2025 in review: TV barks back amid consolidation — but will it bite?
2025 in Review
For the TV industry, 2025 began and ended in much the same way as it had in 2024, with M&A dealmaking amid a rapidly evolving ecosystem.
Broadcasters are being squeezed by tech platforms and global streaming services, themselves pushed into advertising models by a plateaued subscription market.
Advertising pounds have continued to move away from the demand generation telly affords and toward higher-risk, lower-funnel media investments. While connected TV (CTV) and ad-funded streaming is staged for growth, linear is in managed decline, and the future is up for grabs.
Here are four key themes from the past year in the rapidly shifting TV landscape.
A new era of consolidation
One cannot begin to talk about TV in 2025 without first mentioning the degree to which the industry has begun consolidating — a process that appears likely to continue throughout 2026.
In the last 18 months…
- Skydance acquired Paramount.
- NBCUniversal announced plans to split into two divisions: streaming and cable.
- DAZN acquired Australia’s Foxtel.
- RTL acquired Sky Deutschland.
- Netflix agreed to partner with France’s TF1 to give Netflix subscribers access to TF1+.
- ITV confirmed it was in “preliminary discussions” with Sky to sell its Media & Entertainment business.
- Warner Bros Discovery announced it would split into two, then said it had entered into exclusive negotiations with Netflix to sell Warner Bros, then Paramount put in a hostile offer to buy the whole business outright.
What’s driving the consolidation? As Ampere Analysis director Richard Broughton put it at the Future of TV Advertising Global event this month, “structural shifts” in the ad market — from linear to streaming and from TV-led advertising to “video” advertising — have led to a new calculation of winners and losers.
The winners: those that are able to drive global scale in streaming. These include the likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+, though a still-crowded streaming market could make further consolidation — or at least more bundling — possible.
What’s notable about the big streamers has been their universal adoption of ad tiers, opening up inventory for advertisers to reach users that are otherwise often challenging to target. The subscription model plateau has made way for a mixture of price hikes and an embrace of advertising revenue, though opaque business results have made it difficult to gauge the relative success of the global streamers’ ad revenue growth.
Meanwhile, those most likely to be forced into consolidation: mono-market, mid-scale broadcasters that could otherwise become “increasingly isolated”.
The losers? Arguably, the consumer. Consolidation gives cover for further streaming service price increases, and advertisers, too, may see prices inflate as competition dwindles.
Consolidation of media under fewer, wealthier owners also gives those individuals more power to influence public debate and discussion. Case in point, Trump allies Larry and David Ellison now control CBS News, which has already begun turning into a right-leaning news outfit under new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss.
The Ellisons are also currently vying for control of TikTok and Warner Bros Discovery properties, including CNN, with financial backing from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.
Throwing punches at tech platforms
Backed into a corner by a market that has increasingly shifted investment away from TV and toward tech platforms, TV has in recent years often adopted a defensive posture in an attempt to protect investment in a media channel that most effectiveness experts and media strategists still consider unmatched for scale and brand-building.
2025, however, was a year in which UK broadcasters began going more overtly on the offensive.
This was typified in November, when commercial chiefs Rak Patel (Channel 4), Brett Aumuller (Sky) and Kelly Williams (ITV) directly asked advertisers to “turn down the toxic” by disinvesting from tech companies that they allege are causing severe negative externalities on global social wellbeing.
“Look, I don’t think we are naive enough to think that advertisers are going to stop spending on Meta,” Williams said. “But I guess what we’re saying is, just turn it down a bit. Take 30% out, just have a look at what that does. Turn down the toxic. Because it’s really important for our society that somebody makes a stand against this.”
The ask comes even as broadcasters have themselves increased their investment in social video, with Sky dedicating its entire Showcase this year to promoting its footprint on the likes of TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube. ITV and Channel 4 have likewise leaned into YouTube in an effort to pick up incremental audience reach.
But is YouTube TV? TV industry marketing body Thinkbox has argued no, with critics warning the platform is skirting TV measurement standards while nevertheless going after TV budgets from advertisers.
Barb, meanwhile, began reporting TV-set viewing of a cross-section of top YouTube channels this summer, finding that YouTube viewing on UK TV sets is drastically skewed toward younger viewers, while global phenomenons such as MrBeast actually maintaining paltry audiences in this market.
On the other hand, global streaming services like Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video are playing ball with local measurement efforts.
Collaborating and using AI to chase the long tail
Broadcasters’ offensive posture extended beyond rhetoric this year and into action. Through a bevvy of new initiatives, most of them collaborative, TV has worked to position itself as a more legitimate rival to platforms as it searches for revenue growth among small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Kelly Williams laid out the plan at the start of the year at the Advertising Association’s LEAD conference, previewing TV’s foray into “FELT” (fat end of the long tail) brands.
By the summer, Channel 4, ITV and Sky and united with Comcast to announce a new, forthcoming marketplace aimed at making TV as easy and accessible to buy as social media platforms. The news followed Comcast launching Universal Ads in beta at the start of the year in the US market.
The UK’s SME marketplace still doesn’t have an official name, nor an official release date, though it is expected to launch sometime in 2026.
Making ad planning and buying simpler is one thing, but the cost of TV advertising is also prohibitive for many smaller businesses, particularly with regard to creative production. To that end, Channel 4 and ITV have both rolled out similar generative AI tools this year (underpinned by Magnite’s Streamr.AI) aimed at reducing costs and time required to create a serviceable TV spot.
Sky Media is also in the “early stages” of developing a similar product of its own.
Outcomes measurement
The other key collaborative effort between the broadcasters is in the area of measurement, and if foot traffic at the annual Future of TV Advertising Global conference is anything to go by, there is perhaps no bigger story in the TV market right now than the broadcasters’ efforts to pivot toward outcomes-based measurement.
Lantern, announced last September, is set to launch next year. The new measurement panel claims to measure the short- and long-term effects of TV investment on business outcomes, much in the same way as platforms have operated with always-on (albeit not necessarily trustworthy) outcomes measurement.
Lantern will also serve as the measurement solution for the forthcoming UK Universal Ads marketplace.
Sameer Modha, ITV’s measurement innovation lead and a key leader of the Lantern project, has likened the effort to an “intervention” that is required to “ensure there is a future of TV advertising”. Comcast Advertising president likewise warned that uneven measurement standards between “traditional” JIC-backed media owners and platforms has presented an “existential” risk to the media channel.
Modha warned at The Future of TV Advertising Global conference this month that UK advertisers “simply do not worry about measurement quality, transparency” and noted that just half of TV adspend is forecast to be Barb-traded by 2027.
Platforms, he added, are currently modelling new approaches to measurement that are predictive; applying sales data, given to them freely from millions of advertisers that have use the likes of Meta and Google, Big Tech is building “large outcome models” (LOMs) that he expects will “privatise marketing knowledge” behind walled gardens.
If TV is to succeed, it may well need to compete with this reality. Outcomes measurement, in tandem with other efforts to make TV easier to buy, could amount to a life raft, bridging a linear, media-metric focused past with a streaming, outcomes-focused future.
Comcast Ads president: Uneven measurement standards create an ‘existential’ challenge for TV