The past week’s developments point to a clear shift: media companies are no longer just competing on content, they’re competing for control over the systems beneath it.
Netflix is investing in AI-driven production infrastructure. TikTok is collapsing discovery and consumption with Apple Music integration. Sports fragmentation is elevating discovery interfaces into critical navigation layers. And YouTube continues to demonstrate the scale advantage of owning global attention.
Across the board, the control layer, including production workflows, metadata, discovery, and distribution infrastructure, is becoming the strategic battleground.
FAST Keeps Having a Moment; Q4 Viewing Hours Spike 21% Globally as Segment Now Spearheads Streaming’s Overall Growth
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Next Week - Turning CTV Advertising Challenges into Actionable Solutions
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Amazon Fire TV Interface Redesign: Advancing Content Discovery, AI Integration, and Platform Control
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OTT.X BUZZ - Women Shaping the Future of Digital Media & Entertainment March 31st - Virtual Webinar
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Tubi And TikTok Launch Incubator To Help Creators Make Long-Form Series
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The Conversations Shaping NAB Start Here - April 19
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Amagi Launches AI Artwork Engine: Ending the Era of Manual Resizing for Global Streaming
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The Control Layer Is Becoming the Media Business
The past week’s developments point to a clear shift: media companies are no longer just competing on content, they’re competing for control over the systems beneath it.
Netflix is investing in AI-driven production infrastructure. TikTok is collapsing discovery and consumption with Apple Music integration. Sports fragmentation is elevating discovery interfaces into critical navigation layers. And YouTube continues to demonstrate the scale advantage of owning global attention.
Across the board, the control layer, including production workflows, metadata, discovery, and distribution infrastructure, is becoming the strategic battleground.
The Take
The industry’s center of gravity is shifting from content ownership to system control.
Companies that own how content is made, organized, and discovered are increasingly shaping monetization, audience flow, and long-term leverage.
Owning content still matters. Owning the infrastructure around it may matter more.
Read the Full Analysis: The Streaming Wars
FAST Keeps Having a Moment; Q4 Viewing Hours Spike 21% Globally as Segment Now Spearheads Streaming’s Overall Growth
Perhaps it was the mundanity of having too many 24/7 channels themed entirely around ancient TV series like Green Acres, or having snoozed through too many thoughlessly assembled conference panels no-so-provocatively titled “What Makes FAST Go,” but at least a few of us tuned out on the free ad-supported TV revolution a few years ago.
That’s a shame, because the FAST segment of the global TV business appears to be having a legit moment. In fact, usage just keeps on growing, and monetization is getting better.
According to data just released by Amagi, a leading provider of streaming technology infrastructure to FAST channels, hours of viewing (HOV) for FAST programming grew by 17% YoY in the U.S. in the fourth quarter, and by 21% globally. The uptick was a whopping 66% for Latin America. Ad impressions, meanwhile, grew by 27% worldwide
According to Nielsen, streaming’s share of total domestic TV usage is approaching 50%. But increasingly, it doesn’t appear to be the big, flashy premium subscription video-on-demand platforms that are leading this audience share growth.
Consider that in Q4, Roku reported a 15% YoY increase in streaming hours on its platform, many of which belonged to its native FAST, the Roku Channel. Netflix, meanwhile, only touted a 2% increase in HOV from October-December.
According to Nielsen, FAST platforms account for around 6% of U.S. TV viewing, with Roku Channel and Tubi controlling 5.1% just by themselves in January, nearly double their audience share from two years earlier.
FAST denizens say the growth is being achieved, at least at this point, largely without the help of TV’s most powerful audience driver, live sports. According to Wurl, another provider of streaming tech to FASTs, only 2.7% of FAST viewership comes from sports, live or otherwise.
Read the Story: Next TMT
Next Week - Turning CTV Advertising Challenges into Actionable Solutions
Next week’s OTT.X Advertising Roundtables are bringing together senior leaders across the CTV and streaming advertising ecosystem for a focused, executive-level working session.
Designed as an off-the-record, highly collaborative forum, these roundtables move beyond surface-level conversation to focus on real alignment, practical solutions, and industry progress.
Moderated by Craig Heiting, CRO of AdGood, the session will be guided by deep industry expertise and a focus on actionable outcomes, ensuring conversations translate into meaningful next steps for the ecosystem.
Roundtable Objectives
- Improve interoperability across advertising systems and partners
- Advance more consistent, transparent, and scalable approaches to measurement and attribution
- Align buyers, sellers, and technology providers on operational best practices
- Identify actionable opportunities to reduce friction and accelerate innovation across the CTV advertising value chain
- Form a dedicated working group to actively address the challenges and opportunities identified
This roundtable is structured to foster active participation, candid discussion, and defined next steps, culminating in the formation of a working group that will continue collaboration and drive measurable progress across the CTV advertising landscape.
Attendance is intentionally limited to maintain a productive, executive-level environment.
Amazon Fire TV Interface Redesign: Advancing Content Discovery, AI Integration, and Platform Control
Amazon recently announced the first major redesign of the Fire TV interface since 2020, shifting Fire TV toward a more modern, content-discovery-focused design with top navigation tabs, improved performance, and broader aggregation of content from multiple streaming services.
Amazon’s previous redesign of the Fire TV interface reorganized the home screen, added user profiles, and introduced category tabs (Home, Find, Live, etc.) to help users navigate streaming services more easily. That update also emphasized personalized recommendations and tighter integration with Alexa.
"We updated our Fire TV experience to be cleaner, faster, and better organized for customers. We rebuilt our underlying code so it moves up to 30% faster on the hardware customers already own, all as a free upgrade," Said Aidan Marcuss, Amazon VP, Fire TV
The current Fire TV interface redesign addresses several major challenges facing connected TV devices, content overload, user experience competition, and ecosystem control of the living room. It is rolling out gradually to newer Fire TV sticks and TVs starting in the U.S. in early 2026.
While the redesigned interface offers a number of updates over the previous interface, which was often criticized for cluttered navigation and slower performance, there are several key areas of improvement.
- Reorganizes the home screen with a top navigation bar that includes categories like Home, Movies, TV Shows, Sports, and Live TV, allowing users to browse content across all their streaming services instead of searching within individual apps.
- The interface also adopts a more modern look with updated typography, rounded tiles, and clearer layouts designed to reduce the time users spend deciding what to watch.
- Shifts Fire TV toward a content-first experience. Rather than emphasizing individual apps, the system now surfaces recommendations and programming from multiple services in one place, while apps appear in a dedicated row that users can customize.
- Personalization features were expanded as well, users can now pin up to 20 apps on the home screen (up from six), and the system aggregates shows, movies, and live events from services like Netflix, Disney+, and Prime Video in unified browsing sections.
- Rebuilt parts of the Fire TV operating system to improve performance and integrate new capabilities. According to Amazon, the redesigned interface can be 20–30% faster, with smoother navigation and quicker app launches.
- Added deeper integration with the AI-powered Alexa+ assistant, enabling voice-driven recommendations and control of smart home devices.
The redesign organizes navigation into clear categories (Movies, TV Shows, Sports, Live TV) and emphasizes aggregated recommendations across services rather than requiring users to open individual apps. This reflects a broader industry trend where platforms compete on who controls content discovery, not just hardware or apps. Amazon specifically redesigned Fire TV to reduce the time people spend searching for content and to help users browse programming across multiple services from one interface. This shift increases the power of TV operating systems as gatekeepers of streaming consumption, influencing which shows and services are promoted.
Read the Analysis: Parks Associates
OTT.X BUZZ - Women Shaping the Future of Digital Media & Entertainment March 31st - Virtual Webinar
In honor of Women’s History Month, OTT.X is proud to present a special edition of OTT.X BUZZ, a webinar and podcast series designed to bring together leaders across the streaming ecosystem for candid conversations on the issues shaping the future of the industry.
This session brings together a diverse group of women leaders from across the streaming landscape, each bringing unique perspectives from platforms, media companies, and technology partners.
Together, they will explore the opportunities and challenges facing the industry today and share insights shaped by their varied professional experiences and viewpoints.
Featured Speakers
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Moderator - Cathy Rasenberger, Founder & President, Rasenberger Media
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Christina Aguilera, Co-Founder & CEO, Synthis
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Michele Edelman, EVP, Technology & GM, Matchpoint
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Preeya Naul, SVP Streaming Partnerships & Supply, VideoElephant
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DeShuna Spencer, Founder & CEO, kweliTV
From evolving advertising models and platform strategy to partnerships, distribution, and operational innovation, the conversation will highlight how diverse leadership and perspectives strengthen decision-making and help drive meaningful progress across the streaming ecosystem.
Join this conversation highlighting exceptional women shaping the future of digital media & entertainment.
Tubi And TikTok Launch Incubator To Help Creators Make Long-Form Series
In the latest bridge between the creator economy and traditional media, Fox-owned streaming service Tubi has teamed with TikTok to help the latter’s talent pool develop long-form series.
The companies have launched an incubator to help TikTok creators develop original shows to premiere exclusively on Tubi. The programming will span many genres across scripted and unscripted. The companies say creators will lead the creative direction of the projects and receive support from Tubi.
TikTik will help identify creators who will be considered for the program, with an announcement of initial participants expected by this summer.
The initiative brings together two high-profile digital players. Tubi, which was acquired by Fox in 2020, has become one of the leading free streaming outlets, with more than 100 million monthly active users. TikTok’s explosive initial growth in the U.S. has leveled off somewhat but it still has 200 million-plus monthly users here and several times that in other parts of the world.
After years of political and legal wrangling over TikTok being controlled by a Chinese company, a deal was finalized in January to transfer control of its U.S. operations to a new joint venture. The new group of investors includes U.S. stakeholders like Oracle and Michael Dell, though China-based ByteDance retains 19.9% of the entity.
Tubi and its corporate siblings at Fox have been making aggressive moves in the creator space. In the last 10 months, Tubi has added more than 16,000 episodes from more than 200 creators to its platform. At CES in January, Fox’s ad sales group touted its new Creators@Fox initiative to a roomful of media buyers.
Read the Full Story: Deadline
The Conversations Shaping NAB Start Here - April 19
The conversations shaping this year’s NAB Show begin early at the OTT.X Breakfast at NAB on April 19.
Take part in a special preview session led by Dan Rayburn, Chairman of the NAB Show Streaming Summit, who will provide a high-level overview of the themes, speakers, and industry conversations defining this year’s program.
This session sets the stage for NAB’s opening day, offering a concise orientation to the content, discussions, and focus areas shaping this year’s show.
Designed as a strategic primer, the discussion will highlight where industry attention is converging across streaming, CTV, media technology, and content delivery, and what attendees should watch for as the week unfolds.
Step into the NAB Show and Streaming Summit with a clear sense of context, priorities, and the conversations likely to define the week.
Begin your NAB week with insights from one of the industry’s most respected voices in streaming media.
Amagi Launches AI Artwork Engine: Ending the Era of Manual Resizing for Global Streaming
Amagi, the cloud-native SaaS platform powering broadcast and streaming TV worldwide unveiled AI-driven Artwork Generation and Transformation as part of its industry cloud ingest-to-monetization platform Amagi NOW — giving media companies the ability to go from raw video to fully formatted, platform-ready promotional artwork without ever leaving the Amagi platform.
Built on Amagi Intelligence, the company’s AI layer, the new capability tackles a pain point every content distributor knows: the artwork bottleneck. A single title distributed across FAST, OTT, Connected TV, and social channels can demand dozens of artwork variants — different aspect ratios, localized text, platform-specific safe zones, and branding overlays. Until now, that meant hours of manual artwork creation, repeated creative cycles, and frequent rejections from distribution partners. That workflow is now automated end-to-end within the platform.
The Image That Tells the Story — Found Automatically
Amagi’s artwork engine doesn’t start with a blank canvas or a static template. It starts with the video itself. The AI watches the content and analyses every frame for visual composition, subject prominence, emotional resonance, and narrative context — then identifies the single image that best captures the story of the title.
That story-aligned image becomes the base artwork for all downstream use. Editorial teams can review, refine, and approve before anything goes live — keeping creative judgment in human hands while eliminating hours of manual frame-hunting and guesswork.
One Image, Every Format — Instant Transformation
From a single approved base image, Amagi NOW transforms it into every variant a distributor needs: 16:9 for CTV, 9:16 for mobile, 2:3 for posters, 1:1 for social, 4:3 for legacy platforms — and more. The transformation engine intelligently maintains subject framing and visual integrity while respecting each platform’s safe-zone and layout rules.
The result: zero rejection cycles, faster time-to-air, and consistent visual quality everywhere a title appears.
Full Creative Control, One Platform
Every artwork variant can be enhanced inside Amagi NOW with logos, title treatments, overlays, and branded templates — no need to export to third-party external tools. The workflow lives within Amagi’s Media Manager, with role-based access controls, preview functionality, and full audit trails so every stakeholder can track what was created, modified, and approved.
Why It Matters
For media companies operating at scale, artwork has become a hidden operational cost. Amagi’s new capabilities are designed to:
Read the Full Release: Amagi
US Demand for Recent Oscars Contenders
Presented By:
The recent Oscar results for "Sinners" highlight a lucrative shift in the awards playbook, proving that an early-year release can leverage the ceremony as a powerful catalyst for a second wave of streaming revenue.
Key Findings
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“Sinners’” dominant performance at this year’s Academy Awards seems to validate that successful awards contenders don’t necessarily need to release during the traditional awards season window at the end of the year.
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“Everything Everywhere All At Once” proved this. The movie saw its peak demand and brought in an additional $6M in streaming revenue only after its 2023 Best Picture win. “Sinners” is now poised for a massive financial second wind.
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For early-release awards contenders like these, awards season can be even more important as a catalyst that drives a second wave of relevance and ultimately streaming revenue.
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In Case You Missed It
- The Fix for Sports Fragmentation Might Start in the Bar, Not the Home. The Streaming Wars
- Comcast and Charter Push AI to the Edge to Reclaim Network Economics. The Streaming Wars
- Disney Just Put a Parks Guy in Charge of Everything. Now He Has to Prove the Rest of the Business Still Works. The Streaming Wars
- Netflix’s Mark Rober Moment Signals a Shift Toward Commerce-Driven Content. The Streaming Wars
- Sports Media Built a Fragmented Market. Piracy Became the Simplest Product. The Streaming Wars
- The Music Business Is Splitting Into Two Economies. The Streaming Wars
- Ask Skip: How Big of a Deal Is Disney Folding Hulu Into Disney?. The Streaming Wars
- From the Archives: HDHomeRun and the Quiet Roots of OTA + Streaming Hybrid Models. The Streaming Wars
- Netflix Expands Its Animation Strategy Through a KPop Demon Hunters Sequel. The Streaming Wars
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