How TV learned to underprice itself
Denis Ostir runs editorial for V's 50M CTVs. He came to Lisbon with a measurement proposal and very little patience left for industry inertia.
“We’re measuring the same eyeballs on the same device at the same time, two different ways.”
Denis Ostir, Editor in Chief, V (formerly VIDAA)
We recorded this one behind closed doors just as StreamTV Europe wrapped, our way of capturing thoughts while they were still hot off the press.
Evan Shapiro loves to say these conferences have a habit of turning into group therapy. Everyone agrees on the diagnosis, nobody moves toward the cure. He’s not wrong but Lisbon felt different. The tone was optimistic without being naive and more people were talking about what they were actually building than what they had already lost. Evan and I both felt it and we’ve been to enough of these events to know when a room has turned a corner.
Denis Ostir was a big part of why that feeling held up. He’s Editor in Chief at V, the smart TV platform formerly known as VIDAA, now on 50 million connected TVs. He comes from 20 years in broadcast journalism, which means he reads content the way most platform people don’t and he sits on data most of the industry can only speculate about (what I would give to get my hands on some of his data …). He also has a talent for naming problems the industry would rather leave unnamed.
The advertising system that funds most of television runs on a measurement framework that was never designed for the world we now operate in. The gap Ostir put a specific number on, between how the same viewer, on the same screen, at the same moment, gets valued depending on how the signal arrives, is structural. V is now doing something about it, with V Index, an open initiative V first announced at CES and road-tested in Lisbon, with an explicit invitation to every OEM, broadcaster and measurement body that wants in.
Whether they show up is the industry’s next real test. The episode also moves through what happened when V made a counterintuitive call on its FAST offering, a debate about vertical video on the big screen and what streaming data from Africa and Southeast Asia reveals about where the next wave of growth is actually coming from.
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