LOS ANGELES — Podcasts, TikTok channels, YouTube streamers, Substacks … they’re all forms of what Alan Wolk, co-founder and lead analyst of industry publication TVREV, likes to call “feudal media.”

Feudal media could be considered alternative forms of distribution of traditional media and entertainment outlets (broadcasters, theaters, radio), but looking at today’s entertainment landscape, those landing in the feudal media space are looking more mainstream than ever before.

“The monoculture has been replaced by feudal media,” and all defined by a series of self-contained content bubbles, Wolk said, speaking during the opening keynote at the recent OTT.X Summit.“People are retreating into these little bubbles. This is freaking advertisers out to no end. They don’t know how to reach people. In this new economy, attention is the coin of the realm. It’s not how much you watch something, it’s how [people are] interacting.

“How do you advertise to the masses when the mass is gone?”

Wolk harkened back to a simpler time for advertisers, where you reach most all viewers at once, because they were all watching the same programs at the same time. The options were limited a few TV channels, a few radio stations, a few print publications, with gatekeepers controlling all of it.

“Then the internet happened and very quickly the vandals have sacked Rome,” Wolk said. “The gatekeepers are gone.”

That’s left a mountain of unique channels attended to by the most passionate fan bases for each type of content, and they tend to be largely unaware of much of what is going on outside of their universe.

Wolk suggests the global entertainment ecosystem will need to evolve to integrate these democratized platforms to maximize the return on long-term investments in product sales and subscribers. But it’s not easy changing how things have always been done. That 90-minute movie is now competing for eyes with a 90-second TikTok, not to mention a horde of podcasts. The solution is to lean into the chaos and target your message to the right bubbles where passionate fans reside, Wolk said.

Part of that means embracing what AI can do. Wolk said he believes that AI in entertainment is “the printing press of our age,” with no budgets, no gatekeepers, and massive creative power at everyone’s fingertips. Just an idea and a computer give anyone the chance to win the masses.

OTT.X and the Entertainment Evolution Symposium and were sponsored by EX-CO, Aux Mode, Integration Therapy, ITN Studios and ITN Distribution, Matchpoint, AdGood, Cineverse, and Entertainment ID Registry (EIDR), in cooperation with the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School, and the Independent Streaming Alliance (ISA).