That is my conclusion after participating as a panelist in the TVOT 2025 NY Show and attending many other panels. Two recurring themes stood out: an openness to reinventing oneself and one’s company, and a willingness to collaborate with traditional competitors.
The idea of “coopetition” among “frenemies” first surfaced in the 90s when telcos tried to overbuild cable companies. Despite efforts at Next Century Media to consolidate MVPD addressable inventory and later similar attempts by David Verklin at Canoe, coopetition didn’t materialize. MVPD top management preferred acting independently, enjoying the freedom and success of doing things their own way.
NCM warned that digital would eat TV’s lunch if television didn’t lead with addressability, measurability, and shopability. They laughed. Now, the existential moment has arrived: digital has eaten TV’s lunch and dinner, and only breakfast remains—with a dark shadow of threat looming over it: Google, Meta, and Amazon combined account for about 55% of US ad spend, and growing.
This is a time when forming one TV gang feels better than fighting internecine wars over CPMs, only to lose nickels and dimes to other networks and stations. Why not pool resources to achieve the scale, clout, high tech, addressability, measurability, shopability, programmaticness, and shininess of digital? Why not create a digital-like infrastructure that allows advertisers and brands to buy the inventory they want, targeted to their specific outcomes, and optimize in-flight against what the television industry controls—the placement of TV ads? This could help reclaim tens of billions of dollars per year that digital has taken over the last decade.
This is the vision of UltiMedia, which I presented as part of the panel on The Rise of the Television Platform. More about that panel in a moment.
The theme of reinventing oneself came through loud and clear in the panel entitled The Marketplace for Local Cross-Platform Advertising. The moderator Rick Ducey, Managing Director, BIA Advisory Services, asked for the definition of what television is, and Sinclair’s Rob Weisbord, COO/President of Local Media, stated, “We define anything that has audio and video as television.”
He went on to explain that Sinclair fully realizes that it has to not only give the younger generations all of the content they want, on all of the devices they want to watch it on, it has to turn over the newsroom to those younger generations to actually create the programming, and to make sure they know that they are mandated to do it their way rather than conform to the older ways. Remarkably, this was echoed by Dean Littleton, Executive Vice President of Media Operations, Scripps, Michael Page, Senior Vice President of Digital Sales and FLX, Fox Television Stations, and Stephanie Slagle, Chief Innovation Officer, Graham Media. That blew my mind, was music to my ears.
Stephanie said that the newsroom workflow itself was the mechanism that made innovation almost impossible. Rob agreed and told the story of one youngster who had caved to the system and had to be corrected to break things. I was in seventh heaven hearing these top leaders of local television reporting on how they are – as Rob put it – stretching their minds hard to reinvent themselves.
Michael reported that FOX has been doing outcome measurement for all clients; brand lift, sales lift, and winning in the results showdown against YouTube, Meta, and other digital competition. He had been happily surprised by this, but it is no news to me; I’ve been doing TV vs. digital outcome comparisons since TRA 15 years ago, and TV rarely loses the showdown even when its CPMs are far higher than the digital platform being tested in parallel. It did my heart good to know that this awareness has now reached across the television industry and even locally, which in the past has often been a step behind national, is walking the walk the way it should and must.
In a panel entitled From Readiness to Reality: Planning and Optimization in the Transition to Cross-Channel Distribution, Monetization, and Measurement, OpenAP CRO Ashley Luongo made an impassioned appeal for greater collaboration in creating interoperability across television and reported on the impressive progress OpenAP has already made in that direction.
In the same panel, Larry Meistrich, CEO, Red Coral Universe, explained that his new streaming channel is owned by filmmakers like himself, who would like to get a fair share of revenues for the first time in history. A great development and worth working with them to nourish the creator community at the high professional level as well as the prodigies.
Mike Bloxham moderated The Future of Video Monetization, in which Hugh Scallon, Senior Vice President, Video and Head of Activation, VaynerMedia, and Ying Wang, General Manager of Advertising, Xumo, revealed the innovative work they are doing to curate the best of shortform video into longform viewing modes on channels like Xumo.
Media Rating Council CEO and Executive Director George Ivie explained the work of the MRC and how the organization functions as a hub for collaboration and standards-setting across the industry.
CIMM Managing Director Jon Watts moderated the panel The Rise of the TV Platform in which the panelists were David Verklin, Senior Advisor, Boston Consulting Group, and famous for the innovations he led as CEO of Carat; Kym Frank, Senior Vice President of Ad Sales Research at FOX, well known for her leadership of the modern outdoor industry; Howard Shimmel, cofounder of datafuelX, who had been Chief Research Officer at Turner, and is a leading consultant to many companies on all sides of the business. And me.
The panel began with rollicking opening remarks by Jon, who set a fast and hilarious pace for the entire session.
The next act was for me to prevent a few slides (I’ll be happy to share them) showing all of the reasons (including reach, brand growth, ROAS) why television could win back tens of billions of dollars a year from digital if it were to become as easy to buy, as fast to reoptimize in flight, and equipped with MRC accredited and ARF counseled always-on full funnel outcome measurement and ROAS and brand growth optimization via RMT Resonance and datafuelX. I identified the opportunity to make all ads shoppable by networks, making deals with retail media networks through UltiMedia.
Jon asked questions designed to explore the feasibility of the idea of all of the television companies getting together to sell some of their inventory through a single dashboard like Google and Meta, the idea of UltiMedia, which my colleagues and I are proposing to the industry.
Jon asked how I would encourage a critical mass of networks and stations and streamers and MVPDs to all work together and I explained that it would have to be done in steps, starting with Proofs Of Concept, and that the Spectrum tvbeat existing linear programmatic platform was the hub on which the POCs would be built, adding more inventory from more directions as we go.
Jon asked Kym if FOX would be in on this as she answered that, unlike many other sellside entities, FOX has very premium inventory that is not hard to sell, but that FOX would want to be part of anything that could help television as a whole.
Jon asked David if the agencies would like to make TV easier to buy, and David laughed and said that the agencies love how it is right now, TV is so complicated, the brands don’t want to do it themselves. Jon took this to be an indication that David was somewhat skeptical about the idea of a single universal TV platform and asked, “Bill, I thought you had invited these other panelists because they all support your idea?!” and I said, “Jon, David was being sarcastic!” This caused laughter and Jon said, “The Brits do sometimes struggle with American sarcasm…” and I put a fatherly hand on his shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, AIs don’t get sarcasm either.” Which brought more laughs.
Jon asked Howard if he thought this sort of plan was realistic and Howard answered, “Yes. The ratings of the great majority of television shows have come down to low even levels, it’s now possible to aggregate and sell that through far more modern and efficient systems than the legacy workflow models. Also, because of the huge sample sizes we have from Nielsen, VideoAmp, and Comscore, we can accurately forecast at a very granular day/date level.” Unfortunately, due to time constraints, Howard did not get a chance to get the audience’s reaction to his penguins playing hockey socks, and whether they were an upgrade from the cool-assed grampa socks he wore at CIMM East.
Jon acknowledged that there will clearly be a range of TV aggregation platforms, as there are today1, but remained skeptical that UltiMedia’s vision of a single platform remains realistic, given the fragmented nature and complex dynamics of the US TV market. This completed the story arc of the session only about a minute or two past its scheduled closing time, and a good time was had by all.
1These programmatic aggregators have mostly just begun to spring up suddenly, except for Magnite, which has been around for some time and was originally called SpotX:
- Magnite: aggregating a number of television network streaming services.
- ITN/Magnite: aiming to aggregate local broadcast inventory, inspired by TVB.
- Universal Ads: aggregating local cable inventory.
- Audyns: aggregating national cable long tail networks.
UltiMedia’s idea is to aggregate these aggregators and the rest of the premium television industry, most likely in stages, based on the common observation that the buy side does not want to have to swivel chair among multiple dashboards.
tvbeat is not an aggregator but a unification platform which enables any program source to unify its silos of inventory (linear, FAST, AVOD, MVPD addressable, MVPD VOD, etc.), which serves 40 broadcasters/MVPDs in 9 countries and growing rapidly – UltiMedia sees tvbeat as the best available foundation for unification across the entire television industry. The tvbeat US beachhead is Spectrum, covering one out of four US homes.
Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.
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