TV Is on the Cusp of Radical Reinvention

Thirty-five years ago, I was hired by a fledgling new subscription-based pay TV network called Home Box Office. Even at that time, the conventional wisdom among many smart people in our industry was that pay TV was ultimately doomed to fail. After all, they argued, why would anyone pay for something they were already getting for free. Well, most of these experts who predicted pay TV's demise hadn't seen HBO, and the rest as they say is history. Today, the global pay TV and over-the-top (OTT) / subscription video on demand (SVOD) marketplace is booming, both in the U.S. and globally. It is already a roughly 200 billion dollar a year industry and it has been forecast to expand to over $250 billion by 2025. There are many forces working together to drive this growth.