Markets

MIP London 2026 (22–24 February) closed with a session that didn’t feel like a finale at all, but rather a warning flare. In the last panel of the market, media strategist Evan Shapiro took the stage with a title that set the tone immediately: The Year of Change… or Die. What followed was a tough, data-led diagnosis of where the global content business is heading—and why, in his view, the scariest part is not the speed of change, but how reluctant the industry still is to look it in the eye.

Shapiro’s argument starts from a fact that is easy to say and harder to absorb: the audience base that built the modern television economy is no longer the audience that will sustain it. Roughly 70% of the world’s population is now made up of Millennials and younger cohorts. These are not “kids” waiting to grow into broadcast habits; Millennials are approaching mid-forties, Gen Z is moving into their thirties, and Gen Alpha is already in its mid-teens. They are the first generations raised with supercomputers in their pockets—always online, natively social, constantly switching between formats and screens. Expecting them to eventually consume media the way their parents did is, as Shapiro put it, simply bonkers. They don’t just see media differently: they live in a different media world.

From that starting point, he drew a line through what he called the industry’s most inconvenient truth: there are now two ecosystems of media consumption on the planet. On one side, Gen X and older, with heavier traditional television habits. On the other, Millennials and younger, for whom “TV” has been replaced by something else entirely: the combined ecosystem of streaming and social video. The mistake, Shapiro suggested, was believing streaming would simply replace television—same product, new pipe. What actually happened is that social video took off faster, alongside streaming, and the two are now converging into one dominant environment. For younger audiences, moving from vertical to horizontal and back again is effortless: from TikTok to Netflix, from YouTube to a broadcaster app, and increasingly from phone to connected TV without thinking of it as a change of medium at all.

If that sounds like a theoretical framing, Shapiro quickly anchored it in numbers—especially the ones that broadcasters in the UK can no longer afford to treat as “not our problem.” In the United States, streaming has become the dominant force on television, with nearly half of all TV viewing attributed to streaming in December, and with YouTube now the number one “channel” on TV. Not just bigger than any single broadcaster—bigger, he argued, than whole legacy groups. And the trend is not being driven by one platform win: it is being driven by the fact that the habits of Millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are spreading through the population as those behaviors become normalised.

Then came the UK moment. Shapiro pointed to recent BARB reporting showing that, across four screens, YouTube surpassed the BBC in total reach in Q4 2025 and also ranked as the number two destination for total share of viewing across the quarter. The usual objection—“that’s four screens, not TV”—doesn’t make the trajectory disappear. When the comparison is narrowed to television sets only, YouTube is not yet number one in total reach, but it is already in the top tier and “coming on hot.” Just as importantly, usage of YouTube on TV is now widespread across generations: around half of Gen Alpha uses YouTube on television weekly; more than a third of Millennials and Gen Z do the same; and even among over-55s, weekly usage is significant and growing. The fastest growth, he noted, is coming from Gen X and Boomers, pulled in by their children and grandchildren and by the sheer gravitational pull of the platform’s content universe.

That universe is also why Shapiro thinks the industry needs to update its instincts about competition. YouTube is not a channel, he reminded the room—it’s millions of channels. In his framing, fragmentation replaces location as the defining condition of the business. If the three most important words in real estate are “location, location, location,” then from here on, the three most important words in media are “fragmentation, fragmentation, fragmentation.” The competition for attention is no longer just BBC versus ITV versus Channel 4. It is everyone with an iPhone. The harshness of that claim is also what makes it oddly hopeful: if your competition is global, then so is your market. Your buyers are no longer only the broadcasters in your territory. Your potential audience is no longer bound by national schedules. The ceiling moves—if you choose to play that game.

But the keynote wasn’t simply a hymn to platforms. Shapiro repeatedly came back to the idea that the next era will not be won on reach alone. The merged ecosystem of mainstream media and creator media, he argued, is increasingly driven by engagement, loyalty, love and fandom—what he called the “Affinity Economy.” In this model, what matters is not whether someone watched ten seconds and scrolled away, but whether they care enough to return, to participate, to buy, to subscribe, to join. Love can be measured in ARPU: if people love a brand, they buy the T-shirt, the game, the subscription, the live ticket, the upsell. If they don’t, they sample and vanish.

To make that concrete, Shapiro pointed to examples where community building didn’t cannibalise linear viewing but actively increased it. He referenced ITV’s Love Island strategy, where ITV and Zoo 55 grew viewership year-on-year by building community where the audience already was—through games, social video, and constant engagement—raising viewership by around 50% year-on-year without eroding the main show. He described how PBS’s long-running documentary franchise Frontline, a forty-year-old brand with major awards behind it, is now building meaningful traffic and visibility through digital distribution and audience strategy—reaching younger demographics that were otherwise drifting away. He also warned that in genres like news, the stakes extend beyond business: failing to reach younger audiences is not only a ratings problem but a democratic one, especially when major news brands treat YouTube as a clip-dump rather than a service with programming and community.

If the Affinity Economy is the destination, Shapiro argued, the bridge is library content—and this is where his message landed squarely on the realities of rights exploitation and monetisation. He highlighted how BBC Studios has been excellent at monetising library content around the world, taking catalogue brands and building new value from them. The bigger point was blunt: the fear that putting content on social video will cannibalise your audience is, in his view, “bonkers.” In practice, most brands see the opposite: social distribution increases awareness, widens the funnel, and strengthens the franchise.

From there, Shapiro widened the lens to the economics. Traditional media valuations have stagnated or disintegrated in the US, while big tech has doubled, tripled, even quadrupled. He used a “Disney metric” to illustrate the market’s message: Disney’s market valuation today is roughly the same as five years ago, while much of traditional media has flattened or fallen. Meanwhile, he argued, big tech keeps accelerating. He also pointed to the subscription market’s warning signs: premium SVOD adds hundreds of millions of subscribers globally and loses nearly as many through churn; retention trends suggest that by the end of the decade SVOD could look like today’s pay-TV, losing subscribers annually rather than growing. That, he suggested, is why streamers are rushing back into advertising—remember advertising?—and why advertisers themselves are concentrating spend on outcomes-driven platforms like Amazon, Meta and Google. In his telling, Meta alone has surpassed the ad sales of television globally, and social media remains both the fastest-growing segment and more than a third of total ad investment.

At the same time, costs and priorities inside the content business are shifting. Sports rights are absorbing an ever larger share of spending, platforms are beginning to resemble each other because everyone has football, and the money that once fuelled large scripted slates is being pulled in new directions. Shapiro cited a recent production drop across the world and noted that the only area growing is medium and low-budget output, while high-budget projects are shrinking. The result is a new programming logic: diversify radically—mix premium tentpoles with lower-cost formats, podcasts, creator-led shows and new forms that can travel across platforms.

And that brings him back to the argument that the industry keeps getting wrong: this is not “creator economy versus traditional media.” It is “yes—and.” Audiences do not see two separate universes when they turn on the first screen of the day; they see both behind the same piece of glass and move between them without friction. The next ecosystem is a merged one. The professional sector can dominate it—Shapiro insisted—but only if it chooses to adopt the disciplines the creator economy has mastered: community, constant engagement, multi-platform presence, and an understanding that attention is fragmented by default.

One of his most forward-looking claims was that what has happened with YouTube on TV is simply the preview. TikTok and Instagram, he argued, are coming to the television set in a more direct way, and the competencies built now—programming for social platforms, building communities, designing content for engagement—will carry forward as new apps arrive on connected TV and compete directly for the same living-room attention that legacy broadcasters still treat as their home turf.

Underneath the charts and case studies, Shapiro’s sharpest critique was cultural. The industry’s biggest problem, he said, is “the fear of finding this out”—the discomfort of facing what the math says about age, behavior and migration. He joked about rooms of executives being surprised that Millennials are turning 45, as if the calendar itself were a threat. But the stakes are real: if leaders refuse to understand how audiences are changing, they cannot track their businesses along with that evolution. If they do understand it, at least they can adapt.

MIP London ended, then, not with closure but with a challenge. The combination of streaming and social video is reshaping television even in markets that once felt insulated by strong public service brands and mature broadcast ecosystems. Fragmentation is not a phase; it is the defining condition. Growth will come less from scale and more from affinity—from fandom, loyalty and communities built where people actually spend their time. Libraries are not legacy baggage; they are strategic fuel for the next era, if rights holders stop treating distribution as a threat.

Shapiro’s final implication was as direct as his title. The industry can still do more than survive—if it drops the fear, looks at the audience honestly, and acts like the new ecosystem is already here. Because it is. And next year, he warned, the message may get “drastically worse” for those who choose not to change.