When YouTube first emerged as a streaming service, it was a place where people would post little clips of their day, humorous ideas, or a couple of videos of their pet. It was not what it is today, and while the early days were promising for YouTube, it also had several competitors at the time.
Throughout the late 2000s and then into the early 2010s, YouTube became a dominant form of media. It unshackled many of the chains that had been in place for decades, especially for entertainers, who often had to go through traditional routes like TV and radio to get their names out there. YouTube changed all this.
The Rise Of Streaming
It provided a direct route to a global audience, for no cost, and completely removed any middle management that could hamper the progress of their entertainment career.
You only have to look at how YouTube has created the baseline for the modern celebrity. We’ve seen Logan Paul use it as a springboard to go from entertainer to professional wrestler. His brother Jake used the same transition to go into boxing. Comedians like Bo Burnham cultivated huge online followings via YouTube, which helped springboard his career into global fame.
It wasn’t just entertainment trying to adapt; we also saw how music, TV, and casino gaming all became digitally driven, with the bulk of their success over the last decade and a half almost exclusively attributable to the rise of the internet.
This has enveloped the entire industry. Casino classics like craps have effortlessly moved into the streaming world, with streaming technology adapting and projecting these tables to a global audience. Playing at a craps table online covers all the same angles as a conventional game, but with the added convenience of playing at home and integrating fintech like blockchain and crypto, it’s no surprise that streaming is now one of the dominant forces in the growth of the broader casino industry.
Streaming has become the baseline for strategy ideas, as you can see in the link below, as well as for influencers streaming their games to an audience engaged by their expertise.
Changing Legacy Frameworks
In the UK, the BBC is considered a bastion of culture. The fee-paying service, which has been responsible for local and international broadcasting, sports coverage, and entertainment for over 100 years. A recent landmark announcement that the BBC could release programs on YouTube is among the most prominent pieces of news to emerge in recent memory.
This is huge. As part of a broader shift away from legacy media, including the phasing out of print newspapers and their replacement by the internet, as well as Spotify taking over the world of music streaming and partnering with some of the most prominent sports organizations, like FC Barcelona.
Entertainment juggernauts like Netflix, Disney+, and Paramount are creating a monopoly at the top of the streaming market, valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and vast numbers of Gen Z and Millennials now get most of their news and entertainment via social media, influencers, and streaming brands.
Ultimately, it is up to legacy media companies to adapt. Those with the best success have been those who moved quickly online and made their digital platform the figurehead of their business model. We have seen TV stations do this, and we have also seen newspapers make the switch, too, doubling down on the potential of social media and viral content.
Mapping Out The Timescale
It does feel as though it is a case of when, not if, legacy media disappears from the mainstream of media and news. We’re not talking about the brands themselves; cable TV, newspapers, and radio stations are all in a position of vulnerability.
They cannot compete with emerging global media forms online, especially through cost-effective streaming platforms like YouTube, which have global reach. Newspapers have been declining for the best part of a decade and a half, and it is not a trend that is relenting.
Over the next decade and a half, this change will continue to have a significant impact on legacy media. It can be extremely challenging to make these predictions, but it is likely that streaming companies will continue to eat into the legacy media market share over the next decade and a half.
Newspapers are still considered the gold standard in many countries, and while social media sites like X, formerly known as Twitter, are much cheaper and faster, the volume of misinformation on them could push people back toward more traditional forms of media.
If we had to give a definitive opinion, it would not be outside the realms of possibility to see legacy media become a niche within the broader media landscape, but many of the biggest brands have the capital, visibility, and resources to adapt to the modern landscape. Either way, streaming will play an integral role in this change.
