The next TV battleground isn’t ratings — it’s discoverability
Opinion
Content unseen might as well not exist. Discovery must become meaning-driven or audiences will flow to AI assistants, apps and creators, taking loyalty and value with them.
The biggest threat to TV today isn’t rising costs or falling ad budgets.
It’s invisibility.
TV used to measure success in ratings. Streaming shifted it to subscribers. But the real driver of growth today is discoverability. In an age of abundance, content unseen might as well not exist.
The problem
Discovery has long been treated as a technical afterthought, solved by guides and metadata. That worked in an age of limited choice. It fails in the age of AI.
Audiences now navigate a fragmented ecosystem: sprawling catalogues, free ad-supported TV (FAST) channels, creator-led formats, micro-dramas with generative AI promising a wave of intent-driven content generated from conversational prompts.
But discovery is still anchored in outdated taxonomies.
At the same time, AI-powered search and recommendation tools are already training audiences to expect discovery that feels immediate, contextual and natural. Against that benchmark, TV’s grids and carousels look slow, mechanical and increasingly irrelevant.
Unless platforms make their content visible to these AI systems, they risk being left out of the very discovery pathways where audiences are now searching.
The result? Shorter viewing sessions. Fragile loyalty. Weaker economics. And poor discovery doesn’t just dent the user experience; it undermines the TV business model.
The shift
AI-powered discovery today is still in its early stages. Most systems remain text metadata-driven transcripts, descriptions and keywords. Useful, but ultimately just an upgrade, not a transformation.
The fundamental shift comes when AI engages with the asset itself and sees the video’s tone, visuals, audio and context. Discovery evolves from rigid categories into something much more human: a scene surfaced not just as “courtroom drama” but as “tense yet comic legal banter”.
That distinction matters because it changes the game:
• From metadata to meaning: Static tags are brittle. AI creates living and “conversational” taxonomies that flex with culture, context and language in real time.
• From search to conversation: Old systems expect audiences to know exactly what to type. AI enables prompts like “show me something uplifting under 30 minutes”. Discovery becomes natural, not mechanical.
• From finding to creating: With gen AI, a prompt doesn’t just resurface a clip; it can generate an entirely new short-form story.
Discovery in practice
Audiences already expect discovery to feel natural, contextual and human.
TikTok thrives on resonance, surfacing content by mood, moment and cultural velocity, rather than titles. Netflix set the baseline for effortless personalisation, where micro-genres prove loyalty grows when discovery feels precise and seamless.
Across the industry, the appetite is already there, even if the tools remain outdated. FAST channels show audiences embrace contextual entry points — crime, comedy, holiday movies — instead of endless browsing. Sports rights holders know highlights extend engagement.
AI will make every moment instantly discoverable by tone, play or emotion.
How Bundesliga is ‘expanding the field of play’ through distribution of sports rights to creators
Visionary pioneers are already proving what meaning-driven discovery looks like in practice.
AskGVT has built natural-language querying of video libraries, letting audiences resurface precise moments by theme, emotion or context and any meaning they can imagine.
Other innovators, including TwelveLabs and Minute.ly, are exploring adjacent approaches, from semantic indexing to automated highlight extraction.
Together, they show that discovery by meaning is no longer theoretical.
Architecture of growth
The message is clear: discovery must become meaning-driven and platform-owned or audiences will flow to AI assistants, apps and creators, taking loyalty and value with them.
Because the real disruptor isn’t the technology; it’s the audience, with AI in their hands.
And the economics are straightforward:
• Engagement lengthens when discovery aligns with intent
• Loyalty strengthens when audiences feel understood
• Monetisation accelerates when engagement is deep enough to unlock premium ad models, subscriptions or commerce
The reverse is also true: poor discovery weakens retention and erodes yield. At scale, that’s not a product flaw; it’s a strategic failure.
But this isn’t a call to panic. It’s a call to vision.
Leaders who reframe discoverability as the architecture of growth, rather than user experience, navigation or metadata, will define the next decade of TV. The winners will be those that shift from tags to meaning, from grids to context, from navigation to intent.
This is how true personalisation finally emerges: not “if you liked X, you might like Y”, but discovery that reflects how people actually think, feel and choose in the moment.
Content may still be king. But in the future of TV, AI-optimised discovery builds empires.
Agnieszka Krukowska is founder and CEO of AnnimoIQ