The three companies covered in this issue's column are all involved in bringing more monetization or engagement to today's streaming content. The key differentiator is using AI to delve deep into content meaning and adjacent data to create new opportunities for content formats that previously did not exist. While we sometimes cover tools that are suitable for smaller publishers, these AI tools require a certain scale of content to … well, work at scale. Two of these companies have been around for 10-plus years. The other one is much newer but already has an impressive connection with a media company.
23 Jun 2026
Here is a month-by-month roundup of the streaming industry's most momentous mergers and acquisitions of 2025 (excluding the competing Paramount Skydance and Netflix bids for Warner Bros. Discovery—a drama that just turned definitively in Paramount's favor at press time).
26 Mar 2026
Is it still fashionable to be sustainable, even with AI?
26 Mar 2026
Streaming codec adoption used to be an engineering abstraction governed by RD curves, BD-rate tables, and roadmap slides that no one outside of R&D ever considered. Over the last 15 months, codec adoption decisions have morphed into a much broader discussion, involving C-level execs from finance and legal. While the precursors to this transition occurred pre-2025, the situation coalesced in 2025. During the same period, we saw one codec step to the front (AV1) and another shrink before our eyes (VVC).
26 Mar 2026