At StreamTV Europe, 24i CEO Sebastian Braun moderated a timely discussion on one of the industry’s biggest questions: what does it really mean to become a platform in today’s streaming landscape?
The panel brought together leaders from across the media ecosystem, including representatives from BBC Studios, Everyone TV, RTP, Sky, and Synamedia, to explore how broadcasters and streaming providers are navigating a rapidly evolving market shaped by fragmentation, shifting audience expectations, data complexity, and AI.
What emerged was not a debate about technology alone, but a broader conversation about control, discoverability, user experience, and the future role of broadcasters in an increasingly platform-driven world.
The Industry Is Moving From Ownership to Orchestration
One of the clearest takeaways from the discussion was that the streaming industry is entering a new phase.
For years, success was largely defined by scale: building direct-to-consumer apps, acquiring subscribers, launching streaming platforms, and expanding distribution. But as the market matures, the competitive advantage is shifting away from simply owning a destination.
The next challenge is orchestration.
Broadcasters and media companies are now operating inside highly fragmented ecosystems where content, audiences, devices, advertising, and discovery are increasingly controlled by multiple layers of platforms. Success depends less on building isolated services and more on managing the connections between them.
That creates a fundamental strategic tension for broadcasters.
On one hand, distribution across third-party ecosystems is essential for reach and relevance. On the other, every additional intermediary risks weakening the direct relationship between broadcaster and audience.
The panel repeatedly returned to this balance between reach and control.
Who owns discovery?
Who owns audience data?
Who controls monetization?
And perhaps most importantly: who ultimately owns the customer relationship?
In many ways, these questions now define modern media strategy more than technology choices alone.
The Platform Question Has Become More Complex
One of the first themes to emerge was how difficult the word “platform” has become to define.
For some panelists, a platform is fundamentally about technology infrastructure and control. For others, it is about audience relationships, content discoverability, or the ability to operate successfully across multiple ecosystems.
Sarah Milton, Chief Product Officer at Everyone TV, noted that audiences themselves rarely think in terms of platforms at all.
“They just look for an experience that makes it as simple as possible for them to find what they want to watch.”
That distinction became a recurring theme throughout the discussion. In today’s streaming environment, success is less about simply launching an app and more about orchestrating seamless experiences across devices, services, and distribution partners.
Kasia Jablonska, Director of Digital and On Demand at BBC Studios EMEA, described this shift as moving from owning a platform to operating across platforms.
Rather than controlling a single destination, media companies increasingly need to manage visibility, monetization, metadata, and audience relationships across aggregators, OEMs, social platforms, and third-party ecosystems.
The Real Challenge: Connecting Content, Data, and Experience
A central point raised during the session was that the industry is not lacking content, platforms, or even data.
The challenge is that much of it remains disconnected.
This fragmentation is no longer just a technical issue. It has become an operational and strategic challenge.
Audience journeys now move fluidly across broadcast, streaming apps, CTVs, social platforms, mobile devices, aggregators, and recommendation environments. Yet many organizations still manage these touchpoints independently, often with disconnected systems, inconsistent metadata, fragmented analytics, and competing internal priorities.
The result is that media companies frequently understand individual parts of the customer journey, but struggle to build a unified view of audience behavior across the entire ecosystem.
That disconnect directly impacts discoverability, personalization, monetization, and even brand visibility.
As several panelists highlighted, this is where platform strategy increasingly becomes business strategy.
That fragmentation creates complexity for broadcasters trying to balance distribution reach with audience ownership, while also maintaining strong user experiences across an increasingly diverse device ecosystem.
Pedro Landeiro from RTP highlighted how the transition from traditional broadcasting to streaming requires a completely different level of metadata and audience intelligence.
In linear broadcasting, basic program guide information was often enough. In streaming, discoverability depends on far richer metadata structures that can support personalization, search, recommendations, and increasingly AI-driven experiences.
This became particularly important in the discussion around third-party distribution.
As broadcasters distribute content across more ecosystems, gaining access to reliable audience data becomes more difficult. Yet at the same time, the need for actionable insights has never been greater.
BBC Studios shared how they are investing heavily in enterprise-wide data platforms and AI-driven forecasting models to help bridge gaps created by fragmented data environments.
The discussion reinforced a growing reality across the industry: data strategy is no longer separate from content strategy or distribution strategy. They are now deeply interconnected.
Discovery Has Become More Important Than Distribution
One of the most interesting undercurrents throughout the discussion was how the industry’s biggest challenge is no longer distribution itself.
Most broadcasters can now reach audiences almost anywhere.
The harder problem is ensuring audiences actually discover and engage with content in environments dominated by recommendation engines, aggregators, and increasingly algorithmic interfaces.
This shift fundamentally changes the role of the broadcaster.
Historically, broadcasters controlled programming schedules, channel placement, and audience flows. In streaming ecosystems, much of that control moves outward toward operating systems, OEMs, aggregators, and AI-driven recommendation layers.
That makes metadata, curation, and audience intelligence significantly more strategic than they were in the linear era.
Several panelists emphasized that discoverability is now directly tied to how effectively content is described, surfaced, contextualized, and optimized for increasingly fragmented interfaces.
In other words, content alone is no longer enough.
The ability to intelligently position content within broader ecosystems is becoming just as important as creating the content itself.
UX Is Becoming the Competitive Battleground
Another major theme was the growing importance of user experience.
Panelists agreed that audiences increasingly benchmark TV experiences not against traditional broadcasters, but against the speed, simplicity, and personalization they experience every day on mobile apps and digital platforms.
João Barbosa from Synamedia argued that hardware limitations continue to slow innovation in TV experiences, particularly when services need to support a wide range of devices with vastly different capabilities.
This sparked an interesting debate around where the “platform” should actually live. Should intelligence remain on-device, or move into the cloud?
Hugo Raimundo from Sky emphasized the importance of centralized control and server-side logic to simplify app complexity and maintain consistency across devices.
At the same time, everyone acknowledged the difficult balancing act broadcasters face between supporting legacy devices and delivering modern, premium experiences.
Everyone TV shared how Freely approached this challenge through standards-based development, allowing compatibility across a broad device ecosystem while also extending accessibility through plug-in streaming devices.
Across the conversation, one thing became clear: the future of streaming UX will depend on reducing friction.
Whether through better personalization, conversational discovery, cross-device continuity, or AI-driven recommendations, the industry is moving toward experiences that feel more intuitive, contextual, and invisible.
The Industry Is Quietly Redefining What a Platform Actually Is
Another insight that emerged during the discussion was that platforms themselves are becoming less visible.
In the early streaming era, the focus was on destination-based experiences: building apps that audiences intentionally opened and navigated.
But increasingly, discovery is happening outside the platform itself.
Content surfaces through search, social clips, recommendations, voice interfaces, home-screen aggregators, operating systems, and algorithmic feeds. Audiences are often engaging with content ecosystems without consciously thinking about the underlying platform powering them.
That evolution raises an important question for broadcasters and streaming providers: If audiences no longer consciously “go to” platforms, what becomes the true strategic value of the platform?
The panel suggested that the answer increasingly lies in intelligence rather than interface.
The platform of the future may be less about owning a visible destination and more about controlling the underlying systems that drive discovery, personalization, monetization, rights management, and audience understanding.
This is where connected data strategies, metadata enrichment, and AI infrastructure become critically important.
AI Is Changing the Role of the Platform
Unsurprisingly, AI became one of the defining topics of the session.
But rather than focusing purely on operational efficiencies, the panel explored how AI could fundamentally reshape the role of platforms themselves.
Speakers across the discussion highlighted AI’s growing role in metadata generation, thumbnail optimization, localization workflows, forecasting, scheduling, and discoverability.
Pedro Landeiro offered one of the session’s most forward-looking perspectives, suggesting that platforms may eventually become invisible infrastructure.
Instead of users actively navigating apps and interfaces, AI agents could increasingly guide viewers directly to content, explain storylines, personalize discovery, and act as companions within the viewing experience.
In that future, the importance of metadata, content understanding, and connected systems only becomes greater.
Broadcasters Are Reinventing Themselves, Not Disappearing
The closing discussion focused on the future of broadcasters and whether they can continue to compete in a market increasingly dominated by global streaming ecosystems.
The consensus across the panel was optimistic, but realistic.
Broadcasters are no longer simply channels or destinations. They are evolving into multi-platform media businesses that must balance direct audience relationships with strategic partnerships.
The challenge is not whether broadcasters still have value.
As Sarah Milton pointed out, broadcaster content remains some of the most watched content in many markets.
The challenge is discoverability, adaptability, and the ability to remain relevant within increasingly fragmented ecosystems.
For many organizations, that transformation requires not just technology modernization, but also organizational change, sharper focus, and clearer strategic control over audience experiences.
Watch the StreamTV Europe Discussion Recap.
Building the Connected Streaming Future
The discussion at StreamTV Europe reinforced a reality many in the industry are already experiencing firsthand: the future of media will not be defined by a single platform, device, or distribution model.
It will be defined by how effectively companies connect content, audience data, monetization, and user experience across an increasingly complex ecosystem.
At 24i, this is exactly the challenge we help solve.
As streaming experiences become more fragmented, creating meaningful connections between platforms, audiences, and business outcomes becomes increasingly important. Whether through unified user experiences, data-driven personalization, or scalable platform strategies, the industry’s next phase will belong to organizations that can simplify complexity while staying close to their audiences.
The conversation at StreamTV Europe made one thing clear: broadcasters are not standing still. They are actively reinventing themselves for the streaming age.
And that transformation is only just beginning.
Download Our Ebook
