TV experience,” said Michael Goodman, research director, Parks Associates. “Its position across smart TVs and streaming media players gives the platform influence that extends beyond any single hardware brand.”

More specifically, the Fox-Roku acquisition would bring strategic value to both companies. Fox brings premium live content, including sports and news, as well as Tubi, while Roku brings its operating system, The Roku Channel, Frndly TV, Howdy, advertising capabilities, and first-party data. Fox reports that Roku reaches more than 100 million streaming households globally.

The combination also strengthens Fox’s position in the growing free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) market. Tubi and The Roku Channel give the combined company two major ad-supported streaming properties, while Roku’s platform provides additional opportunities to connect content discovery, audience data, and advertising across the TV experience.

In the Parks top ten list of U.S. FAST streaming services, Tubi ranked as #1, followed by The Roku Channel, Pluto TV, Samsung TV+, Xumo Play and LG Channels.

“Competition in video is now about who owns the relationship with the viewer,” Goodman said. “Content remains critical, especially live sports and news, but the platform determines how consumers discover that content and how providers engage and monetize audiences. The Fox and Roku combination brings greater control over how consumers access and discover content while expanding opportunities for viewer data, advertising, and distribution.”

With the NFL season starting on Weds. Sept. 9, a new study from Guideline is projecting another year of hefty ad sales growth, with 8% growth in ad revenue for the 2026-2027 season compared to last year.

Guideline is projecting that total ad revenue will hit $6.3 billion, with the inaugural Thanksgiving Eve game expected to generate $48 million in revenue.

That comes after 7% YoY growth in ad revenue in the 2025-2026 season, which hit a record $5.9 billion. Regular season ad revenue was up 6% YoY last year while playoff ad revenue was up 13% YoY.

"Overall ad demand looks healthy headed into the 26/27 season,” explained Sean Wright, chief insights and analytics officer at Guideline. “Upfront commits are pacing up double digits ahead of where they were last year, partly driven by increases in pricing, partly in a surge of new ad budgets. We'll see how much ultimately gets booked but right now, the regular season is shaping up to be another potentially record setting year."

Guideline also reported that in 2025-2026, streaming-exclusive games accounted for 13% of full-season revenue, nearly double the 8% share from two seasons ago. Overall, streaming-exclusive network ad growth was up 6% YoY in last year’s 2025-2026 season.

LONDON—While a new study from Ampere Analysis documents the ongoing decline in new orders for TV series, the research also shows that orders for new linear TV series has been more resilient than streaming VOD and that the new orders for scripted programming on linear TV actually grew in recent years.

The new report from Ampere Analysis found that between 2022 and 2025, US-produced linear orders fell 26%, a smaller decline than streaming counterparts, which fell 41%.

Very notably, the research also found that linear scripted series orders actually rose 11% in a slightly different time frame between 2023 and 2025, with a particular focus on renewing reliable franchise comedies such as “The Simpsons” and “American Dad.”

"In the post-Peak TV era, the traditional seasonal development cycle from linear broadcasters in the U.S. is evolving,” explained George Evans, senior researcher at Ampere Analysis. “With streaming players now accounting for a greater share of content spend globally, free-to-air linear commissioners in the US have adopted a more flexible approach to ordering, putting fewer titles through the development and pilot process and instead working more responsively year-round. By responding more dynamically to audience appetite and leaning on scripted franchises with established fanbases, broadcast TV can continue to prove its worth in the seemingly streamer-dominated US market."

More specifically the report found that between 2022 and 2025, U.S.-produced linear orders fell 26%, from 1,773 to 1,304, compared with a 41% decline in streaming orders, from 1,144 to 678. Linear Scripted series orders subsequently increased 11%, from 236 in 2023 to 262 in 2025.

Overall, free-to-air (FTA) channels have fared better than Pay TV.

Pay TV subscriber numbers have declined by 56% since 2016, as consumers switch to streaming. This drove a 33% decline in series orders between 2022 and 2025, down from 1295 to 877. In contrast, free-to-air broadcasters such as NBC, ABC, and CBS saw series orders drop 13% over the same period, from 408 to 352. Thematic Pay TV channels, particularly those focused on specific niches, such as Food Network and HGTV, have struggled to maintain ordering levels.

The report also highlighted changes in traditional TV development cycles. US Commercial free-to-air broadcasters are shifting away from the traditional seasonal development cycle of Q4 script orders and Q1 pilot orders, towards year-round development and 'straight-to-series' orders, committing to an entire season without first testing a pilot, the study found.

In addition, U.S. broadcast networks have shifted towards more disciplined primetime commissioning strategies. Since 2024, 52% of new scripted series orders have been franchise-based, reflecting a more disciplined approach to primetime commissioning.

The strength of broadcast programming can also found on streaming platforms. Around 50% of both linear and non-linear TV viewers enjoy genres such as comedy, action & adventure, crime & thriller, and drama. This alignment supports complementary commissioning strategies across broadcast and streaming. Primetime series from ABC, CBS and NBC generate strong engagement on Hulu, Paramount+ and Peacock, respectively, extending their value beyond linear TV.

“Despite the continued growth of streaming, broadcast television remains an important part of the US media landscape,” explained Eric Kurtsel, research manager, SME Media at Ampere Analysis. “Post-Peak TV, broadcast networks are taking a disciplined approach to primetime commissioning, focusing on proven genres and franchises that can connect with audiences across platforms. Viewers continue to engage with broadcast series on streaming platforms, suggesting their value extends beyond linear television and reinforcing broadcast TV’s foundational role in today’s content ecosystem."

LONDON—New data from Ampere Analysis shows Asia has become the world’s biggest region for first-run streaming scripted series orders for the first time, leaping two places from third to secure the top spot in the first half of 2026. More than one-third (36%) of first-run scripted TV orders from the leading global streamers now originate in APAC, the highest six-month share on record.

The new Ampere study also found that the APAC region surged ahead of North America and Western Europe in H1 2026 for the volume of new scripted TV commissions from the six leading global streamers - Prime Video, Apple TV+, Disney+, HBO Max, Netflix and Paramount+. The region secured 70 first-run scripted commissions during the period, versus 46 for North America, 44 for Western Europe, and 34 for all other regions combined.

Cyrine Amor, senior research manager at Ampere Analysis, explained that “APAC has become increasingly important to global streamers for two reasons: it offers attractive opportunities for subscriber growth, while Asian content is increasingly finding audiences far beyond its home markets. India, South Korea and Japan remain at the heart of commissioning activity, but growth in markets such as Taiwan and the Philippines shows how widely streamers are now looking for locally produced content with regional and global potential.”

Of all streamers’ first-run scripted TV orders, 36% now originate from the APAC region, the highest six-month-period share to date. The rise is primarily driven by Amazon’s and Netflix’s commissioning activity in the region. In the same period, their combined first-run orders in Western Europe and North America remained almost flat compared to H1 2025.

India led the region with 25 orders, the highest increase among APAC markets, fueled by Prime Video’s commissioning push across multiple Indian languages. South Korea remained the region’s second-largest market by volume, where Netflix continues to lead commissioning activity among global streamers.

In terms of genre, one-third of these commissions were Crime & Thriller. Drama hit a new record of one quarter of commissions. Meanwhile, the Sci-Fi & Fantasy genre, which led by volume share in H1 2025, fell sharply.

Newer entrants to the streamers' regional subscriber acquisition race also stood out in this commissioning shift, the Ampere study stressed.

Taiwan and the Philippines experienced unusually high volumes of streamer orders, with nine and seven new scripted series commissioned respectively during the first half of 2026. In Taiwan, Netflix quadrupled its new scripted series orders compared to last year, including the medical drama “How to Survive Med School” and the influencer-led crime investigation “Million-follower Detective.” In the Philippines, Amazon led the charge with five new series announcements over the past six months, including the romance drama “The Loyalty Game.”

Recent successes such as Netflix’s Thai original “My Dearest Assassin” and Korean original “The Great Flood” demonstrate the potential for locally produced APAC content to travel beyond its home market. Streamers are also using licensing to capitalise on this demand, with Prime Video further expanding an existing multi-year worldwide distribution deal with CJ ENM in 2026, Ampere reported.

The commissioning surge reflects different stages of streaming growth across APAC. In more established markets, including India, South Korea and Japan, new productions are being used to both attract and retain subscribers while also targeting increasingly receptive regional and global audiences. In emerging streaming markets such as Taiwan and the Philippines, first-run commissioning is being used to support subscriber acquisition.

PLANO, Texas—Having a live TV bundle option is still important to half of all consumers surveyed in a recent Parks Associates report.

In the research firm’s latest consumer research The New Live TV Model: Skinny Bundles, Sports, News, 27% of US internet households prefer a live-TV bundle combined with their favorite streaming on-demand services, while 24% prefer a skinny bundle combined with their favorite streaming services. In total, 51% prefer a package that combines live TV with their favorite streaming services.

"Consumers are not necessarily choosing between live TV and streaming. Many want access to both in one package," said Michael Goodman, Director, Entertainment Research, Parks Associates. "Providers have the opportunity to offer greater flexibility to their consumers while making it easier to access the content they value."

Parks Associates also noted that 68% of streaming pay-TV subscribers (vMVPD subscribers), including consumers using services such as YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV, Fubo, and DirecTV Stream, like the idea of a skinny bundle—a pay-TV or streaming channel package that includes a limited number of core channels, typically focused on specific content types (e.g., entertainment, sports, or news). It is priced below traditional all-inclusive TV packages.

The findings show consumers continue to value live television, but their expectations for how it is packaged are changing, according to Parks. Smaller channel packages combined with streaming services can provide a middle ground between traditional pay TV and streaming-only options.

"Skinny bundles offer providers an opportunity to address consumers who want to maintain access to live television but are increasingly sensitive to the cost and size of traditional channel packages," Goodman said. "The strongest opportunity is retention. These packages can give existing subscribers another option before they decide to cancel service entirely."

The big news in the broadcast industry in August was the Federal Communications Commission’s vote to eliminate its TV-station ownership cap.

Advocates of removing the limit, which bars a single broadcaster from reaching more than 39% of all U.S. TV households, argued that it hindered local stations and their ownership groups from competing effectively with social media giants, digital ad platforms and streaming services—competitors never envisioned in 2004 when the cap was raised from 35% to 39%.

Those favoring its continuation argue that the FCC lacks the authority to eliminate the cap without new legislation, and that the move will promote further media consolidation and a loss of voices in markets.

With all of that said, this really isn’t a column about lifting the cap. Rather, it’s about competition in a government-regulated market and a comment from Gary Weitman, chief communications officer at Nexstar Media Group.

An Aug. 6 Variety.com article quoted Weitman as saying, in part: “The FCC’s decision to eliminate the broadcast ownership cap is a welcome, necessary and long-overdue recognition of today’s competitive landscape, which is dominated by legacy Big Media and Big Tech. For too long, local broadcasters were handcuffed from reaching the scale they needed to compete on a more level playing field by outdated federal rules that didn’t apply to the largest and most powerful companies like Google’s YouTube, Meta’s Instagram or Netflix.”

The comment made me wonder how else local broadcasters have been “handcuffed from” competing “on a more level playing field by outdated federal rules.” If the 22 years since the 39% cap was established is a standard for determining what is “long overdue,” how about the 30 years since Congress and the FCC established rules for the transition from analog to DTV or the 28 years since the first digital TV signals went on air?

Broadcasters are required to use MPEG-2 TS, a compression scheme and digital packaging technology first published in the mid-1990s. Since then, a succession of more-efficient compression algorithms has been released—with the latest (VVC) being 75% to 80% more efficient than MPEG-2. On the packaging and encapsulation side of the ledger, the world began to embrace IP as the World Wide Web gathered steam in the early 1990s.

Now, the television industry waits to see what the FCC will do when it comes to sunsetting ATSC 1.0 so it can fully embrace a new standard that has no restrictions on using the latest—and most efficient—compression schemes as they come along, nor the inability to encapsulate and package bits like the rest of the world.

The hope is the agency will make rules enabling broadcasters to transition by setting up ATSC 1.0 lighthouses to free up channels to take full advantage of the ATSC 3.0 capabilities and services while continuing to transmit legacy DTV to viewers with older sets.

While the FCC and the industry may indeed overcome this hurdle, I am not confident that, in the long run, it is possible to expect a government-regulated industry to compete with unregulated businesses—especially when 20 or 30 years seems to be how long it takes for the regulator to modernize rules, and unregulated competitors can pivot on a dime.

Alongside the many technological changes occurring in this era, robotics continues to evolve with new capabilities in artificial intelligence. Of those more recent advances and updates, generative AI took the lead, but there’s a new tech in town and it’s going “fully autonomous.”

In my Cloudspotter’s Journal columns, I have shown by example that the basics of next-generation cloud computing now include an advanced “cloud” infrastructure, shifting toward AI integration, edge computing and cross-cloud federation (coming up in October). Crucial elements include “AI-first architectures,” “agentic data systems” and “distributed cloud-to-edge” connections and their associated networking.

The importance of connecting the cloud to the world of AI cannot be underestimated. At first, it seems to be a bit far-fetched and beyond the reach of everyday use, but hold on—artificial intelligence is now “everywhere,” with a wider definition and an expanded dimension touching all walks of life. Most evident today is the explosion of data center activity popping up everywhere. Only a few see this as an important element of our tech future, but the data centers of today and tomorrow are “the cloud,” with compute power, storage and interconnection across the globe.

In the not-too-distant future, these new data centers will be self-managed and, in many cases, autonomous in nature. They will become the backbone for AI activities as their integration grows.

In this installment, we take a broad overview perspective of some new AI-related terms and how they generally apply to workflows, data centers and AI:

• Artificial Intelligence Integration: Based upon custom AI agents, robust LLM integration and AI-data engineering. As stated in Google Search, “AI integration is the process of embedding artificial intelligence into existing systems, workflows and applications to automate processes, generate insights and optimize performance.”
• AI Systems Integration: The fundamental elements associated with this widespread migration, modernization and optimization of services using a leaner stack are being accomplished with zero disruption. An “always-on digital workforce” is a key element, constructed as a unified platform built on at least three integrated layers: Data Quality, Agentic AI and Plain-Language Interfaces.

Data Quality (DQ)
Data Quality (DQ) encompasses elements of trust and Autonomous Data Engineering—the automation of jobs for data analysts, data engineers and operations (see workflows depicted in Fig. 1). DQ aims to improve the accuracy, completeness, consistency and reliability of the data used to train, test or run machine-learning models and AI systems. DQ generally includes model accuracy, which aims to ensure all AI outputs are trustworthy and to prevent error factors where poor data leads to biased or incorrect results.

DQ concepts include machine learning models that depend on “clean inputs”—free of duplicates, errors or misrepresentations, aka missing values or skewed anomalies.

Modern platforms use other AI tools to automate DQ checks and build validation rules that scale. Validation rules are those surrounded by an AI simulation of human intelligence in machines specifically programmed to think, learn and make decisions—i.e., utilizing building blocks typical to AI systems that include data (i.e., numbers, characters, media images—audio, video, etc.) and operations which are performed by using compute processes.

• Algorithm(s): Basically a sequence of calculations or rules used to solve a problem employing data that is “optimized in terms of time and space.” Such relative data should fit the time, place and application, and must provide suitable results that resolve the problem constructed of appropriate prompts with sufficient depth to properly answer the question “posed” of the associated content. 
• Model: Sometimes referred to as an “agent,” a model is a combination of data and algorithms used to generate the response. Once you have a model, you can constantly provide it with new data and algorithms and continuously refine it. Fundamentally, the goal is to perform these actions autonomously.
• Response: Outputs generated as responses from models, otherwise known as the results.
• Ethics: The “moral principles” and “guidelines” from responses. These and related fundamental principles ensure that the responses (replies, reactions and/or outputs) from the AI systems “contribute to positive social, economic, and environmental impacts of the organization and the community.”

One significant application of AI is automating tasks that do not necessarily require human intervention during routine operations. This brings on some relatively new definitions for workflow and actions—e.g., idempotent, which means an operation that can be applied multiple times without changing the final result beyond the first time, and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). When combined, idempotency and CLV can match analytics or calculations without double-counting revenue or corrupting historical cohorts—i.e. the use of past records to identify groups of people with or without a specific exposure.

The latest evolution in AI-driven automation is known as Agentic AI.

Agentic AI for RPA
Agentic AI is the next step in automation. Autonomous or semiautonomous artificial intelligence systems can independently plan, make decisions, use external tools and execute multistep workflows to achieve a specific goal with minimal human supervision. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is rule-based, using software “bots” to mimic human actions. RPA automates repeated tasks (invoicing, inputting data, extraction and validation) which have since evolved with new AI capabilities. In principle, that evolution has stepped into various levels of agentic automation used to aid in determining the level of agents your organization may need; agentic workflow automation in action, or how those AI-powered agents perform; and how to scale agentic automation—responsibly and securely—while autonomously evaluating foundational skills aimed at end-to-end task completion.

The main types of automation (in robotics) include:

• Attended RPA: Bots that run on a user’s computer to help with live tasks like customer calls. 
• Unattended RPA: Bots run on servers in the background to complete large batches of work automatically.
• Hybrid RPA: Blends both attended and unattended approaches so humans and bots can work together on complex jobs.

In addition to those RPA/human modes, those rational and easily manipulated sets of actions or instructions—including reporting and outputs—are orchestrated in plain language instead of software-driven expressions in specific forms of new or complex terms that must first be thoroughly learned and trained.

Plain Language
For an AI interaction to be “conversational,” the prompts and stages should repeatedly master the following steps in its sequences:

• Removes Jargon: Finds hard-to-read technical words, acronyms, or legalese and swaps them for everyday terms, with “audience identification” obviously being a prime focus on both output and delivery. For example, a response for a lawyer would be output differently for an administrator without a legal background.
• Shortens Sentences: Breaks down long, tangled sentences into short, direct thoughts aimed for a C-level executive set, TV/radio news reporter or professional-level manager.
• Active Voice: A sentence structure where the subject performs the verb’s action, following a clear pattern: actor, verb—targeting its searches for passive phrasing and changing it to clearly show who is doing what.
• Layout Improvement: Outputting clear headings and bullet points so text is easy to scan and reading for understanding is elevated smoothly and rapidly.

Assuring Data Quality
A part of maintaining and assuring Data Quality is documentation (especially if auto-generated). Docs are a foundational principle in assuring Data Quality and are extremely important when assembling any AI platform. Having a consistent and accurate reference set that includes the stages and steps discussed is essential to the AI system’s intelligence for long-term maintenance of the large model learning system, for both immediate and future or long-term support of the system overall. Instructions on documentation integrated with the “checks and values” portions of a system are essential.

Elements crucial to AI-developed outputs (Fig. 2), based on the prompts submitted and the audience you are addressing, include accuracy, where data matches real-world values and facts; completeness, with no essential fields or values missing; consistency, where all information matches across different systems, tables or equations; that data is fresh and timely, appropriate to the topics and audience and easily available when needed; and validity, where data follows defined (business) rules, formats and constraints, is unique and does not contain duplicate records.

Appropriate expectations are part of the primary requirements in qualifying the validity of an AI system and integration. These are some of the guidelines most solutions or outputs will produce with a properly utilized agentic AI or general practices as modeled across many levels of industry—providing a good checklist and process for relatively effective and useful autonomous applications and solutions.

Back in the day, when you produced and/or distributed content mostly through one broadcast or cable channel, making certain everything looked and sounded the way it should was easy. You simply checked it at the last point where you touched it and then verified it via a return feed. Oh, that it was still that easy.

Now, thanks to content distributed through multiple distribution pipes and consumer-
side reception devices, you have to check the same piece of content multiple times. Think of it as creating a single drink but having to deal with a wide range of pipes, pressure and different faucets. Oh, and on top of that, different sizes and shapes of glasses. If you are not careful, this economic necessity becomes a QoS nightmare.

The options used to be simple: Black and white or color; mono or stereo. Monitoring, particularly at the local level? Easy peasy: a decent consumer TV set and an antenna or cable feed.

Know Where to Look
How have you and those in your organization or at client locations adjusted to the ways that even a single program or piece of content is viewed? How are you and your team assessing and then assuring end user or viewer image and sound quality?

Here’s a bit of guidance from the consumer side of things: No matter who is at the root cause of an issue, the one who touched it last is always blamed by the end user. They don’t care about who or what is upstream from you; if it breaks, it is your fault and you look bad. In the age of social media, you can’t afford that, so here are some suggestions on how to avoid it.

First, make certain you are properly monitoring any error conditions in the full streaming workflow, no matter whose side it is on. Encoding, packaging, CDN delivery, DRM, caption timing, audio and anything related to ad insertion, such as SCTE-35 Ad Break Market Integrity. That last one has to be “right on the money”—if not, there may not be any money! You also need to ensure your own internal content management system matches the needs of the various distribution feeds and services. A metadata mapping mismatch may cause your content to be rejected.

Even when you’re comfortable with how content left your facility, you must check the quality against the matrix of the streaming services/distribution channels and the multiple consumer devices.

To do that, you need to consider two things: First, create a “streaming QC station.” The second and equally important part is to create checklists and score reports to validate the results.

Remember that the same feed may not look and sound the same on different services or on different devices. Beyond that, each generation of the same device brand and model may impact how a feed looks and sounds. You are no longer monitoring a single off-air or return feed.

Devices Matter
Start with one each of the Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV 4K and Google TV 4K external streamers with the latest OS updates. Then, look on sites like eBay or ask around with colleagues for older models that no longer get updates. That covers you from missing errors that might not be revealed on current devices or OS drops.

For monitoring, have two midpriced connected TVs (CTVs). Why two? Because Roku, Fire TV and Google/Android TV can be monitored with external streaming dongles, but the captive TV manufacturer OS systems (LG’s WebOS, Samsung’s Tizen and Vizio’s OS/SmartCast) can’t. Depending on which HDR formats your consumer-facing feeds use, make sure you can check the current HDR formats beyond the now almost standard HDR-10, including Dolby Vision, HDR-10+, HLG and Advanced HDR.

When it comes to switching between the two sets, instead of using an HDMI switcher, get a midline AVR with at least six HDMI inputs and two HDMI outputs. That will also let you monitor multichannel audio presentations. If you need more HDMI inputs, simply connect some of the streaming devices directly to the TV sets.

For control, the AVR remote should be able to cycle through everything. However, because you may need to have a bucket of remotes for the TVs and the streamers whose remote codes might not be in the AVR remote, consider a programmable universal remote.

For the more adventurous, experiment with a simple home-device control system or talk to a local CEDIA member residential design/installation firm, as this type of system is what they do for a living.

Test Systematically
To justify the time and expense of the QC station, it is essential you develop a repeatable test sequence to identify when something is wrong and then locate where the fault originates. That will help you correct the root cause for things you can correct.

You can’t be expected to provide tech support for your viewers, but if something is happening outside your control, knowing what is going on allows you to post a message on social media feeds (or, if it is more significant, consider an on-air crawl message). Remember, if you don’t catch errors when the cause may be the viewer’s slow bandwidth or outdated streamers and CTVs, you could become the scourge of the internet.

Capture your daily QC check across all services in a database matrix against how each stream lands from all services and on each device. Remember, the same stream viewed on a Roku might appear differently than on a CTV app or through a different streamer. Keep a record of the download speed and occasionally check it using a smartphone, either directly or by using the phone as a hotspot to the QC station rather than from your facility’s usual broadband access. There are a lot of variables, and any one of them can be the root cause for a single outage or reception issue, even when other streams are perfect.

As you would for any QC/QoS testing, check and record the image quality and color gamut. Is there buffering or occasional freezing? Is there excessive latency from one stream and device to another? Is the sound in sync? Be sure to check that for a few minutes on each view to make sure you don’t have issues with audio/video sync drift when variable frame rate (VFR) encoding is used. Is the audio, particularly multichannel audio, correctly passed through from an app originating in a CTV through to the AVR? Are the captions working properly?

Finally, chart every place your content appears, including channel aggregators. Think of a feed coming not from a station, but from the feeds of local newscasts that are part of a network’s news app. Those, in turn, may be picked up by FAST aggregators like Pluto TV or Xumo.

This may seem a big task, and to some extent it is, or at least can be. However, if you construct your QC station properly, set a logical-but-comprehensive test schema and develop the database for metrics, you don’t need to do everything every day. Create a manageable rotation so that over the course of a week, you check everything at least once with the caveat that during major news, sports or milestone programs, you have someone checking things in real time.

Always remember that no matter what the root cause of a system or technical issue is, and regardless of how far upstream it was from you, the consumer blames the last one to touch it. In the case of streaming content, if it has your name on it, that’s you. Don’t let that “last one to touch it” syndrome hit you in the face.

I have written about supercomputers in the pages of TV Tech for more than six years. I even had an ABC director tell me my musings on computer dominance in broadcasting were pure folly and that I was “full of it.” However, my earliest contemplations did not take into account learning models which, to me, now further legitimize the possibilities of AI in broadcasting.

Let’s use my friend at ABC as an example. Bob has less than a dozen cuts in his directing repertoire, with only a handful of permutations between them—very predictable. Now, if you take it to the next level, Bob-Bot can remember these camera sequences and their outcomes, plus how effective their entertainment value was. You could even teach Bob-Bot the patterns of different directors and producers and mix up a pretty good show.

FIFA World Cup soccer and Host Broadcast Services have led the way in advancing sound quality and also in developing computer-assisted sound.

Not only was the concept of mixing matches in the broadcast center’s master control developed at the World Cup, but Lawo also created a mixing algorithm that compares sound intensities from different microphone positions, selects the best ones and creates the most desirable sports sound. I wrote in the pages of TV Tech that I thought the 2022 World Cup was the best-sounding World Cup ever and better yet, the best-sounding sporting event ever!

From Assistant to Controller
The difference between the early AI systems and current (and future) systems is that AI brings the ability for the computer to learn and remember. For example, a machine model can combine audio sources and create a mix from the existing data. A learning model will be able to elevate the entertainment value with more and better permutations each learning cycle.

Computer-assisted is quickly moving to computer-controlled. It is easy to see how the entire production chain can be computer-controlled. Cameras do not need operators anymore, with autofocus and simple commands like “follow the ball” or “follow car No. 6.” I was resistant to “audio-follow-video” for many years because I thought the switch did not sound very good and subjective control was the job of the mixer. Basically, my prejudices were ego-related and not engineering-related.

The Lawo “mixing assist” compares sound levels from different microphones and adjusts mix levels for the most desirable combination of sounds. So, what about computer-generated sound fields and sporting sound effects, like what Ben Shirley and Rob Oldfield of Salsa Sound have been developing? The Salsa program not only can mix, but can change the timbre, texture and composition of sounds. I imagine a ball kick with a little thunder or dynamite explosion added to it. That is entertaining!

Entertainment vs. Reality
When gaming came along, I realized my role as a sound mixer was to entertain the audience and not necessarily document the sound image. Some sounds were boring or not easily captured, which is why, in the early ’80s, I started to use a sound sampler—a primitive analog computer to play back and enhance the sound field—everything from pit sounds and tire squeals to canoe rows and crowds. Engaging sound, camera work and graphics drive broadcast retention, but also cost money, unless perhaps there is a heavy dose of generative computer influence and output.

Every sport can develop an audience via the internet, and there is clearly an abundance of content that is captured and streamed. Not only are supercomputers good at automating tasks and improving efficiency, but they are capable of creating realistic content. How about nude beach volleyball? How will content production keep up? Through AI.

Supercomputers with learning and adapting capabilities are known as “generative,” where computers create new content using similar or existing data. Think about the commentators. You rarely see them, and they tell the viewer what they just saw and then read something about the person, place or thing that was just shown. It is called play-by-play and color, and I think these folks are on the way out.

I have read postings on LinkedIn for audio practitioners to train AI algorithms. That makes sense, since the power of artificial intelligence lies with its ability to ultimately learn and think for itself. It also seems that the best models have a deep reservoir of knowledge to build on.

A Better Model Me
But where is this knowledge coming from? Well, one significant avenue has been through theft of intellectual property.

America has long had a beef with China over intellectual property theft, but it is happening right here in the United States—with impunity. I don’t know who is to blame—the publisher or the AI company.

I heard on the news recently that Anthropic, a leading AI company that I thought had scruples, has settled a class-action suit for copyright theft, which included two of my broadcast publications with Focal Press. If you are going to train a computer to do my job, then learning the fundamentals of signal processing as well as the aesthetics of signal balancing will make a better Model Me.

All sound disciplines are changing and the evolution probably will not stop. No doubt, analytical tools for quality control are soon to arrive, if they are not already here. Things like distortion, phase and loudness are easily quantified and corrected. While working on this article, one of my sources said they have developed a profanity eliminator that works basically in real time and even in different languages.

I used to think the safest jobs in television were held by those who set up and maintained the equipment. I don’t see that as the case anymore when I see stories of Chinese robots playing soccer. Television broadcasts are not hard to set up, and any deficiencies can be compensated or covered up by the computer.

Are you scared yet?

New fixed wireless speed tests for Q2 2026 from Ookla show that T-Mobile continues to dominate the category, with a median download speed of 222.7 Mbps, (outpacing AT&T Internet Air by 38.8% and Verizon 5G Home by 76%).

T-Mobile’s Q2 2026 median upload speed (18.1 Mbps) also beat AT&T by 79.2% and Verizon by 48.5%.

The data also highlighted some encouraging trends and some emerging problems. All three providers experienced a performance drop in download and upload speeds between Q1 2026 to Q2 2026. This, however, is likely a seasonal impact, Ooklas reported as dense leaves on trees can weaken FWA signals.

In more positive news, AT&T’s median download speed surged nearly 60%—from 104.61 Mbps in Q3 2025 to 167.34 Mbps in Q1 2026. This is likely the result of deploying the additional 50 MHz of spectrum purchased from EchoStar, Ookla reported.

The report also highlighted an important shift in urban deployments that could have larger implications for the broadband industry.

Traditional cable and telco operators have long dominated urban markets and fixed wireless access providers have long been seen as an attractive technological solutions for rural areas, where the cost of wiring isolated homes can be high.

The new Ookla Q2 data shows, however, that fixed wireless providers can deliver faster speeds in urban areas, potentially making them more competitive with faster wired options from cable and telcos.

Rural FWA users across all three providers nationwide have lower median download speeds and higher multi-server latency. Urban users benefit from a multi-server latency that is 7 to 13 milliseconds lower than their rural counterparts, the Ookla data shows.

Even so, the Ookla data showed that only two states (Hawaii and New York) and the District of Columbia produced fixed wireless access samples where 40% or more of the samples met the FCC’s minimum standard for broadband speed (100 Mbps download/20 Mbps upload).

A new survey of American’s media habits find that 90% access YouTube on a typical weekday versus 79% for streaming services and 73% for Live TV.

Even so, they typically spend more time with streaming services (one hour and 49 minutes) versus YouTube (one hour and 46 minutes) and Live TV (one hour and 31 minutes), according to Attest.

Very notably, Attest’s 2026 Attention Economy Report, based on surveys of 1,000 UK and 1,000 US adults alongside five years of tracking data, found that creator content is now more popular than streaming or TV.

Americans spend an average of 3 hours and 54 minutes a day with YouTube, TikTok and social video, outstripping the time, three hours and 20 minutes, that people spend with live TV and streaming services like Netflix. “YouTube hasn’t just become an alternative to TV, it’s already ahead of it,” Attest reported. “Tellingly, 23% of Americans primarily watch YouTube on their televisions.”

These numbers are higher for younger age groups. “Gen Z watches by far the most YouTube, 2h 25m a day on average, well ahead of Millennials (1h 55m), Gen X (1h 18m) and Boomers (53m),” the researchers noted. “Men also watch significantly more than women overall (2h 09m vs 1h 23m).”

This does not spell the end of longform content, however, the researchers explained.

“The assumption behind most `short attention span' commentary is that video has been chopped into ever-smaller pieces because that’s all people want,” the study noted. “The data tells a more specific story: as creator platforms introduce longer content, it’s gaining eyeballs. Two-thirds of people regularly watch YouTube videos longer than 15 minutes, while 53% watch long-form on Facebook or Instagram and 39% on TikTok. All four of these platforms launched their short-form video products with strict length caps. They have since expanded them repeatedly, visibly chasing consumer demand for longer content, not just short clips.”

As the attention of consumers shifts from TV to social media platforms, the study also found that people are paying less attention to the TV programming they are watching. “Only 12% of people give TV their full attention, with no other activity happening alongside it. The other 88% are doing something else, and for 68% of the total, that specifically involves second screening: scrolling social media, shopping, searching, messaging, or gaming.”

The study also highlighted data regarding consumer’s willingness to tolerate high ad loads. High ad loads contributed to the shift of viewing from pay TV channels to streaming services and social media platforms, which in recent years have also begun showing more ads.

“Ad frequency tolerance is one of the only genuinely flat patterns in this entire report,” the researchers noted. “People say ads become excessive once they’re shown every 14 minutes on streamed TV and every 12 minutes on social video, a threshold that barely moves regardless of generation. What isn’t flat is what people do about it: 82% of Gen Z always or usually skip ads on social video, compared with 46% of Boomers; on streamed TV it’s 68% versus 36%. Everyone hits roughly the same wall, younger audiences just act on it faster and more completely…When people can’t skip an ad, only 44% say they continue watching as intended, 34% redirect their attention elsewhere, 17% mute it, and 3% stop watching altogether.’

The full report is available here.

The production environment that broadcast infrastructure was built around no longer exists. The model of the studio with a defined perimeter, a predictable signal path, and content that stayed within four walls has been under pressure for years, and the pressure is not easing.

Remote production means contributors are no longer in the building. Corporate clients with broadcast-quality studios want those studios to feed their enterprise networks: the lobby screen, the conference room, the overflow space on the floor above.

Houses of worship running full production environments need the same signal that powers their main auditorium to reach every classroom and corridor in the complex. Education facilities are building multi-camera setups not just for events, but for daily instruction that flows across buildings and campuses.

None of these are edge cases. They represent a significant and growing segment of production activity, and none of them are well-served by a contained baseband workflow. The SDI-to-IP conversation has been going on for a decade. What has not kept pace is the infrastructure layer that determines whether IP actually delivers on its promise.

The Real Barrier is not the Protocol
What often gets lost in the SDI-versus-IP debate is that the barrier to adoption is rarely the protocol itself. NDI, Dante, AES67, SMPTE ST 2110 are proven, mature, and increasingly affordable. The technology works. The problem is the network sitting underneath it.

For years, configuring a switch for a broadcast or professional AV environment required someone with deep IT networking knowledge. Someone who understands multicast routing, IGMP snooping, PTP grandmaster configuration, VLAN segmentation across mixed protocols. Large integrators might have had two or three people in the entire organization capable of doing it correctly.

That bottleneck was a meaningful brake on IP adoption, and operations lacking that specialist knowledge either stayed with SDI, made configuration errors that eroded confidence in IP workflows, or relied on unmanaged switches that worked until they did not.

Complexity Does Not Scale
The problem compounds in hybrid environments, which are now the norm. A typical broadcast or corporate studio operation today might be running NDI for remote contributors, Dante for audio, SMPTE ST 2110 for its core video fabric, and AES67 for audio interop—all simultaneously, all across the same physical infrastructure. Each protocol has its own network requirements, and getting them to coexist without colliding requires switch-level configuration that is specific, precise, and easy to get wrong.

The industry largely accepted this as an unavoidable cost of IP adoption, but I think it’s worth challenging. When NDI 4 was transporting NDI traffic, control traffic, and Dante over the same ports without separation, manufacturers were fielding support calls that were about the network surrounding their product.

The fix was not to change the protocol, but to build the separation into the switch itself. Manufacturers who adopted that approach reported reductions in NDI-related support calls of 80-90%.

The Next Generation of Broadcast Infrastructure
The operations successfully making the transition to IP are not necessarily the biggest or best-resourced. What they share is infrastructure specified for the workflow, not generic IT hardware pressed into service.

As production workflows move toward 25 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit transport—already underway at the leading edge of the market—the margin for infrastructure that is merely adequate shrinks considerably. A switch that handles 1 GB NDI traffic may not handle uncompressed SMPTE ST 2110 at the same level of reliability. The physics change, and so do the timing requirements, the synchronization demands, and the consequences of getting it wrong.

Broadcast engineers understand this intuitively from the SDI world. The discipline around termination, signal path, and equipment specification that makes SDI reliable translates to an IP workflow. PTP grandmaster configuration is the timing equivalent of gen-lock. VLAN segmentation is the traffic management equivalent of router output assignment. The execution requires infrastructure purpose-built to handle them.

The Partnership Layer
For most of the last decade, the production vendor and the network vendor operated as separate procurement tracks. The integrator specified a production system from one supplier and a network from another, then reconciled the two on-site, often discovering incompatibilities that had not surfaced during pre-sales.

The market is beginning to move away from that model. When production vendors validate and distribute switching infrastructure alongside their own product, the compatibility question is already answered before the project starts. The integrator is deploying a solution that has been tested end-to-end, not reconciling two separately specified systems.

For integrators handling the full scope of a project without a dedicated network engineering resource, removing that compatibility uncertainty changes the risk profile of the project in a way that makes IP adoption viable for clients who would otherwise stay with what they know.

Foundation Before Conversation
Years of SDI-versus-IP debate have generated panel discussions, white papers, and show floor demonstrations. What the industry has scrutinized less is the infrastructure layer underneath those protocols - and whether it is actually ready to deliver on the flexibility and scalability that IP promises.

The operations thriving in hybrid IP environments are not the ones that chose the right protocol. They are the ones that built the right foundation first. The network is not a commodity input in a broadcast IP workflow. It is the layer that determines whether everything above it works—reliably, repeatedly, and at scale. Until the industry starts treating it that way, the gap between the IP conversation and IP reality will remain.

NEW YORK—Nielsen’s Q2 2026 edition of the Ad Supported Gauge shows that ad-supported TV captured a 71.5% share of total viewing, which represents a 1.3 share point decline from the first quarter of the year, and that live sports programming boosted broadcast’s share of ad-supported TV viewing.

Broadcast viewing followed its typical seasonal decline from Q1 to Q2, though the drop was softer than the same period last year. Sports programming, notably the NBA playoffs and early World Cup coverage, helped broadcast gain 0.6 share points year-over-year, rising to 26.6% from 26.0% in Q2 2025.

Meanwhile streaming continued its upward trajectory, expanding its lead within ad-supported TV by 1.6 share points to reach a 48.2% share. Cable held steady, retaining the 25.2% share it established in the first quarter.

The report also noted that when the focus is shifted from total viewing (Persons 2+) to adults 18 and older (Persons 18+), traditional TV gains notable ground.

The Persons 18+ segment reallocates 3.8 share points away from streaming down to 44.4%, while boosting broadcast to 28.6% (+2.0 points) and cable to 27.0% (+1.8 points).

Nielsen stressed that the published version of The Ad Supported Gauge has not migrated to the ARF DASH-based media related universe estimates which is planned for the fall. This is significant because this approach, while consistent with previous months of the Gauge, will have different results.

Average price increases across Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon have fallen from 24% of the previous subscription price in 2023/24 to 14% in 2025/26, according to a new survey from Ampere Analysis.

In dollar terms, average increases have declined from $1.67 to $1.54 over the same period, with increases averaging $1.62/17% in 2024/25. Across the full three-year period, the average individual price increase was $1.60, equivalent to 17% of the previous price. As streaming markets mature and become increasingly competitive and saturated, Ampere says the trend could indicate that streamers are moving closer to the limits of consumers’ willingness to pay, leaving less headroom for larger price increases in the future.

Ad-free tiers have seen larger price increases over the past three years, averaging $1.62 versus $1.21 for ad-supported tiers. With ad-free plans already premium-priced, the gap between the two has widened. In markets offering ad-supported tiers, the average price difference between the ad-free and advertising tiers has grown from $4.53 in August 2023 to July 2024 to $5.35 in August 2025 to July 2026 globally across the three streamers.

For Netflix in the U.S., for example, the price gap between the Standard with Ads and the Standard tiers for new subscribers grew from $8.50 in August 2023 to $11 in July 2026. As advertising becomes an increasingly important source of streaming revenue, platforms have an incentive to keep ad-supported tiers attractively priced.

Average price increases over the past three years vary across the three services, ranging from $1.73/16% for Netflix to $1.53/17% for Disney+ and $1.47/30% for Amazon. The frequency of price increases also differs.

Netflix’s price increases have remained broadly stable, according to Ampere.

Disney+ has seen the clearest shift towards more modest increases, down from an average increase of $1.86/31% in 2023/24 to $1.45/13% in 2025/26.

Amazon has made the fewest over the three-year period, likely reflecting the broader role of the Prime subscription within Amazon’s retail business.

Western Europe has seen the largest average price increases over the past three years at $1.86/16%, ahead of North America at $1.70/15% and Central and Eastern Europe at $1.68/18%. Most regional markets are moving in the same direction, with average price increases shrinking over time.

“The decline in price increases comes as streamers diversify how they monetise their audiences. says Jaanika Juntson, Senior Research Manager at Ampere Analysis. “Advertising is an increasingly important revenue stream, reducing reliance on subscription pricing alone, while password-sharing crackdowns allow streamers to generate more value from existing audiences through extra member slots. As streaming businesses mature, revenue growth is becoming less reliant on price increases, while intense competition is also making streamers increasingly mindful of how they are positioned against rivals.”

A new survey from the VAB shows that consumers across all age levels are more likely to purchase products that appear in local TV news programming and that those ads also boost their opinion of the brand being advertised.

The study comes at a time when advertisers have expressed reluctance about appearing in news content given the levels of political polarization of the country and a growing push-back by publishers working to demonstrate the effectiveness of advertising in news.

The VAB worked with Dynata on the survey, which attempts to better understand the relationship between news environments and advertiser impact on adults 18 and older, those aged 18 to 34 and those between the ages of 35 to 54.

It found that ads in local TV news positively impact brand perception across audiences, with 37% of adults 18 and older saying that they had a better opinion of brands that advertise in local news (2.2 times those who disagreed the idea) and an even bigger impact among younger viewers.

Nearly half (47%) of those 18 to 34 agreed that they had a better opinion of brands that advertise in local news, 2.8 times those who disagreed.

The study also said that 31% of those younger 18 to 34 viewers were more likely to purchase a product they saw on local news, about 23% more than the 25% who said the ads in local TV news made them less likely to buy a product.

Overall 24% of all adults over 18 said they were more likely to purchase a product advertised in a breaking news story on local TV news, versus 18% who said they were less likely. Among those between the ages of 35 to 54, 25% were more likely to purchase the product versus 15% who were less likely, a 65% differential.

Brands advertising in national TV news also saw an uplift in the number of people being more likely to buy a product.

Among the hard to reach younger 18 to 34 demo, 28% said they were more likely to purchase a product advertised in national TV news, versus 22% who were less likely. Overall 22% of those 18 and older were more likely to purchase versus 16%, and 24% of those between the ages of 35 and 54 were more likely to purchase, versus only 14% being less likely.

Free speech is easy to defend when we agree with the speaker. The real test comes when someone says something we find offensive, foolish or downright wrong.

That is why conservatives should pay close attention to the controversy surrounding Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr and ABC. This is not fundamentally about Jimmy Kimmel, liberal media bias or whether Americans enjoy late-night television. It is about something much more important: Should the federal government use its regulatory power to pressure broadcasters because government officials dislike what is being said on the air?

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), certainly no liberal, understood the danger immediately.

After Carr warned that broadcasters could face consequences following Kimmel’s controversial comments about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Cruz objected strongly. He compared Carr’s “easy way or hard way” language to something out of a mob movie.

Cruz’s larger point was common sense: Conservatives may enjoy seeing a liberal television personality put under pressure today, but what happens when political power changes hands?

Imagine a Democratic FCC chairman telling a conservative television network: Change your programming, discipline your host or your broadcast licenses may receive some special attention.

Conservatives would rightly be outraged.

The Constitution does not change depending upon which political party controls Washington.

Government should not be deciding which political opinions are acceptable. It should not be rewarding friendly broadcasters and intimidating hostile ones. And it certainly should not be using licenses, investigations or regulatory reviews as political weapons.

ABC has now gone to court, arguing that the FCC’s actions were motivated, at least in significant part, by hostility toward viewpoints expressed in its programming. That allegation will have to be tested in court. But the broader constitutional principle should not require a judge to explain it to us.

Government retaliation against speech is dangerous whether the target is MS NOW, Fox News, ABC, a conservative radio host or a liberal comedian.

We have seen versions of this movie before.

For decades, conservatives complained with considerable justification about government policies that could pressure broadcasters over their programming. The old Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to present contrasting viewpoints on controversial public issues. Whatever its original intentions, conservatives came to understand that government supervision of “fairness” could easily become government supervision of political speech.

There is also the history of Rupert Murdoch. In the 1980s, Congress passed legislation that specifically interfered with temporary FCC waivers affecting Murdoch’s newspaper and television holdings in New York and Boston. A federal appeals court ultimately found that Congress had improperly singled him out.

The lesson should have lasted longer than one generation.

The Supreme Court expressed the principle beautifully all the way back in 1886. A law can look perfectly fair on paper yet become unconstitutional when government officials enforce it with what the Court famously called “an evil eye and an unequal hand.”

Put that into everyday language: Government cannot use neutral-looking rules to punish people it doesn’t like.

That principle applies equally to Republicans and Democrats.

There is an even simpler answer for conservatives who believe ABC, Disney or other major media organizations are hopelessly liberal.

Compete.

That is what free-market capitalism is supposed to mean.

Build better television networks. Create stronger digital platforms. Invest in newspapers. Finance filmmakers and documentary producers. Develop new streaming services. Support talented conservative journalists, comedians and commentators. And if wealthy conservatives believe an existing media company can be run better, they are perfectly free to buy shares, organize investors and attempt to acquire control through lawful market transactions.

Elon Musk bought Twitter and transformed it into X. Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post. Wealthy Americans routinely invest in media organizations because they understand the enormous influence that comes with controlling platforms and distributing ideas.

That is capitalism.

Using government regulatory power to frighten media companies is something very different.

I have spent much of my professional life in broadcasting and media. I know firsthand that broadcasters operate in a regulated environment. The public airwaves are not identical to a printing press or someone’s personal social-media account. The FCC has legitimate responsibilities involving spectrum, licensing, ownership and technical standards.

But those legitimate responsibilities make restraint even more important.

When the same government agency that regulates your license begins criticizing your political programming, every broadcaster understands the enormous imbalance of power.

That is precisely why conservatives should be especially careful.

We spent decades warning that government bureaucracies could be weaponized against people because of their politics. We cannot suddenly decide that weaponization is acceptable when our side controls the weapon.

Jimmy Kimmel can be criticized. Viewers can turn him off. Advertisers can walk away. ABC executives can fire him. Competitors can defeat him in the marketplace.

Those are all consequences of freedom.

But government intimidation is not the answer.

The First Amendment was not written to protect popular speech. Popular speech rarely needs protection. It exists precisely because unpopular, irritating and offensive speech will inevitably tempt those in power to silence it.

Today the target may be a liberal comedian.

Tomorrow it could be a conservative broadcaster.

If we believe in free speech, we must defend the principle even when we dislike the person exercising it.

And if conservatives believe liberal media organizations have too much influence, the answer is wonderfully American:

Compete with them. Outperform them. Or buy them.

Just don’t ask the government to silence them.

ESPN delivered the most-watched WNBA game ever on cable as the Atlanta Dream-Indiana Fever matchup averaged 2.6 million viewers on Sunday, August 16.

The telecast ranks as the most-watched WNBA regular-season or postseason game ever on cable. The audience was up 178% compared to last year’s ESPN regular season average. The game peaked at 4 million viewers from 7:15-7:29 p.m. ET.

Leading into the game, WNBA Countdown presented by Google Pixel averaged 452,000 viewers on ESPN, up 33% compared to last year’s ESPN regular season average.

The second game of ESPN’s Sunday doubleheader also delivered a record audience, as the Phoenix Mercury celebrated Diana Taurasi’s jersey retirement. Portland Fire-Phoenix Mercury averaged 1.4 million viewers, the most-watched non-Indiana regular-season WNBA game ever on ESPN and up 46% from last year’s ESPN regular-season average.

Through 25 games, the WNBA on ESPN networks is averaging 1.4 million viewers, up 16% compared to the comparable point last season.

NEW YORK—Gracenote’s Q3 2026 Data Hub analysis shows rapid growth for sports-related ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels and programming over the last year.

Overall the number of FAST channels classified as sports rose 13.8% year over year to 264. Over the same period, unique sports program titles increased 31.2%, while individual games and events distributed across FAST climbed 37.5%.

Each measure captures a different dimension of the FAST sports market, the researchers noted.

Channel count tracks FAST channels classified as sports, while program title count reflects the breadth of distinct offerings. Because a single sports program title can encompass many games or competitions, tracking them individually provides a fuller picture of the volume of sports distributed across FAST.

The analysis also found that in July, sports programming appeared on 20 FAST channels outside the sports category. The pattern resembles traditional television, where sports serves as both destination programming on dedicated channels and as part of lineups centered on other genres.

In general, sports programming also grew faster than the overall FAST category. Globally, FAST channel count increased 17.5% year over year to 2,172, compared with 18.6% gains in total video distribution and 19.4% in TV program titles.

The resulting larger sports inventory gives FAST programmers greater flexibility to create varied schedules and reduce reliance on frequently repeated content, the researchers explained. More broadly, the findings suggest that competitive differentiation across FAST will increasingly be shaped by the range and volume of programming within the ecosystem—not channel count alone.

The Gracenote Data Hub is a set of data visualizations tracking the volume and composition of programming available across leading global subscription video-on-demand services (SVOD) and FAST channels. Derived from Gracenote Global Video Data and updated quarterly, the Data Hub covers Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Disney+, HBO Max, Netflix and Paramount+, as well as more than 2,170 FAST channels.

Q3 Data Hub reporting pairs program title counts with data on individual episodes, games and events, offering a more granular view of programming distribution and revealing changes beneath topline catalog and channel counts.

We settled in for the night. The episode started. My elderly in-laws couldn't follow the popular Western's dialogue, so I reached for the remote to turn on captions. Simple enough, I thought.

On the first streaming app, the process was seamless: enlarge the text, add a dark background block, position it so it didn’t obscure the actors’ faces. Done in seconds. Then we switched apps for a movie, and the captions shrank to a font barely visible against a bright blue sky, with no size control and no way to reposition them.

Frustrated, I jumped to a third app and discovered there was no way to turn on captions from inside the video player at all. I had to exit the movie and dig through the streaming device's system settings.

A night meant for relaxation became a string of small, unnecessary aggravations. Multiply that by the tens of millions of households juggling four or five streaming apps, and you have a design failure that's rarely discussed with the seriousness it deserves.

The Problem We Already Solved Once
This is the same problem the industry already solved in hardware. For years, the “cable drawer” was a rite of passage: one proprietary connector for the phone, a different wide-pin connector for the tablet, a third for the camera. Traveling meant packing a tangled nest of cords just to keep your devices alive.

Then, driven largely by the EU’s common-charger mandate, the industry converged on USB-C. Nobody’s product got worse. If anything, the switch unlocked value. Manufacturers stopped competing on how they could lock customers in, and started competing on what their products could actually do.

Streaming is Repeating the Same Mistake
Every app is a new dialect. Streaming interfaces are running the hardware maze all over again, just without the cords. Every time a viewer switches apps and has to play detective to find the skip button, adjust playback speed, or turn on captions, the platform is taxing the viewer’s attention and treating a basic accessibility need as an afterthought.

Captions are not new technology. They are not some cutting-edge feature streaming apps are struggling to invent. Broadcast television has operated under federal captioning standards for decades. The technology and the precedent both already exist. What’s missing is the industry’s willingness to agree on how it should look and behave from app-to-app.

Consistency is a Form of Respect
We’ve already solved this kind of coordination problem elsewhere in consumer life. Play, pause, and fast-forward symbols mean the same thing regardless of language. Traffic lights dictate identical behavior worldwide. Power icons and QWERTY keyboards converged on standard forms because confusion has a measurable cost in time, accessibility, and trust.

Streaming platforms are one of the few remaining corners of consumer technology that still treat basic navigation as proprietary territory.

What This Reveals About Lasting Value
I’ve spent my career on the brand, creative, and commercial side of media products, and the pattern is consistent across every digital shift I’ve watched: the companies that build lasting enterprise value are the ones that obsess over the last mile of the experience, not the ones chasing the next feature. Beautiful content tied to a frustrating interface is still a product failure.

In a market saturated with choice, the real luxury isn’t more features. It's less friction.

The Real Question Every Interface Answers
Consistency is a form of respect. A universal charging port and a predictable caption menu are answering the same question for the customer: did you think about me, or did you just ship something and call it innovation?

Streaming platforms happen to be making this failure highly visible right now, but the rule applies to any company running a digital ecosystem. Every time we force a customer to relearn our dialect, we’re making them do our job for us.

What Comes Next
The companies willing to put ego aside and agree on a shared standard for captions, for playback controls, for the basic grammar of the remote won’t just make viewers’ evenings easier. They’ll be the ones customers trust the next time they’re choosing where to spend $15 a month. That trust is how loyalty actually gets built, and it’s worth more than any proprietary menu design ever will be.

The technology to fix this already exists. What’s missing is an industry willing to sit down together and use it.

HENDERSON, Nev.—While the FIFA World Cup 2026 broke viewing records in the U.S. on linear TV and on streaming platforms, new data from Gaming Compliance International (GCI) suggests that an enormous amount of illegal streaming also occurred around the world. Its first complete global measurement of illegal streaming across the 2026 FIFA World Cup, estimates that there were 174.3 billion qualifying illegal stream views of 90 seconds plus globally across the tournament.

The analysis also found that:

• 174.3 billion qualifying illegal stream views of 90 seconds or more globally across the tournament
• 1.68 billion average qualifying illegal stream views of 90 seconds plus per match, globally
• 6.2 billion qualifying illegal stream views of 90 seconds plus globally for the Spain vs Argentina Final
• 95% of qualifying illegal stream views of 90 seconds plus globally carried advertising for unregulated gambling

The estimate is derived from GCI's global monitoring and marketplace intelligence, using multiple proprietary and third-party licensed data sources.

A qualifying illegal stream view requires at least 90 seconds of streaming, denoting a "committed view". This is a stream-view measure, not a unique viewer count. The methodology accounts for stream interruptions, forced refreshes, reloads, mirror switches and channel resets throughout each match.

GCI's analysis also highlighted a dark nexus between illegal streaming and unregulated online gambling with heavy ad loads for unregulated gambling in the illegal streams.

GCI monitoring shows that illegal streamers can receive payment for advertising and referring audiences to unregulated gambling, with affiliate deals offering between 25% and 50% of net gaming revenue produced by unregulated gambling operators from referred customers.

The result is a powerful illegal economy: premium sports content attracts mainstream audiences; illegal streaming monetizes that attention; and unregulated gambling pays to acquire those audiences.

This relationship was previously identified by GCI in Great Britain. Analysis released in January 2026 found 3.1 billion illegal stream views of 90 seconds plus across the Top 10 sports in Great Britain during 2024 and another 1.6 billion during the first half of 2025, with unregulated gambling advertising present upon 89% of illegal sports streams.

The GCI study found that the World Cup demonstrated the same relationship at global scale.

Overall, GCI estimated the 2026 FIFA World Cup would generate $593 billion in global online betting handle — the value of money wagered on World Cup betting online. Of that total, $409 billion — 69% — was unregulated, compared with $184 billion — 31% — regulated.

While regulated operators saw record activity, the majority of wagering value flowed through offshore, unregulated and unlicensed channels, the study found.

Illegal streaming connects these two parts of the marketplace by delivering sports audiences to unregulated gambling operators while those consumers are watching live events and each game presents fresh betting prospects.

The commercial relationship with unregulated gambling is not the only risk associated with illegal streaming.

GCI's analysis found that video players, pop-ups and fake "click to watch in HD/4K" buttons can hide malware, spyware and keystroke loggers, exposing audiences to data harvesting and other forms of cybercrime.

"174 billion qualifying illegal stream views should remove any remaining illusion that illegal streaming is a marginal problem for sport, said Matt Holt, CEO of Gaming Compliance International (GCI). “Consumers experience one marketplace, and illegal streaming is an industrial-scale part of it — competing for the same audiences and extracting value that should support rights holders, broadcasters and the wider sports ecosystem.”

"When 95% of qualifying illegal stream views carry advertising for unregulated gambling, illegal streaming is not simply stealing content,” he added. “It is providing one of the world's largest sporting audiences as an acquisition channel for the unregulated gambling economy."

The full GCI Illegal Streaming – Global: World Cup 2026 report is available from Gaming Compliance International (GCI).

NEW YORK—Nielsen has announced a number of improvements to its Big Data + Panel currency measurement that the company says will improve its currency methodology before the new broadcast TV season and provide more accurate ratings.

The improvements include better co-viewing data in the runup to the popular fall football season, improved measurement of Hispanic audiences, updates to automatic content recognition (ACR) technology, improved demographic estimates and changes in the way it uses ARF DASH universe estimates.

“We are relentless in our pursuit of delivering the most accurate measurement possible for our media and advertising clients,” said Karthik Rao, CEO, Nielsen. “We’ve spent months working hand in hand with them and industry experts to make Big Data + Panel even more accurate.”

Nielsen said it has been working closely with its stakeholders to prepare the market for these enhancements, sharing preview data with clients to help them understand the potential impacts, while also negotiating the timing and contents of the updates with the oversight of the Media Ratings Council (MRC).

Nielsen described the new enhancements that it plans to incorporate by August 31 as follows:

• Co-Viewing: The co-viewing enhancement better incorporates the use of Nielsen’s proprietary wearable measurement devices. These are worn on the wrists of Nielsen panelists and resemble a smart watch. The wearables capture audio from TV events, shows and movies, allowing for more passive measurement that does not require a formal log in process. Because of the more passive nature of this measurement, including these devices in our measurement process will result in a more accurate picture of how many people are watching a given program.
• Latency Adjusted DASH UE (Universe Estimate): While Nielsen adopted the ARF’s DASH Universe Estimates into its currency earlier in 2026, this enhancement improves accuracy by fixing timing delays in survey data. Universe estimates are, as the name implies, an approximation of the total number of households or persons in a particular category – in this case, media consumption capabilities of U.S. homes. While previous DASH UEs were based on survey data from 2024, Nielsen is now adjusting these UEs to reflect more recent trends in consumer behavior.
• Household Demographic Assignment Model (HDAM) Enhancement: HDAM is a machine-learning tool used to determine the demographic makeup of households from Big Data providers. This update improves the process to ensure the data is more representative and does not artificially skew toward older residents.
• Integrated Weighting: Nielsen improved its weighting process to combine panel and Big Data more effectively, leading to more consistent, accurate, and reliable viewing numbers.
• Hispanic Methodology Enhancement: Nielsen now combines data from two surveys—the American Community Survey, which is conducted by the U.S. Census, and the National Hispanic Enumeration Survey—to better estimate Spanish-language universe estimates. This helps the company create a more accurate and representative picture of Spanish-speaking households.
• ACR Monitored Tuning Adjustment: This update improves the method that Nielsen uses to account for differences in the sources that Nielsen’s ACR (Automated Content Recognition) providers measure versus the sources that Nielsen measures in its panel. This improves the accuracy of the sources measured from Nielsen’s ACR providers.
• Provider B Householding: Improves the model Nielsen uses to group together big data devices into individual households for one of its ACR Big Data Providers. This results in more accurate household information from that provider.

Devoncroft’s 2026 Big Broadcast Survey (BBS) of global media tech buyers has once again ranked `IP Networking & Content Delivery’ as the top media tech trend.

Reflecting the ongoing transition to IP technologies, the result marked the sixth consecutive year (and for the seventh time in eight years) that `IP Networking & Content Delivery’ was the top trend.

Devoncroft researchers noted, however, that the margin between the top trend and the second ranked trend of ‘AI / ML / GenAI’ technologies narrowed versus 2025 BBS Global Trend Index.

‘AI / ML / GenAI’ has received a ranking of second since the 2023 BBS Global Trend Index, according to Josh Stinehour in a blog post announcing the results.

“One of the key outputs from the BBS is the annual BBS Global Trend Index,” he noted. “This is a ranking of the media industry trends that are considered by technology end-user respondents the most commercially important to their businesses in the next 2-3 years. In the 2026 survey efforts, we presented BBS respondents with a list of 23 industry trends and asked them to select the one trend that is `most important’ to their business, one trend that is `second most important’ to their business, and the other trends (plural) they consider `also very important.’

The BBS is the largest annual global study of media technology industry trends, technology purchasing plans, and benchmarking of technology vendor brands.

REMI came in number three, followed by multiplatform content delivery and automated operations, rounding out the top five.

The study reported the following ranking:

More data and information from the study is available here.

Check out TV Tech's extensive IP and Networking coverage here.

As the NBA gears up for the start of the 2026-2027 season on October 20, a new study from Guideline shows that NBA ad revenue hit a record $2.1 billion in the 2025-2026 season.

This growth was helped out by a 39% year-over-year spike in ad revenue during the NBA Finals, with ad spend rising from $183 million to $256 million for five games.

Overall, the regular season generated $870 million in revenue, while the playoffs brought in $1 billion.

Guideline also reported that streaming was up 8,481% YoY, rising to a 41% share in spending, the highest of any league ever recorded.

In addition, streaming-simulcast estimated revenue was also up 3,303% YoY, rising from $10 million in 24/25 compared to $347 million in 25/26.

However the linear ad spend declined 19% YoY, as spending from Warner Bros. Discovery shifted to Peacock and Amazon.

In contrast, playoff spending grew across every round, led by the play-in round, which was up 54% YoY.

NEW YORK—Nielsen’s June 2026 reports of The Gauge and Media Distributor Gauge reveal that the highly anticipated FIFA World Cup 2026 drove remarkable audience engagement with over 84 billion minutes viewed across Fox and NBCUniversal properties.

That viewing also pushed both distributors to June's only viewing increases in the Media Distributor Gauge.

Meanwhile, the combination of World Cup matches and NBA Finals games helped drive a 118% increase in broadcast sports viewing, and led the broadcast category to 19.8% of TV and its first increase during a June interval (+0.6 share pts.) since the inception of The Gauge in 2021.

According to the June Media Distributor Gauge, Fox exhibited the largest gain in share of TV (+0.9 pts.) compared to May, and the largest overall viewing increase among all distributors this month (+18%). The World Cup surge boosted viewing on Fox affiliates by 73%, and Fox Sports 1 was up 232%. FOX concluded the month with 7.4% of total TV watch-time and moved up to No. 5 in the Media Distributor Gauge rankings.

NBCU-Versant represented 9.1% of total TV viewing in June (+0.7 share pts.). That success, the researchers reported, was a result of two drivers: NBCU’s Telemundo served as the exclusive home to all Spanish-language World Cup coverage, which drove a 143% monthly viewing increase to its broadcast affiliates in June. Peacock also benefited from Telemundo’s World Cup coverage, as days with games exhibited a 60% audience increase on the platform over those that did not, and viewing from Hispanic audiences increased nearly 200% compared to the prior month.

Peacock’s 34% total monthly viewing increase was also due to owning June’s most-streamed title, “Love Island USA.” The six-night-per-week appointment viewing for the reality dating series generated 6.8 billion minutes across the month. Overall, Peacock gained half a share point to represent 2.3% of total TV viewing in June, its second-best share of TV to date behind February 2026.

Overall streaming usage was up about 3% compared to May, but due to it being just below the 3.1% increase for total TV usage, the category dropped back 0.1 share point to 48.5% of TV watch-time.

In addition to Peacock, several other streamers also saw monthly viewing increases, including YouTube, Netflix, The Roku Channel and Paramount Streaming (Paramount+ and Pluto TV combined), but similar to the overall streaming category, their shares were flat or down slightly. However, YouTube remained in the lead among media distributors with 13.8% of time spent.

Disney held on to the No. 2 spot among media companies with 9.6% of TV. ABC’s coverage of the five-game NBA Finals showdown between the San Antonio Spurs and eventual champion New York Knicks helped drive a 15% viewing bump for ABC affiliates in June. Each game of the series was the most-viewed broadcast telecast on days played, and Games 3, 4 and 5 were the most watched telecasts over the June interval with more than 20 million viewers a piece.

Cable represented 19.5% of television in June (-0.9 pts.) as viewing was down 2% compared to May. This was largely due to the absence of the NBA and NHL playoffs, which led to a 10% monthly decline in cable sports viewership.

Due to the fact that advertising sales for Versant are still retained by NBCUniversal, and to preserve data trends and insights in these reports, NBCU and Versant are reported together in the Media Distributor Gauge with each company’s respective share included in the Media Distributor Gauge chart.

The June 2026 interval spanned four weeks, from 06/01/2026 through 06/28/2026. Nielsen reporting follows the broadcast calendar, with weekly intervals beginning on Monday.

As the world of broadcast TV news moves into the AI era, station groups like Scripps are using the technology not only to help improve news coverage and viewer engagement, but also to reform and enhance how reporters and anchors spend their days—focusing on new workflows and adapting to how consumers stay informed.

That was the impetus behind Scripps Media’s announcement several weeks ago that it would adopt a “digital-first” approach to news coverage, in which it would prioritize streaming breaking news rather than waiting for scheduled daily newscasts. This approach reflects the reality of how consumers get their news—a development that is long overdue, according to Dean Littleton. Littleton recently became president of media for Scripps, combining leadership of the company’s enterprise television and broadcast operations in a newly created role.

The company plans to roll out its new process to a dozen of its smaller markets, with plans to increase deployment to all markets over time.

'We've Got to Change Our Business'
The changes were revealed at the same time the station group announced that 268 positions across the company were being eliminated. Littleton says Scripps had to make these changes, noting that core revenue across its approximately 60 local broadcast TV stations in more than 40 markets and 22 states is down 30%–50% from 20 years ago. The station group announced a nearly 5.4% drop in core revenue in its latest fiscal quarter, compared to the same quarter a year ago.

“A year ago we sat down and said, ‘We've got to change our business,’” Littleton told TV Tech. “So we took a step back and said, ‘What is our true north?’ And our true north is journalism. It's the journalism that will sustain us.

“So we looked at all of our processes and completely set about reinventing all of them with a focus on the consumer and how they consume content across broadcast, digital, streaming, and social platforms.”

Littleton says today’s news production process isn’t all that different than what it was 30 years ago and that, despite past promises to focus more on digital and streaming, broadcasters were not moving forward fast enough.

“I remember sitting in these meetings talking about strategy, and as much as we would walk out of those meetings and all say, ‘We're digital-first,’ we'd go right back to working on our 5:00, 6:00, or 10:00 newscast,” he said. “Meanwhile, the consumer left the party in large part, and that's been a mistake. I think we lost sight of the consumer.”

Littleton also wanted to move beyond the walled garden of a station news “app,” calling that approach “overly simplistic.”

He says Scripps needs to go where consumers are when it comes to news—giving them access to “journalism that's delivered on the platforms of their choosing, in formats native to that platform, and delivered on a schedule that fits the consumer's schedule.”

Littleton emphasizes that Scripps is increasing its focus on local news despite the recent layoffs by tapping into new AI processes that automate more of the production process.

“We are essentially reallocating resources from the production of newscasts to the development of journalism,” he said. “[We’re] moving resources from the process of creating the traditional newscast, and then investing in resources to create original reporting in our markets.”

Littleton says he wants to increase the number of reporters in local markets and believes Scripps will expand its local coverage rather than reduce it, as some critics have claimed.

“We'll see more reporters and MMJs, not fewer, with them having geographic beats so that they build expertise, and their stories are told with relevance and context in the communities that they serve,” he said. “And these communities that they're serving often are communities that have been 'news deserts' up until the point that we assigned a reporter.”

“At the end of this process, we'll have more MMJs and reporters overall than what we have today,” Littleton added.

Scripps has developed a new workflow to support its digital-first approach, according to Littleton.

“We've invented a whole new process for operating our newsrooms, where a story gets completed, and the story immediately goes into the live stream,” he said. “The technology that we've built constantly ‘stacks’ and ‘restacks’ the shows on the live stream, and the stories are prioritized based on tags that human beings assign to those stories, so the technology knows how to prioritize the content.

“Therefore, my experience as a consumer watching that live stream at 2:00 in the afternoon is different than it would have been at 1:00, because as new content has moved into the stream, the technology ‘restacked’ it based on priorities that human beings gave it,” Littleton added.

New Role: 'Executive Reporter'
Along with more automated production processes, Littleton also says the management of how news is handled is changing, with the creation of a new “executive reporter” role in each newsroom.

“This person leads the reporting resources inside each newsroom, they have a reporting background, and so their goal is to help improve the storytelling and the journalism, and their focus is on that all day long,” he said. “So we've had to rethink how management works in our newsrooms to support what is an entirely new workflow and process inside our buildings.”

To put the power of AI behind its new news workflow, Scripps developed its own news production platform called "Stacker," according to Christina Hartman, vice president of emerging technology operations at Scripps.

Producers working with Stacker create templates based on their focus—whether it be news, weather, business, or sports—and connects those subjects to local community concerns so news reports better reflect local issues.

“Stacker is the platform we built that is responsive to a template that a producer builds, as a reflection of the content strategy of the newsroom, whether it’s heavy on weather, leading with community connection stories, etc.,” she said. “The producer sets the template, and then Stacker as a platform will read what stories we have available and meet the criteria for slotting in the platform, and then it produces a draft or suggested rundown based on that daypart's template.

“It allows the producer to intuitively move stories around if they don't like the suggested order, or if they want to change some of the timing content, they could do that really easily through the platform,” Hartman added.

Better Use of Time
Hartman reiterated Littleton’s assessment of the need to use AI to free up a reporter’s time during the day.

“The amount of time that our reporters have been able to spend being in the field versus doing the shooting, editing, and versioning for social media and the web—the time spent actually with news gathering has shrunk, and the day has gotten longer,” she said. “We remind people that more and more of your day is going to things that aren't why you got into this business.”

Given the level of automation now involved in news production, Hartman stressed that everything aired is still approved by humans.

“Nothing is published or goes to air without human review and affirmative approval, and everything that we publish or take to air is originally reported, substantively written, and reviewed and approved by a human journalist,” she said. “What we have brought AI in to assist with are really the production components: the versioning, the metadata tagging, the sort of rough-cut edit, and the layout of the rundown in a suggested capacity. So from a guardrails point of view, it's structurally built into the process.”

As Scripp’s chief advocate for AI development within the company, Hartman shares her initial skepticism about AI, noting that when ChatGPT was launched nearly three years ago, her first thought was, ‘how do I keep this as far away from our newsroom as possible?’

“It's why I proposed forming AI governance,” she said. “So we started from sort of a ‘protective condition.’” she said. “What I found though is that if I was writing the guardrail and the rules around use of AI, I better know what I'm doing and be using it so that I can understand what the traps and the and the pitfalls were.”

Hartman responded to criticisms that Scripps is using AI as an easy way out to justify downsizing its news staffs.

“If this were purely a financial exercise, there are many other models that that I will tell you candidly would have been so much easier to pursue,” she said. “We could have dripped down to five-minute newscasts. We could have killed reporting and reporting roles, and maintained the facade of a newscast where you have talent that isn't even local, putting on the appearance of a local broadcast. But none of those alternatives would be true to Scripps’ value and Scripps’ promise to its communities.”

With a digital-first approach, a news story is not a finished product, but rather an evolving element that Littleton believes can help make viewers part of the narrative.

“What we are now seeing our newsrooms do with this process where you create a story and you immediately upload it and it goes into the stream, that happens throughout the day so viewers get to go along with the reporter as they develop a story,” he said. “[As the reporter] walks out of the newsroom, they record video that explains what their story is for the day, and as that story gets updated, those videos are created, and they go into the stream also. So the person watching at home gets to go along with the reporter as the story develops throughout the day.”

The fact that news workflow is being built around AI is not new, but technical changes are just one factor in the decision to the shift, according to Hartman, who characterized the new direction as “as much cultural as it is technological.”

WASHINGTON—A new Federal Communications Commission report shows that high-speed residential broadband is now more ubiquitous than ever before.

The study found that from June 2024 to June 2025, the number of Americans lacking access to 100/20 Mbps fixed terrestrial broadband service decreased by about 23%.

Over a two-year period, this reduction was approximately 43%. Today, 96.9% of Americans have access to a fixed terrestrial broadband service at 100/20 Mbps, the FCC reported.

The report also cited data showing increased competition. Twenty-three states now have more than 50% of locations served with fixed wireless at 100/20 Mbps, the FCC said.

“President Trump’s policies are delivering great results for Americans in communities all across the country,” Chairman Brendan Carr said in a statement. “The data show that speeds are up, prices are down, competition is stronger than before, and the digital divide has narrowed substantially. The FCC is putting policies in place that will further accelerate high-speed builds and extend U.S. leadership.”

The FCC voted Aug. 14 to adopt the agency’s annual Section 706 Report. Section 706 requires the FCC to report on “whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.” This year’s report is the first spanning the current Trump Administration.

Other key findings include:

• Over a two-year period, the percentage of rural Americans lacking access to 100/20 Mbps fixed terrestrial broadband service decreased by over 44%. Further, with the inclusion of satellite, 100/20 Mbps rural broadband deployment is nearly universally available in rural areas.
• The number of Americans lacking access to mobile 5G with a minimum speed of 35/3 Mbps declined by over 30% over a two-year period. Today, almost 95% of American homes and businesses are covered by 5G at 35/3 Mbps speeds.
• The number of competitive options available to Americans also continues to grow. As of June 2025, 77% of Americans have access to three or more fixed services at 100/20 Mbps, and 43.4% of Americans have access to three of more fixed terrestrial services at 100/20 Mbps.

The FCC also cited data from other sources showing that speeds are up, prices are down, and competition is stronger than before:

• Speeds are Up – Wireless download speeds increased by 51% in 2025. Average upload and download speeds for fixed wireless are up 36.9% and 25.1% respectively between late 2024 and early 2026, according to Ookla data. In rural areas, those numbers show upload and download speeds rose 39.8% and 28.7% respectively.
• Actual prices for wireless service have now fallen four times more during President Donald Trump’s first 18 months in office compared to the same time under President Joe Biden. Prices are declining across the board, with postpaid unlimited plans down 10% over the last year. Fixed prices for the most popular services are down 6% over the last year.
• The percentage of homes and businesses nationwide that have three or more service options with at least 100/20 speed increased 4.85% from December 2024 to December 2025.

More data and information is available here.

NBCUniversal’s expanded partnership with YouTube is being presented as a streaming distribution deal, but its larger significance lies in how both companies are positioning themselves for the next phase of connected television.

For YouTube, the agreement strengthens its role as a starting point for television viewing. For NBCUniversal, it creates a broader path for Peacock’s programming, sports and entertainment brands to reach audiences across one of the world’s most heavily used video platforms.

Owning the Starting Point
That matters because the most valuable position in CTV is no longer simply owning popular shows, movies or sports. It is owning the starting point: the screen viewers open first when they sit down to watch.

YouTube already competes with Netflix, traditional television and other streaming services for viewing time on the largest screen in the home. Adding Peacock to YouTube Premium gives subscribers another reason to open YouTube first and remain there for television shows, movies and live sports.

For NBCUniversal, the arrangement offers a practical way to put Peacock in front of more potential subscribers.

YouTube, meanwhile, is starting to look less like a single streaming app and more like a complete television destination. It can help viewers find something to watch, subscribe to it, pay for it and begin watching without leaving the platform.

That changes how streaming companies compete.

Industry executives increasingly see the Peacock agreement as a potential blueprint for what comes next. In a recent Looper Insights survey of C-suite executives across streaming services, broadcasters, agencies and CTV platforms, 73% described the Peacock/YouTube deal as very significant or game-changing, while no respondent considered it insignificant.

Nearly half, 46%, believe YouTube’s most likely next move will be securing similar bundle agreements with other major streaming services, while another 27% expect it to emerge as a universal streaming super-aggregator. Taken together, nearly three-quarters of respondents see YouTube’s next phase being driven by aggregation.

The 'Front Door'
For years, media companies focused on ensuring their apps were available on Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Google TV and smart televisions. But simply being available is no longer enough. As more content is brought together within larger platforms, the bigger question is whether viewers need to open a separate app at all.

Someone starting on YouTube might discover a Peacock show through a trailer, sports highlight, creator review, search result or recommendation. Instead of leaving YouTube and searching for the program elsewhere, the viewer may be able to move directly into the show or event.

That makes YouTube the front door. For NBCUniversal, that doorway is valuable because it creates another route to viewers who may not regularly open Peacock or otherwise consider subscribing. In an increasingly crowded streaming market, making content easier to discover can help reduce the friction between interest and viewing.

The agreement also matters for YouTube TV. The broader partnership keeps NBCUniversal’s channels within Google’s live television service while allowing YouTube to connect traditional channels, streaming shows and online video in one place.

Sports could make that connection especially powerful. A viewer might watch highlights or commentary on YouTube, receive a recommendation for an upcoming event and then move into live coverage through Peacock or YouTube TV.

For NBCUniversal, that can create additional exposure for its sports programming. For YouTube, it creates a direct path from free video to paid viewing without asking the viewer to start over on another service.

For Roku, Amazon, Apple and television manufacturers, this increases the pressure to become the place where viewers begin their search. These companies have spent years building home screens that bring apps and subscriptions together. YouTube’s advantage is that it can combine television programming with creator videos, search, fan communities and online conversation on a huge scale.

The next phase of streaming competition will therefore be about more than producing the best shows or acquiring the most valuable sports rights. It will be about becoming the place where television viewing begins.

In the changing television market, that may be the most powerful position of all.

NEW YORK—Gracenote has announced a deal with Fox’s Tubi Media Group that will see Gracenote supply advanced content discovery and advertising capabilities on Tubi Media Group properties, including Tubi and Fox One.

Gracenote's solutions provide unique identifiers, human-verified program metadata, rich imagery and standardized taxonomy that will provide improved content search and discovery capabilities for natural language queries.

As a part of the partnership, Tubi Media Group will also test Gracenote IDs in programmatic bid streams to improve contextually relevant advertising.

"Gracenote has been a valued partner, and this renewal underscores our commitment to innovation for both consumers and for advertisers across our streaming portfolio," said Paul Cheesbrough, CEO of Tubi Media Group. "As Tubi and FOX One continue to scale, we are excited about the future we're building."

"Tubi Media Group's market-leading streaming portfolio, combined with Gracenote's gold-standard content intelligence, make a powerful pairing," said Jared Grusd, CEO of Gracenote. "As the market embraces data and technology to maximize value for viewers and partners alike, Gracenote's curated and human-verified data provides an essential foundation—a definitive source of truth for entertainment experiences that keep consumers engaged."

Tubi recently announced it has reached 110 million monthly active users, with engagement growing 17% YoY and a record quarter of revenue, up 35% year over year.

In addition to record streaming levels during FIFA World Cup 2026, which saw more than 20 million viewers visit Tubi's World Cup Fox Hub, Tubi also announced that it reached an all-time high of 2.3% share of total U.S. TV viewing, according to Nielsen, and that more than 60% of its audience comprised of Gen Z and Millennials, who spend more time on Tubi than watching traditional broadcast or cable television.

Tubi's simulcast of the opening World Cup matches also delivered the most streamed English language opening match in World Cup history.

LONDON—As consumers continue to feel pressure from the rising cost of living, one researcher predicts that the increasing popularity of ad-supported streaming subscription services will reshape the streaming business.

According to Ampere Analysis, ad tiers are now the dominant monetization model in North America, and the research firm expects them to account for more than half (54%) of total subscription streaming service revenues in the region by year-end. As the world;s most mature streaming market increasingly relies on advertising to drive growth, Ampere says the region offers a clear indication of where the global streaming market is heading.

Ampere expects revenues from advertising alone will exceed $18 billion in North America this year, accounting for more than one-fifth of total subscription OTT revenues for the first time.

To illustrate how this could influence the world market, North America currently dominates the global ad-supported subscription OTT market, accounting for nearly 60% of global revenue. Platforms in this region benefit from stronger subscription ARPUs, higher CPMs, a more mature connected-TV advertising environment and a greater consumer acceptance of ads. As subscriber growth slows elsewhere, the region is suggesting the direction of travel for the global streaming market, Ampere said. Consumer goods and retail companies are leading the shift to streaming advertising, with Procter & Gamble, Amazon and Walmart accounting for 22% of U.S. subscription OTT advertising impressions so far in 2026.

Amazon’s Prime Video, which began charging subscribers a monthly fee to skip ads starting in 2023, leads the North American ad-supported subscription OTT market, with revenues expected to exceed $14 billion in 2026. In contrast, Netflix and Disney+ have encouraged users to choose their ad tiers, offering a lower price point and fewer ads.

"Advertising has become a fundamental part of streamers' business models, changing both how success is measured and the content they commission,” Ampere Analysis Research Manager Rory Gooderick said. “As subscriber growth slows in mature markets, the focus has shifted towards driving engagement and habitual viewing. The challenge now is to increase monetization without compromising the premium viewing experience that these streamers have spent years cultivating.”

NEW YORK—Nielsen Holdings has announced a definitive agreement to acquire DoubleVerify in an all-cash transaction valued at about $2.15 billion.

DoubleVerify is a leading software platform that offers solutions for verifying media quality, optimizing ad performance, and proving campaign outcomes.

The deal comes at a time when Nielsen faces increasing competition from a number of other companies and many industry players continue to express frustration with the state of audience measurement in the streaming era.

The combination, Nielsen said, would to provide clients clear, verified, and independent data and would help advertisers improve their campaigns and outcomes.

The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027.

“Over the last few years, Nielsen has undergone a fundamental transformation — accelerating product innovation; expanding our platform across the full media lifecycle, from discovery and planning through measurement and outcomes; and strengthening our financial foundation,” Karthik Rao, CEO of Nielsen, said in announcing the deal.

“This combination will unite two organizations focused on strengthening independence and trust in advertising, Rao continued. “Joining forces with DoubleVerify will extend our capabilities deeper into the digital media industry, ensuring that the spend flowing between buyers and sellers is reaching real people in brand-suitable environments, through verified channels. As advertising workflows become increasingly automated, together we can offer publishers, advertisers, agencies, and platforms a truly independent, end-to-end partner that connects trusted audience intelligence with verified media delivery — across every screen, every channel, and every transaction – enabling superior decisions and outcomes.”

“Today’s announcement is an exciting milestone for DoubleVerify,” added Mark Zagorski, CEO of DoubleVerify. “As a private entity with the support of Nielsen, we will have access to expanded resources to deliver new, market-leading solutions that drive exceptional value for our customers and partners. DoubleVerify’s MRC-accredited quality signals, in combination with Nielsen’s deduplicated cross-screen audience measurement, will fuel genuine market innovation – a single currency that scores media on both audience delivery and media environment quality. I’m proud of the strong momentum we’ve built for DoubleVerify as the leading media effectiveness platform, the strength of our AI-powered measurement and optimization platform, and the exceptional work of our team.

Nielsen described the key benefits of the transaction as follows:

• Extends Nielsen’s Platform Across the Full Media Intelligence Stack: Nielsen’s platform already spans the entire media lifecycle — from content discovery and audience planning through cross-platform measurement and outcome attribution. DoubleVerify adds the layer of independent verification that the impressions underpinning every campaign are real, viewable, brand-suitable, and free from invalid traffic. Today, advertisers must reconcile these signals across separate vendors. The combination unifies them into a single, integrated platform covering audience, context, and delivery quality.
• Expands Nielsen’s Addressable Market into High-Growth Digital Channels: DoubleVerify sits at the operational core of how digital advertising is bought and sold, with integrations embedded into the day-to-day workflows of the platforms, publishers, and agency groups that execute the world’s largest campaigns. Nielsen products already power media decisions across television, streaming, audio, and sports. By coming together, Nielsen will reach across the full breadth of the $240 billion digital advertising segment, giving clients a better partner as budgets continue to shift toward digital channels. The combination delivers global, end-to-end, independent, transparent measurement and optimization across linear TV, CTV, social, mobile and AI platforms.
• Preserves Independent Verification Standards the Industry Depends On: The combined company will continue to support the open, independent standards that are highly valued by global advertisers. This includes preserving DoubleVerify’s industry-leading capabilities in invalid traffic detection, viewability and brand suitability.
• Helps Enable a Reliable, Trusted Shift to AI in Advertising: As AI-driven planning, activation, and optimization shape how campaigns are built and executed, the combined company will help enable the advertising industry to adopt AI with confidence, with the verified data, outcome signals, infrastructure, and platform integrations necessary to execute the spectrum of advertising workflows.

Under the terms of the agreement, Nielsen will acquire DoubleVerify for $13.60 per share in an all-cash transaction, representing a 30% premium to DoubleVerify’s 60-trading day volume weighted average price as of August 5, 2026. The value per share implies an enterprise value of approximately $2.15 billion for DoubleVerify.

The transaction, which has been approved by the Boards of Directors of both companies, is expected to close by the first quarter of 2027, subject to approval by DoubleVerify shareholders, receipt of required regulatory approvals, and satisfaction of other customary closing conditions.

The transaction will be financed through a combination of committed debt financing provided by Barclays, BofA Securities and Citi, incremental equity financing and cash on hand at Nielsen.

Upon completion of the transaction, DoubleVerify will become a privately held company as part of Nielsen and DoubleVerify common stock will no longer be listed on any public market. DoubleVerify will continue to operate under the DoubleVerify name and brand.

Funds affiliated with Providence Equity Partners LLC (“Providence”) that own approximately 11.8% of DoubleVerify’s outstanding shares of common stock as of August 5, 2026, have agreed to vote their shares in favor of the transaction. As part of the transaction, Providence will conclude its investment upon close.

Imagine building a TV business based on streaming IP-packetized local TV channels to viewers on a market-by-market basis. Who would have thought of that?

Well, it turns out the broadcasters, broadcast vendors and CE companies responsible for developing the ATSC 3.0 standard aren’t the only ones. In early July, a tech company called “FreeCast,” specializing in providing “streaming Platform-as-a-Service” solutions, threw its hat into the ring with the announcement of FreeCast Cities.

The service combines local TV channels, free streaming channels, premium television services, on-demand entertainment and subscription management into a single consumer experience. Currently in beta, FreeCast will enable consumers to access this content via supported TVs, mobile devices, computers and connected streaming platforms, according to a press release.

The FreeCast Cities announcement came about three months after a company called Landover Saturn 5 proposed to the Federal Communications Commission that it conduct an auction of a nationwide block of TV channels 28–36.

The two are unrelated in most respects but share a common thread: They both give the FCC even more to consider as it works on its final report and order regarding ATSC 3.0, which is expected to be out before the end of the year.

To be sure, neither proposal is a slam dunk. FreeCast must successfully navigate its way through rights negotiations with stations and their networks before it has a chance of fulfilling what it calls its “consumer-focused design philosophy,” namely, “One City. One Login. All Your Television.”

Regarding the Landover proposal, the FCC has much to consider, not the least of which is whether it wishes to empower a private entity to conduct the proposed auction on its behalf.

What’s worrisome is these proposals further muddy the waters for the commission as it considers its NextGen TV report and order—something a television industry seeking clarity on sunsetting today’s DTV standard and an expeditious transition can ill afford.

A Bit Overwhelming
A month or so ago, I reported about my stroke and my upcoming open-heart surgery to bypass four significantly clogged cardiac arteries.

Since then, I have undergone the surgery and am convalescing at home. While I am not ready to run down the aisles at NAB Show any time soon, the doctors assure me that after my outpatient rehab is complete, I will be back in the swing of things. In fact, following the operation, my surgeon told me I now have “the heart of a 20-year-old.”

I also wanted to report that the outpouring of support, well wishes and prayers from both family and friends, as well as many in the TV industry, has been a bit overwhelming. I want to thank everyone for their supportive texts, emails, phone calls, cards and flowers. They have meant the world to me.

As I sign off, I will echo the closing of my last column. I am eager to put this all behind me and get back in the swing of things, reporting on our fast-changing industry.

The term “cloud” originated from diagrams of large-scale data networks and, for a long time, the cloud was just a “means to transfer information from one place to another using someone else’s computer.” In time, privately controlled services emerged that allowed users to store data with “cloud service providers,” new businesses that permitted access to their “private” data from anywhere.

In truth, the user’s data lived on computer systems owned and hosted by a cloud service provider. Those physical places became known as data centers, consisting of racks and racks of computers, storage devices and networking devices that communicate and/or support many compute functions. Such services must be capable of expanding—as necessary—to meet the user demands for short-term, long-term and immediately accessible data housed in locations typically unknown to those end users.

Private Clouds
Large companies often have their own “scaled” data centers located at their physical buildings, which allow for personalized management and cost a great deal to fabricate, support and manage.

Today, there are two general meanings of this “data center” terminology:

• It’s where the term “on-prem”—meaning “on the premises” comes from—inferring that self-managed compute services (usually servers and computer elements), storage and input/output network management are physically placed in the company’s owned-and-operated facility (such as a hardened warehouse full of electronics, cooling, backup power and security).
• You can host your data in your own datacenter “on prem,” or you can host it with another service “as in the cloud.” Private companies are now building entire data centers to either outsource/lease space (only) or house entire systems solutions for users to place their own gear into or rent the service provider’s systems on a “square-foot” basis or a “rack-by-rack” space basis—with or without maintenance or support by a third-party organization.

Cloud Structure
A cloud can be considered a business when it is owned and operated by a “recognized” entity such as Amazon (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft (Azure), Google, etc. But they may not be the only “cloud resources”—companies that offer software services under their own “private” cloud (e.g., Wasabi or Comcast). Such cloud organizations or structures may also provide intercloud offerings, allowing them to scale across larger data sets, bridge various specialized “data centers” or even sublet entire facilities to a particular single entity as needed.

For on-prem solutions or even large-scale public data centers, monitoring platforms are “managed over-the-top subsystems” that may drive an entire solution set platform (data center) or link groups of data centers. For an on-prem environment, such a platform could require a large up-front commitment by the organization.

If your organization is employing a cloud-based DevOps solution with rapid iteration and continued live or real-time practices that involve continuous results reporting and direct-to-developer feedback, though, it may be difficult to predict or understand the depth of commitment necessary on the front end, let alone what might occur as the systems scale upward in response to growing needs for client services or compute and storage expandability.

Self-deployed monitoring systems may also generate a lot of unused capacity and wasted resources. That is unpredictable as the software-solutions processes move through the various “bring-to-market” stages. Even when the DevOps solution is built for internal or local operations only, the self-built/self-managed monitoring platform can overwhelm the IT or engineering services with unpredictable consequences.

Today, there are many potential open-source monitoring solutions available to organizations; some strictly on-prem and others entirely cloud-based. Any improperly integrated solution could generate a lot of unused capacity and wasted resources—as reported by service providers, vendors and end users.

That’s not to mean an experienced organization familiar with today’s most relevant trends (and with sufficient cloud management solutions experts in-house) should not or cannot develop a comprehensive, scalable monitoring solution that fits its needs. However, the risks and costs can escalate as the environment expands or as the scale mushrooms. It is a complex balancing act that can make or break the organization’s performance or profitability.

Before venturing into this domain, be sure to understand the overall solutions development processes—especially the real-time management core initiatives and the harmonization of the operation’s IT functions.

First, Defining DevOps
DevOps is a collaborative approach that merges software development and IT operations—and is nearly always a live or real-time environment. DevOps typically combines people, processes and automated tools to build, test and release software much faster and with greater reliability.

Throughout the DevOps process, software is constantly monitored while in development or in use. During the testing and “spinning up” process, user issues generate large amounts of data and feedback that go directly back to developers to be quickly improved. Once deployed, the procedures usually continue and may require more capabilities than an “on-prem” solution might be able to handle.

In the cloud, DevOps may function by using “on-demand” cloud infrastructure (Fig. 1) to automate software delivery, manage infrastructure through code and auto-scale resources dynamically to meet delivery needs, adjusting the flows by reacting to anomalies, including failures, crashes or data overruns. In the cloud, instead of manually configuring physical servers, teams write code to provision environments, test automatically and deploy updates while continuously monitoring application health.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the process by which operations teams define network servers, databases and environments using configuration files (such as Terraform or AWS CloudFormation) rather than manual clicks in a portal.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) is an accompanying cloud-native service (such as AWS CodePipeline or GitHub Actions) that permits the automatic testing of code as soon as developers commit it. Once verified, the cloud platform automatically pushes the software update into production.

Data Centers
One of the “DIY” challenges is when an organization is driven to write all of the integrations itself and then forced to manage those integrations long-term. Novel “open-source solutions” require a great deal of upkeep, attention and maintenance.

Users report they almost need to have a Ph.D. to set up effective and sufficient monitoring capabilities that can address the ever-growing needs of a DevOps environment.

Some (but certainly not all) system solutions vendors may either make it difficult to figure things out intentionally or require long-term solutions support contracts, resorting to extensive Googling or digging into all kinds of online forums for answers. Much of that information will likely be inapplicable to the organization’s actual needs without considerable DevOps adoption (while under live operations).

Monitoring for Success
Effective end-to-end monitoring is crucial for enterprise DevOps teams to ensure high-quality, scalable and secure software delivery across complex environments.

Key requirements for enterprise DevOps monitoring platforms (Fig. 2) must be properly selected to ensure scalable, reliable and efficient software development and operations. The cloud on its own is not generally designed to develop those platforms without a considerable amount of code or structured elements that are specifically fashioned to the needs of the user’s organization.

Effective end-to-end monitoring is crucial for enterprise DevOps teams to ensure high-quality, scalable, and secure software delivery across complex environments.

In our next installment, we will dig deeper into issues on dynamic scaling, integration and vendor support, the importance of documentation, how to establish real-time notification and developer access without infrastructure exposure and end-to-end data capture across the DevOps lifecycle.

A person is scrolling through social media and stops on a video of a real human being making a plausible claim. Nothing about the clip looks obviously fake. The lighting feels normal. The voice sounds right. It may even be genuine footage.

How does that person decide whether to believe it?

That is the real question now: not whether media can be manipulated—we already know it can. Not whether synthetic media will continue to improve; it will. The harder question is how belief gets formed when authentic-looking media is abundant and context is fragile amid constant technological innovation.

Since my column “Content Provenance: Audience Trust Is at Stake” in the December issue of TV Tech was published, confidence in the telecom sector continues to fall. According to a 2025 Gallup poll, a record-low 28% of Americans expressed a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in mass media (see chart below). The conversation around the importance of the verifiability of content authenticity, i.e. content provenance, has become pivotal.

This article does not argue that provenance can solve the trust problem; that challenge depends on a multitude of factors, including effective marketing, brand and customer strategy, as well as human emotion, environment and temperament. Rather, we argue that provenance is now a necessary infrastructure for making digital content more transparent and defensible. The need for authenticity is not coming soon; it is already here.

Over the past two years, meaningful progress has been made on provenance technology. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) is an industry standard for attaching provenance metadata to digital content so people can verify where media came from and whether it has been edited. It has become the center of gravity for content credentials.

As synthetic media becomes easier to create, and AI-generated images and videos become more commonplace, regulators are beginning to insist on machine-readable transparency. Article 50 of the European Union AI Act becomes enforceable on Aug. 2, and California’s AI transparency rules are moving in a similar direction. For media companies, provenance is more than a best practice. It is a capability they will need to operationalize.

Why Trust Cannot Be Engineered
People trust institutions. They trust familiar people. They trust sources their communities already recognize. They trust what aligns with their prior experiences more readily than what disrupts them. And while technology may modify some of these patterns, it does not replace them.

This is why propaganda still works in a world where authenticity tools are improving. A message does not need to be fake to be manipulative. It only needs to be framed effectively, repeated often enough and delivered by a messenger the audience is predisposed to trust. Conversely, a piece of information can be authentic in a narrow technical sense and still mislead. A real clip can be selectively edited. A true quote can be stripped of context. A genuine image can imply something false.

This is the core limitation that provenance cannot solve.

C2PA is designed to certify the history of content, not its inherent truthfulness. It can help establish where a file came from and whether its recorded history has been altered. It does not determine whether the message is honest, persuasive, manipulative or fair. It is a transparency layer, not a truth engine.

The news industry has been dealing with versions of this problem for years. User-generated content has long been highly valuable and highly risky. It feels authentic because it is often captured by real people in real moments. But that makes it easy to over-trust. “Shot by a real person” is not the same thing as “reliably framed,” “fully contextualized” or “immune from manipulation.” In some ways, that is precisely why provenance matters. In other ways, it is precisely why provenance is not a silver bullet.

AI Makes the Problem More Visible
AI has not so much created the trust problem as made it harder to ignore. For broadcasters, the more immediate issue is not whether AI can generate convincing content. It is how to preserve confidence in the provenance of content as it moves through increasingly complex production and distribution chains.

The healthiest relationship with provenance is pragmatic: use it to strengthen verification, not to outsource judgment.

That becomes especially important in broadcasting because the chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Content may be signed at capture, but downstream platforms and intermediaries can still strip or distort metadata during re-encoding or distribution. In practice, that means provenance can disappear before the audience ever sees it. For broadcasters, that means provenance technologies cannot be treated as a point solution. It must be operationalized across capture, editing, publishing, metadata management and governance.

C2PA is not a trust substitute. It is an enterprise capability that supports trust at scale.

The future is unlikely to produce a universal trust layer that makes belief automatic. That is asking too much of any technology. What it can do is provide better information.

For media executives, this creates a practical agenda.

First, treat provenance as infrastructure. Second, start where the risk is highest, especially around UGC and breaking news workflows. Third, build governance around what you capture, expose and retain. And fourth, prepare for provenance to become part of compliance architecture, not just editorial experimentation.

That is where the real opportunity lies. Not in claiming technology can manufacture trust, but in building systems that make trust easier to earn and easier to defend.

Technology can tell us where information came from. It cannot tell us what to believe. Even if it could tell us what to believe, would we?

LONDON—A new survey highlights just how important media consumption has become—with consumers in the U.K. and U.S. now spending almost 11 hours a day consuming media—and just how diverse and fragmented those habits are.

An Ampere Analysis study finds the average consumer in those markets spends more time consuming media than sleeping or working, and that consumers are increasingly selecting from a rich menu of media depending on their mood, age and needs.

“Today’s consumers have more varied media diets than ever before, selecting from an expanding menu of media depending on what they want in the moment,” Ampere Research Manager Sam Nursall said. “Whether they're looking to relax, discover something new or simply fill spare time, each medium serves a different purpose. That's today's attention economy. For advertisers and broadcasters, understanding those different moments is just as important as understanding the audience itself.”

Key findings include:

• The average U.S. or U.K. adult spends 11 cumulative hours engaged with media products every day. This includes overlapping activities, such as using a phone while watching TV or streaming.
• Streaming services (1:57), social media (1:46) and YouTube (1:35) attract the highest levels of daily media engagement.
• Consumers build their media diets around different moods and needs. Streaming services are most often used for relaxation and immersion, YouTube for discovery and lifting users’ mood, while social media is used to relieve boredom or provide distraction.
• Media diets also differ by age. Gen Alpha (age 11–15) spends the most time on YouTube (1:45) and gaming (1:56), while Gen Z (16–29) spends the most time on social media (1:54) and music services (1:20). Generation X and Baby Boomers spend relatively more time with streaming services, TV channels and live sports.
• Consumers in the U.S and U.K. access an average of 11.5 media platforms every week, including pay TV, streaming services, social media, music streaming, gaming and broadcaster VOD. Streaming services like Netflix or Disney+ account for 4.1 of these services per week. Gen Alpha accesses an average of 13.6 platforms, the highest of any age group.
• Mobile devices have expanded where media is consumed. More than half (55%) of music streaming users regularly listen outside the home, alongside 34% of podcast listeners, 20% of social media users and 11% of gamers.
• Mobile devices have also driven higher daily media engagement by making simultaneous media use easier. In the U.S. and U.K., for example, more than one-quarter (28%) of Netflix users regularly watch the service on a smartphone.
• One-third (33%) of YouTube users said they use the platform when they “want something on in the background.”

The Ampere Analysis “Attention Economy” survey was fielded in the U.S. and U.K. among respondents aged 11 to 64.

For the better part of a decade, there's a word the broadcast industry has been using to describe the move from traditional to software-defined production.

That word is transition.

But transition implies a journey from one state to another. What broadcasters are really living through is more permanent than that. They're not crossing a bridge. They're building one while keeping traffic moving on both sides.

The hybrid reality that most production operations face today isn't a phase. It's the terrain they're operating in. And the industry is only beginning to work out what that really demands.

Two Worlds, One Team
As IP and cloud-based production matured, the assumption in most technology strategies was that organizations would eventually retire traditional hardware workflows. But that hasn’t happened. Client commitments, capital cycles, rights agreements and the genuine complexity of software-defined environments have all kept legacy infrastructure in service.

This means that production teams manage both at the same time, and engineers who once worked in a single signal chain are now expected to be fluent across various architectures. That pressure isn’t always obvious, until something goes wrong.

Client expectations are moving in different directions at the same time. Some rights holders won't compromise on premium quality. Others are under real pressure to deliver faster and cheaper, sometimes for the same content through a different window. In some cases both demands land in the same contract.

The Cost of Keeping Both Engines Running
Operating in a hybrid environment is costly in ways that aren’t always easy to quantify. Maintaining two categories of infrastructure, training staff on both and building workflows that flex between them: the obvious costs are significant. But the subtler ones are too.

Every infrastructure decision now has a strategic dimension to it. Whether to extend the life of traditional kit, push harder toward software workflows and take on the short-term risk that comes with it, or route projects through different models depending on the brief, none of it is straightforward and each path brings its own complexity.

None of these are easy calls. They involve trade-offs between cost, speed, quality and flexibility. The right answer shifts with each client and project. The teams that navigate this skillfully have stopped looking for one cohesive answer and instead relied on the judgment to make the call differently each time.

Remote and Cloud: Real Gains and Real Limits
Remote and cloud production have proven their worth. The ability to draw on the right talent wherever they are, scale infrastructure around event demand and cut crew travel has truly changed how operations plan and staff major events.

But the limits of working fully distributed are also getting clearer. Some productions benefit greatly when people are in the same room, where decisions need to be made quickly and creative judgment is built through proximity. The best hybrid operations aren’t choosing between remote and on-site. They’re developing the discipline to recognize which approach will work best for any given brief, and then investing in the infrastructure to support both.

Flexibility: The Baseline Requirement
The most important shift in thinking may be that flexibility isn’t something to sell anymore. Clients expect workflows that flex to last-minute changes, support teams who are spread across different technical environments and scale without everything falling apart.

That’s a structural challenge. Not a technology challenge. The tools exist, but what production operations are still building is the confidence to lean on them and the organizational design to deploy them well.

The broadcasters and service providers who define the next phase of this industry will not be those who complete the move to software-defined production fastest. They will be those who build the judgment and workflows to operate effectively in a world where both models coexist, indefinitely, at the same time.

Hybrid production isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s the operating environment. The sooner the industry plans accordingly, the better.

NEW YORK—Comcast’s FreeWheel has launched Video Content Report, an insight tool available in FreeWheel Buyer Cloud (formerly Beeswax) that provides TV series-level data on where ad campaigns actually appeared.

Fueled by direct connection to FreeWheel Streaming Hub (FreeWheel’s ad server with natively built SSP), the report gives buyers detailed, series-level insight into post-impression delivery from premium publishers, including A+E Global Media, Spectrum Reach, Fuse Media, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Xumo.

By using publisher-sourced delivery data recorded directly through the ad server, Video Content Report gives buyers a clearer, reliable view of where campaigns ran across premium streaming environments, helping increase transparency and confidence in their CTV investments.

“CTV buyers need series-level transparency they can trust and use at scale,” said Jon Mansell, vice president, U.S. demand for FreeWheel. “What makes Video Content Report unique is the direct connection between Buyer Cloud and Streaming Hub, which enables publisher-permissioned, impression-level delivery insights from multiple premium publishers in one workflow. That gives advertisers a clearer view of where their campaigns ran while giving publishers control over how their content data is shared.”

Powered by Buyer Cloud’s connection to FreeWheel Streaming Hub and impression-level delivery data, Video Content Report provides scalable series-level transparency to confirm content alignment and brand safety, at no extra cost, while helping publishers prove the value of their premium content.

In announcing the new tool, FreeWheel stressed that it is designed to address the needs of advertisers.

Over 50% of CTV advertisers say they would shift spend to publishers that provide show- or series-level transparency, according to new research from Advertiser Perceptions. As demand for this level of visibility grows, FreeWheel said it is helping make series-level reporting even easier to access and apply at scale. By bringing publisher-sourced insights into a more consistent workflow, Video Content Report gives buyers a clearer way to understand delivery across partners and use those insights to guide future planning and investment decisions.

Some advertisers and agencies applauded the launch. “As investment in programmatic CTV continues to grow, we as buyers need transparency that is accurate, scalable and easy to access,” said Mike Treon, head of CTV and video strategy for PMG. “FreeWheel’s Video Content Report addresses a real gap in the market by giving us series-level visibility directly within Buyer Cloud, helping us better understand campaign delivery across premium video without relying on one-off reporting requests or adding unnecessary reporting steps.”

The launch builds on FreeWheel’s broader commitment to giving buyers more transparency, control, and customization through Buyer Cloud, in addition to direct publisher connections. As a customizable demand-side platform built for premium video and connected to FreeWheel Streaming Hub, Buyer Cloud gives agencies and advertisers direct access to FreeWheel’s premium supply, robust decisioning tools and exclusive reporting capabilities designed to support more informed, efficient, and accountable media buying.

Video Content Report is now available in Buyer Cloud for all clients at no additional cost.

With cable operators rebranding themselves as “broadband providers,” the term “cable TV” has fallen out of favor in recent years. The impact of cord cutting, increasing retransmission fees, increased competition from streaming services and changing demographics have all contributed to an industry approach that now considers “video” just another service from the local operator.

While the larger providers can often protect themselves from the changes in consumer interests, smaller, independent cable operators have to continuously evaluate the rising costs and routinely ask themselves, “is it still worth it for me to offer a video service?”

That was the focus of a panel discussion, "Video is Evolving: How to Win in a Changing Video Ecosystem" at The Independent Show held by the NCTC at Disney World this week.

I moderated a panel that included Mark Rankin, CFO, of Summit Broadband in Orlando, Geoff Shook, President & GM, Buckeye Broadband in Toledo, Ohio, and Sandra Tilley, senior vice president of Brand Strategies, EPB, Chattanooga, Tenn.-based provider of broadband services.

‘Hard Conversations’
Providers now see offering video as a service as one of numerous options that will attract and keep customers rather than one that will automatically improve a broadband provider's bottom line, the panelists said.

“In and of itself, I don't believe that video is still a strategic product on its own,” Rankin said. “Having said that, though, I think you need to think about where you deploy it, how you deploy it, how it helps broadband, and certainly as a bulk provider in Florida, serving 55-plus communities, it's a strategic product for us in how we go to market and win business.”

Shook agreed that video is still essential, but with caveats.

“Our philosophy is there'll always be a video product as a part of our catalog, [but] I think that we continue to have the hard conversations over what that product looks like and how we make it affordable,” he said.

Shook acknowledged the importance of his shrinking list of “video-only” customers and said “we don't want to walk away from that,” but he also cited the growing costs that have forced Buckeye to reconsider what channels to carry on a regular basis.

“We've made some really difficult decisions regarding carriage because we just cannot afford to continue to take video rate increases from the programmers,” he said. “Our customers push back and when they get a change in their bill they don't just shop video, they shop everything and so we've walked away from several programmers, but we've also provided resources and options for those customers to find another way to to still get the video and still depend on us to help facilitate it.”

EPB’s customer base is primarily older, according to Tilley, so video still plays an important role. Nevertheless, she continues to look for new ways to partner with third parties to maintain and improve their services.

“We've been able to maintain our market share, and we haven't seen any decline in our broadband because of a loss of video,” she said. “But we do have a customer base which is primarily older that has a high value, and we're looking at how we can continue to offer a quality product. We're working with TiVo now to try to see how much cost we can get out of it by going managed, and we think that that allows us to hold our pricing, keep it at a value for our customers, and still make a short, small margin.

“We don't look at video as a big margin producing product, but I will say we are looking for anything that is the right next thing to bundle to protect our broadband market share,” Tilley added. “So we're going to continue to watch what happens with video and look at maybe broadband TV.”

Simple and Seamless
With increased competition from streaming services, particularly in live sports, panel members agreed on the importance of making it simpler for customers to navigate the increasing variety of sources as well as the complexity and fragmentation of the current scenario.

In response to this, Rankin said he isn’t as concerned about the fact that more big ticket sports are now only available on paid streaming services.

“We don't see that as the bigger problem; it's finding it that’s the challenge and the complexity that customers feel,” he said. “It's middleware that's hard to navigate that is a problem. So the more that our vendors can help us with middleware that makes it easy for customers, I think will make a big difference.”

Tilley cited a campaign by EPB to help their customers better understand the changing video landscape and provide the needed assistance, regardless of who they choose to sign up with—whether it’s their video service or a streaming bundle.

“About five years ago, we rolled out what I call our ‘cord-cutting campaign,’ but really the whole point of it was to say, ‘we want you to have TV the way you want it; we want you to have choice, and we're here to help you,” she said. “Whether it's ours that you want to buy, if you do, we want to sell that to you, and we want it to be a product you like. If it's not ours, we want to help you learn how to stream and find what you're looking for.”

Buckeye Broadband offers a program called “Brain and Stream Assist,” that helps its customers consolidate billing, passwords and navigation, according to Shook.

“We have a pay call center that is there to help those that need the help to figure out how to set up their billing and remember their passwords and connect through to the apps that they choose,” he said. “Our positioning is that we've heard from multiple generations that our video consumers wanted choice and control.”

Understanding how their customers consume TV is essential to a better overall experience, regardless of their age, Rankin added.

“The younger generations probably prefer an app-based search experience, and certainly the older demographic, they love the guide and the big remote,” he said.

Rankin pointed to the TiVo Manager app in helping Summit to “marry” those environments.

“TiVo Manager is doing that well for us,” he said. “We can give the grid guide experience and still create that app experience. And it brings deep search capabilities, such that if you are subscribing to Paramount or Netflix or something else, you know your search will present those options to you. And so, so we think that's the best of both worlds right now.”

Tilley summed up the panel’s philosophy by noting the delicate balance small independent operators need to maintain to continue to offer video while keeping an eye on the bottom line.

“We try to keep the price as affordable as possible while covering costs at a small margin,” she said. “That's our philosophy of how we approach video.”

NEW YORK and BELLEVUE, Wash.—Fox Advertising has extended its partnership with iSpot with new features to improve attribution and outcomes of advertising campaigns.

The agreement builds on a relationship between Fox and iSpot that began in 2015, when Fox first adopted iSpot’s real-time TV ad measurement capabilities across its portfolio. Since then, the collaboration has evolved to include creative measurement, audience verification and business outcomes attribution across both linear and streaming environments.

Most recently, Fox Advertising and iSpot worked together to deliver always-on attribution and outcomes measurement through Fox AdStudio, Fox’s recently launched unified data and technology platform. This enables brands to drive business results across screens, platforms and audiences.

“The Fox AdStudio was built to help advertisers do more than simply reach audiences at scale,” said Kym Frank, senior vice president, research at Fox. “Our partnership with iSpot has allowed us to prove how connecting with Fox’s engaged fandoms drives measurable business outcomes across every screen, giving advertisers greater transparency, accountability and confidence in their investments.”

The expanded capabilities come at a time when advertisers are increasingly demanding performance-driven solutions.

To address that need, Fox and iSpot have worked to offer what they call "actionable insights" that go beyond traditional reach and frequency metrics. Through Fox AdStudio’s integration with iSpot’s attribution capabilities, advertisers have access to near real-time measurement that links ad exposures directly to consumer actions, delivering a more comprehensive view of campaign effectiveness.

The two companies also reported that over the last year, the partnership has demonstrated strong performance across multiple categories and campaigns throughout Fox’s portfolio:

• Ads appearing on Fox Networks (Fox, Fox News, FS1, Fox Deportes and Fox Business Network) delivered 142.26 billion TV ad impressions, accounting for over 10% of the total ad market and two of the top six networks by TV ad reach (Fox News, Fox).
• Among top 50 networks by reach, Fox has three of the top 10 by attention or effectiveness: FS1, Fox News, Fox.
• In April 2026, Fox drove strong lift in location conversion rates for some of the top brands in the world. In one instance, Fox helped a quick serve restaurant drive an average lift of 148% vs. a 54% average lift generated from the rest of their linear buy that same month.

“These results reinforce the value of combining premium video inventory with advanced outcomes measurement that is both proven and trusted,” said Stuart Schwartzapfel, executive vice president of media partnerships at iSpot. “Together with Fox, we’re helping advertisers move beyond assumptions and understand exactly how campaigns are performing in the real world.”

IRVING, Texas—A new analysis from Horowitz Research highlights the importance of multicultural audiences for the record viewing seen during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which concluded with a historic final and record-setting audience engagement of nearly 63 million Americans watching the event.

In addition to the 38.9 million viewers turning into the English-language soccer telecast on Fox, an additional 23.9 million viewers watched the Spanish-language telecast on Telemundo.

At the same time, Telemundo and Peacock reported Spanish-language streaming engagement in the U.S, with group-stage digital average minute audience up 251% versus the tournament in 2022. These results reflect a broader transformation in the media landscape, where multicultural audiences and digital platforms are driving growth, Horowitz reported.

Those results confirmed longstanding research from Horowitz highlighting the importance of multicultural audiences, making clear that multicultural audiences are a central part of the sports audience. The scale of Spanish-language viewing and the outsized role of Hispanic fans highlight how deeply soccer is embedded in cultural identity and community connection in the U.S.

Horowitz Research’s latest study, "State of Media, Entertainment, and Tech: Viewing Behaviors", which was conducted prior to the tournament, found that over half (54%) of Latinx consumers intended to watch the 2026 FIFA World Cup, significantly higher than the total market (42%). Those expectations were borne out in the intensity and consistency of engagement seen throughout the tournament.

“What we saw in 2026 is the full realization of trends we’ve been tracking for years,” said Adriana Waterston, executive vice president, insights and strategy lead for Horowitz Research. “The World Cup is where culture, community, and media converge. It is not just about the game on the screen, it is about identity, connection, and shared experience across platforms and languages. Our research at the intersection of cultural insights and sports is focused on helping media brands and their advertisers and sponsors maximize engagement among Hispanic audiences, multicultural audiences, and the sports audience overall.”

The 2026 tournament also marked a turning point for streaming as a primary platform for live sports and highlighted a number of trends that content providers and advertisers will need to embrace if they want to attract these audiences, the Horowitz analysis found.

For starters, digital viewership surged across matches and rounds, with fans seamlessly moving between traditional television and streaming services depending on context and convenience.

This behavior was anticipated by Horowitz’s pre-event research, which showed that a majority of prospective viewers expected to stream matches live and use multiple devices beyond the TV set. The World Cup demonstrated that live sports can successfully operate in an ecosystem where linear and streaming are complementary.

The result is a new model for major sporting events, one that demands integrated distribution strategies across broadcast, streaming, mobile, and social platforms, the Horowitz analysis stressed.

Beyond platforms and audiences, the 2026 World Cup reinforced the idea that sports fandom is inherently social. Fans gathered at home, in public venues, and online, engaging with content before, during, and after matches. Social media, second screens, and shared viewing experiences were not secondary behaviors but, rather, they were core to how the event was experienced.

In surveys prior to the event, Horowitz Research found that large portions of viewers planned to watch with friends and family, attend viewing events, and engage with World Cup content across social platforms. The tournament brought those behaviors to life, with fans using the World Cup to connect across geographies, cultures, and generations.

The scale and nature of engagement during the 2026 World Cup also reinforced the value of live, multicultural sports environments for advertisers. High levels of attention, emotional investment, and cross-platform engagement create conditions that are uniquely powerful for brand impact.

In addition, the momentum from the 2026 FIFA World Cup is already extending into the next chapter of global soccer. Horowitz’s research suggests meaningful continued interest in global soccer events, including the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2027.

“If 2026 showed us anything, it is that the playbook has changed,” added Waterston. “The audiences driving growth are diverse, the platforms are fluid, and the experience is shared. The organizations that understand and embrace that reality will be the ones that win in the next era of global sports.”

For more information, visit www.horowitzresearch.com.

PORTSMOUTH, N.H.—New survey data highlights how smart TVs are becoming the most influential gatekeepers in entertainment, playing an increasingly important role in how viewers discover and watch content.

Data from Hub Entertainment Research’s annual “Evolution of the TV Set” indicates that asking "What good TV shows are you watching?" may be less relevant than asking, "What TV set do you own?" in terms of viewing habits and the ability of smart TV operating systems to influence those choices.

Fox's recent $22 billion acquisition of Roku is the clearest signal yet that control of the TV operating system is becoming one of the industry's most valuable strategic assets, the research suggests.

The “Evolution of the TV Set” study, which reveals the growing influence of the TV set in shaping how viewers discover and engage with content, finds that the operating systems powering today’s smart TVs have become the primary doorway for both programming and advertising.

"The conversation around finding great TV to watch is poised to become like the `Mac vs. PC' or `Android vs. iPhone' battles from prior years — as viewers learn that some TV operating systems do better jobs than others at helping them find good stuff to watch," said Jason Platt Zolov, senior consultant at Hub. "The merger of Fox and Roku will be a watershed proof point that some streamers will have more influence than others, depending on what TV set you own."

Key findings from the report include:

• Smart TVs dominate viewing, and streaming households are embracing Roku and Fire TV more than Android, Tizen (Samsung) or webOS (LG) systems that power those sets.
• Most homes have three TVs, and two of those are now smart TVs, making them more dominant than ever.
• For the TV set they use most, streaming TV viewers are no longer flipping channels: they are living in app-centric environments that are increasingly powered by Roku (37%) and Fire TV (17%), well ahead of Android, Tizen or Apple TV users.

The researchers noted that within different TV operating systems, the viewer's goal is clear: "how can I quickly find a specific program I want to watch?"

When asked to rank what matters most, viewers rank "Easy search" as the most valued discovery feature (60% call it “very important”), well ahead of "personal recommendations" (31%) or seeing "trending content" (25%).

AI-powered TV search features are poised to help viewers solve this search problem. When asked to choose the most valuable AI-powered TV viewing features, more than half of viewers want AI features that either help them find similar things they like (27%) or more effectively exclude stuff they don't like (28%).

While quick search is most important, home screen real estate and recommendations still significantly impact what people watch.

Some TV operating systems sway users more than others: suggested titles on the TV home screen within Apple TV, Fire TV, Android and Roku environments are all more likely to be watched than those titles being suggested by Samsung (Tizen) and LG (webOS), the survey found.

As viewers continue to invest in smart TVs, the vital importance of influencing consumers to install apps when they first turn on their new TV cannot be overstated, the researchers stressed.

Half (51%) say they install suggested apps during setup — but more (56%) this year than in 2024 (47%) say they rarely add apps after that first day home with the TV — a reminder that more needs to be done to capture new TV owners with apps they will love.

These findings are from Hub’s 2026 “Evolution of the TV Set” report, based on a survey conducted among 2,500 US consumers ages 16-74. Interviews were conducted in May 2026. A free excerpt of the findings is available on Hub’s website.

FIFA World Cup 2026 has officially become YouTube's most-viewed FIFA World Cup in history, pushing lifetime views for videos related to the current and past FIFA World Cups past 200 billion views, the streamer reported.

Overall, more than 1.7 billion unique viewers globally watched World Cup-related videos on YouTube during the FIFA World Cup 2026, including over 550 million that watched on their televisions.

Official YouTube broadcasts of the FIFA World Cup 2026 final match between Spain and Argentina on July 19 drew over 21 million average minute audience (AMA) across more than 40 markets. Together, they reached a peak of over 27 million concurrent viewers on YouTube.

The data was released in a blog post by Angela Courtin

Vice president of sports and entertainment marketing on YouTube and Justin Connolly, vice president, global head of media and sports, YouTube.

They also reported that FIFA’s official YouTube channel amassed over 4 billion views and added over 7.5 million new subscribers between June 11-July 19. The channel now has over 34 million global subscribers.

The YouTube executives also noted that the tournament also redefined what it means to be a soccer (or fútbol) fan, with a global roster of creators with a combined 350 million YouTube videos related to the FIFA World Cup uploaded by its creator roster accumulated over 2.5 billion views globally.

YouTube also hosted the first YouTube FIFA Creator Cup exhibition match on July 12, live from Central Park, New York. Led by team captains IShowSpeed and Celine Dept, the official live streams for the event drew over 10 million live views globally, including broadcasts from FIFA’s official channel, participating creators and official broadcasters, the blog said.

T-Mobile was found to offer the fastest mobile network and fastest 5G network in Ookla’s latest Connectivity Report on the state of U.S. mobile and fixed networks in the first half of 2026.

Cellphone provider T-Mobile was deemed to have the Best Mobile Network, with a median download speed of 275.55 Megabits per second across all technologies combined, and the Best 5G Network, with a median download speed of 314.38 Mbps, Ookla reported.

The speeds have important implications for broadcast journalists and news organizations in the field who rely on 5G networks to deliver video feeds and stories to newsrooms.

To earn its top rankings, T-Mobile recorded a Speedtest Connectivity Score of 80.12, and a Speedtest 5G Connectivity Score of 73.52. Speedtest Connectivity Score combines key metrics to evaluate a mobile provider’s overall user experience offer. It includes Speed Score, indicators for web browsing performance and Video Streaming Score, Ookla said.

T-Mobile also offered the best gaming and video streaming experiences in the United States during 1H 2026, across all broadband technologies and 5G, according to Speedtest Intelligence data.

Ookla found that AT&T Fiber offered the Best Internet and was the Fastest Fixed Network in the U.S. during the first half, with a median download speed of 374.75 Mbps and a median upload speed of 320.65 Mbps.

Among the most populous cities in the United States, Lincoln, Neb., recorded the fastest median mobile download speed of 395.83 Mbps, while Durham, N.C., outpaced other cities to record the fastest median fixed download speed at 380.47 Mbps.

Ookla is a research firm best known for Speedtest.net, which tests and tracks global internet and mobile network speeds.

More data and the full report can be found here.

France’s convincing 2026 FIFA World Cup win against Morocco revealed a lot about how in-match play affects audience trends, and their knock-on effect on the advertising potential of major sports. The French side was threatening throughout as it marched to a 2-0 victory that included an early penalty miss and an eventual goal breaking the deadlock midway through the second half. A second goal just minutes later put France in control, allowing the team to see out the closing moments easily and continue its World Cup journey.

Throughout the tournament, Yospace has been collecting streaming and advertising data from 14 OTT rightsholders worldwide to understand how key moments influence streaming audiences and advertising opportunities. France’s victory demonstrated how momentum can shift even without a flurry of goals, keeping audiences engaged and creating valuable advertising opportunities throughout the match.

Early Drama Drives Audience Growth
Within the opening half-hour, France was awarded a penalty following a Video Assistant Referee (VAR) review. Around three minutes passed before the kick was eventually taken, creating an unusually prolonged period of suspense as viewers waited to see if France would take the lead. To viewers’ surprise, France’s star player, Kylian Mbappé, missed the penalty. Rather than slowing audience growth, the delay resulted in a nearly 10% increase in viewership, with new viewers tuning in to see what would happen. This sharp increase came right before a hydration break, meaning an even larger audience reach for rightsholders that chose to serve ads here.

New to the 2026 FIFA World Cup, hydration breaks are mandatory three-minute pauses taken midway through each half, creating space for an extra two-minute ad break previously unavailable to rightsholders. As you can see from the chart, the audience spike was timed particularly well for maximizing this new advertising opportunity, and dipped only slightly before quickly regaining momentum.

Morocco continued to challenge France ahead of halftime. Despite neither side making a breakthrough, a healthy stream of chances kept viewing figures high right up until the interval.

Second-Half Goals Produce the Biggest Advertising Opportunity
Halftime led to a temporary decline in viewership, as is typical of soccer matches. As play resumed, audiences quickly returned and continued to climb as the quarterfinal remained evenly poised at 0-0.

The breakthrough finally arrived midway through the second half. France’s first goal gave audience numbers a sharp boost, with many tuning in to catch the replay on mobile. A second goal just six minutes later boosted viewers again for the same reason, and effectively decided the contest.

The second-half hydration break followed immediately after France doubled its advantage. With audience numbers high after two quick goals, broadcasters were gifted the largest live audience of the match for an ad opportunity they previously wouldn’t have had.

Audience Declines as the Result Becomes Clear
France’s two quick goals midway through the second half proved to be the decisive period of the match. While audience numbers remained high immediately afterward, the second hydration break marked a clear turning point. Unlike other knockout matches analyzed during the tournament, where viewers returned quickly after this break as the result still hung in the balance, audience numbers continued to decline once play resumed.

The graph suggests many viewers felt France’s place in the semifinals was no longer in doubt. As the defending champions comfortably managed the closing stages and Morocco struggled to create a route back into the match, concurrency fell steadily towards the final whistle.

What This Means for Ad Tech
France’s victory shows that goals are not the only factors influencing streaming audiences. VAR reviews, missed chances and decisive scorelines can all influence viewer engagement.

Hydration breaks add another layer. Their timing depends on the referee rather than on a fixed schedule, meaning broadcasters need technology that responds immediately when advertising opportunities arise.

Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI), supported by advanced prefetch, helps rightsholders maximize the value of these moments. By preparing ad requests shortly before each break, broadcasters give the advertising ecosystem more time to respond, allowing demand partners to compete without being overwhelmed by sudden traffic spikes. This improves technical fill rates and helps ensure every advertising opportunity is monetized seamlessly, regardless of when the biggest audience arrives.

France’s reward was a place in the World Cup semifinals, but for broadcasters the match demonstrated something equally important. No two matches will behave the same way, and it’s not always the goals that keep viewers engaged. Ad tech infrastructure must be able to handle this unpredictability at a moment’s notice and at scale to capture every last advertising opportunity on the table.

STAINES-UPON-THAMES, U.K.—Dynamic ad insertion solution provider Yospace is reporting that it stitched 11.57 billion one-to-one addressable advertisements into live video streams during the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

This equates to 297 million advertisements per day during the 39-day tournament, which is a big increase on other recent global events - the Paris 2024 Summer Games saw 41% fewer ads stitched per day.

“The 2026 FIFA World Cup demonstrates the massive scale we’re seeing for ad-funded streaming today,” said Tim Sewell, CEO of Yospace. “The excitement of these moments, when entire nations are tuning in, means that the quality of the experience and the seamlessness of the advertising is absolutely critical. It’s a testament to the experience and dedication of the entire Yospace team that we have such a strong reputation for monetizing major live events. The data tells us that we’re only scratching the surface of the kind of scale that live streaming is set to achieve, and Dynamic Ad Insertion technology must be able to meet that demand.”

The data was collected from Yospace’s global customer base of broadcasters and distributors, of which 14 were streaming the action.

Yospace also reported that the growth is representative of some wider trends. Very notably, viewers are shifting their attention to app-based channels on their Connected TVs rather than traditional linear. Broadcasters responding to that shift are in turn focusing more attention on monetizing their OTT streams more effectively by ensuring as much online traffic as possible has DAI applied.

The 2026 edition of the FIFA World Cup also brought additional value, given the fact that there were 16 more teams compared to the last tournament in 2022, which created 40 additional matches to advertise against.

The introduction of a three-minute hydration break in each half also created an extra opportunity to advertise, which most ad-supported rights-holders utilized.

Yospace’s busiest ad break came at the start of Half-Time when England played Norway in the Quarter-Finals. In that two minute window, 13 million one-to-one addressable ads were stitched, demonstrating the need for DAI systems and the adtech to work together and to scale with very short notice if rights-holders want to achieve the highest possible fill-rates and maximize value.

Yospace’s Advanced Prefetch system was applied throughout the tournament to space out ad requests, giving the adtech the time it needed to respond, and helping to prepare for unscheduled breaks as matches ran into Extra Time and penalties.

Yospace also reported that across the entire tournament, there were 637 ad breaks (including hydration breaks) compared to 326 in 2022, based on how the majority of Yospace customers applied ad breaks.

This was driven by the increase in matches and more ad breaks per match, but also by the nature of play. Fewer matches were decided by a dreaded penalty shoot-out (four) than in 2022 (five), despite there being substantially more matches.

However, five matches were settled by goals during the Extra Time period, whereas in 2022 every single match that entered Extra Time went on to penalties.

Yospace also reported that there were more goals per game (2.96) compared to 2022 (2.69), meaning that, with hydration breaks effectively splitting matches into quarters, there was a far higher likelihood of a goal or a dramatic moment, and a resulting audience surge, occurring near an ad break.

When France was awarded a penalty against Morocco in the Quarter-Finals, the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) check that followed took an agonizing three minutes to reach a resolution. Between the penalty being awarded and France’s Kylian Mbappé kicking the ball, there was a 37% increase in stream starts. The hydration break came barely a minute after his miss. Advertisements during hydration breaks benefitted from a lower audience drop-off than other ad breaks. Being only three minutes long, Yospace saw just a 0.4% drop-off rate for some matches, compared to 16.82% during half-time.

Earlier in the tournament, Belgium’s dramatic comeback from 2-0 down against Senegal in the Round of 32 drove a 93% increase in stream starts in the space of two minutes, and rose steadily until the full-time whistle and subsequent ad break. Typically, the final whistle of a match prompts an audience drop-off around 50% within a matter of minutes. With Extra Time coming up next, Belgium’s late goals meant the drop-off was only 11%, meaning the ad break at that point benefitted from an audience surge following the goals and less drop-off than would otherwise have been expected.

Match reports and further tournament data is available on Yospace’s World Cup feed here: https://www.yospace.com/worldcup.

Yospace is exhibiting at the International Broadcast Convention (IBC), Amsterdam, on 11-14 September. You can find out more and request a meeting here: yospace.com/ibc.