The AI bubble, pocket TV and the extinction of ad free viewers
Year two starts with a roast and ends with a hard reset. We call out what will matter in 2026, and what will stop working.
“Old men. First.”
“Age before beauty.”
“That’s a nicer way of saying this.”
“Uh, I just called you beautiful and you called me old.”
“And that’s our relationship in a nutshell.”
Happy new year everyone. Year two of The Media Odyssey Podcast starts now!
Evan Shapiro and I started the first episode of 2026 the only way we know how: light banter, then predictions.
This year’s through-line is not shiny new stuff, it’s consequences. Media stops rewarding narratives you can’t measure, platforms stop tolerating business models that don’t travel and audiences keep voting with their thumbs and their wallets. You will hear us wrestle with the gap between AI as headline and AI as habit, the kind you keep paying for when the novelty fades.
Then we get into why “ad supported” is no longer a tier, it’s the default experience creeping into everything, to finally get into the boardroom reset you can feel across Europe, the consolidation wave where the hardest part is never the deal and the reason every social platform suddenly wants a seat in your living room.
Predictions are cheap, the arguments are the value so have a listen. Full episode available here: APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE.
For more predictions, have a read 👇🏻
If you have time for one podcast only, let’s make it The Media Odyssey Podcast, produced with love from Amsterdam & NY.
That’s it for today but before you go:
❓Survey time
As we start year 2 of the pod, we’d love to hear from you! What topics do you want more of? Less of? What’s working? What’s missing? This is your chance to tell us directly.
To fill out the survey, head over here.
Brilliant framing of the AI bubble splitting into headline hype vs actual behavioral stickiness. I've seen this pattern play out at enterprise level where theinitial AI pilot gets massive boardroom excitement but then quietly dies becuase nobody actually changed their workflow. The insight about ad-supported becoming the default rather than a tier is where things get really interesting though, its basically reversing a decade of consumer conditioning around paying for premium experiences.