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🇬🇧 Streaming Made Easy is off to London!
You ask, I deliver 😊 After a first meet up in Amsterdam in November, London is next.
On January 21st 2026, I’m hosting an event in partnership with Little Dot Studios for a session on The State of Advertising - 2026. A breakfast followed by a fireside chat with best in class advertising execs (line up to be announced soon).
I’m always trying to learn something new but with advertising I still feel like it’s day 1. 10 years ago, M&E executives could do without it. Today, our businesses have gone full hybrid and so it’s imperative we understand what the ad market has in store for us next year.
Fancy joining us?
👉🏻 Register here: https://luma.com/n3jlxtdp
📍Little Dot Studios (91 Brick Ln, London)
📦 YouTube TV redraws the bundle
YouTube TV is preparing a shift that looks less like product iteration and more like a structural correction: genre-based plans. Lower entry points with sports, news, entertainment split out instead of bundled together by default. Customers may end up recreating a multi-genre bundle at a higher price point but it will be by choice this time.
What matters is not the packaging itself but the timing. Price pressure is mounting, churn is baked in and the “one giant bundle” logic is starting to crack, even at YouTube TV which has been the new kid on the vMVPD block, strong of its 8M subs, the last official number quoted by Google.
Will unbundling intelligently help Pay TV survive or thrive? 2026 will be telling.
Find out more in the company's latest blog.
🎧 Prompt that playlist
Spotify is opening a small but meaningful crack in the recommendation machine. A new feature now in testing lets users (in New Zealand aka Scotland but further - if you have that TV series reference, we’re meant to meet) actively “power” playlists with natural language prompts, nudging the algorithm instead of passively accepting it.
This is not about better playlists. It’s about a shift in control. For the first time, personalization becomes collaborative rather than invisible. Taste, mood, context and even what’s trending online start to mix explicitly with listening history. The algorithm stops being a black box and becomes something you negotiate with.
What makes this moment interesting is the timing. Platforms everywhere are rethinking how much agency users should have. If this sticks, it signals a broader transition from “the algorithm knows best” to “the algorithm listens back” and that has implications far beyond music.
🎙️ Grading 2025
This week on The Media Odyssey Podcast, Evan Shapiro and I did something most people avoid: we graded our own 2025 predictions. Not to chase scores but to surface patterns. Some calls landed cleanly, others aged badly (mostly mine because Evan only chose the ones he was right about 😁) and a few turned into something more interesting than “right” or “wrong.”
The most honest moment comes at the end. 2025 was brutal for jobs across media. We talk openly about what helps when the market contracts, what doesn’t and how to stay grounded when certainty disappears.
If you want to know who graded what, and why, you’ll have to listen. Full episode is live wherever you get your podcasts: APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE.
For my entire prediction report card 👇🏻
🇵🇹 MFE’s hunger for scale
MFE (Media for Europe) took a 32.9% stake in Impresa, the broadcaster behind SIC and publisher of Expresso. They’re not taking control but they’re taking position. Advertising sales, digital platform upgrades and local production are the first areas of cooperation.
It’s another sign of MFE stitching together a pan-European footprint that actually means something commercially: Italy, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Austria (with the recent takeover of ProSieben SAT1 in September) and now Portugal form a contiguous ad market where major brands already buy across borders.
The interesting part: partnerships like this (and mergers) are what Europe will increasingly look like in 2026 and beyond. No one gets scale alone.
Read the full press release.
🎰 The must have app for CES
I’m heading to CES for the 1st time and I have no clue where to start (Who’s coming? Where to meet?). Jason Cohen, CEO of MyBundle, built this for us so we can find each other amongst the slot machines 😁
🤖 The rise of the AI subscriber
New research from Bango on AI subscribers shows something unprecedented in the subscription economy. Among people paying for AI tools, 67% say AI is their single most important subscription. Three-quarters call it “essential” to daily life. And yes: 61% would rather cancel all streaming services than give up their AI suite.
This isn’t a small niche. It’s a new gravitational center. AI subscribers pay on average 66 dollars per month, plan to add more tools and increasingly demand bundling with mobile, broadband, banking and even streaming services.
The strategic question is no longer whether AI will be bundled. It’s who owns the billing relationship when AI becomes the super-app for digital life. If ChatGPT becomes the front door for subscriptions, the OS wars in CTV will look tame by comparison.
Read more in Bango’s “Rise of the AI Subscriber” study.
🗳️ Poll time
That’s it for today. Enjoy your weekend and see you on Tuesday for a Deep Dive edition of Streaming Made Easy Premium.
This insight about AI tools becoming the "gravitational center" is spot on. The wildest part isnt just that people prefer AI over streaming, its that AI is becoming the interface layer for everything else. I've noticed this with my own workflow where ChatGPT essentially replaced my browser homepage. The billing realationship question you raise could reshape the entire subscription stack.