Beginning on June 15, I am going to be at StreamTV in Denver. And the primary reason I want to be there is that, in some ways, it is the polar opposite of the recently wrapped ATX Television Festival. ATX is great, and it’s a wonderful way to celebrate the best of broadcast, cable, and streaming television.

But StreamTV is more about the future. It’s not that any of these new digital platforms are better or worse than the legacy networks. But it’s a big part of the future of media, and it’s a world I want to better understand.

Evan Shapiro has built a career in recent years being the bridge between those two worlds. He used to work in legacy media and knows that world well. But he also understands the new universe of media options and the ways companies need to engage viewers in 2026.

On Thursday, June 18, he will be hosting the Evan Shapiro Media Universe Summit at StreamTV, and it’s described as an “interactive experience [that] will map out the shifting landscape of media, exploring the convergence of streaming, technology, and consumer behavior.”

“Discover how to navigate disruption, identify new opportunities, and position your business for success in an ever-evolving universe. With Evan’s expertise and actionable insights, you’ll leave ready to chart your path in the next era of media.”

I’m looking forward to attending, and ahead of the event I spoke with Evan today about a variety of issues facing the industry.

The interview has been lightly edited for clarity (mostly mine):

One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is that I talk to a lot of people on the legacy side of the business, and I'm struck by the difference between their attitude toward the future and the attitude of people who aren't in legacy media. And I'm wondering, is this something you have noticed from your perspective? Do you have a sense of why they're so reluctant to change in the way that they're going to have to change to succeed?

Evan Shapiro: There's a general epidemic of fear of finding out—FUFO, as I call it in our industry—because I think they're afraid that if they find out what they actually need to do, it's not within their skill set. And what's fascinating about that is it's not really true. Once you embrace the need and pace of change that's surrounding you, there are things you can do to incrementally make the transformations you need.

The New York Times is the best example I really can think of, although there are others out there. But The New York Times is, I think, the greatest derivative company ever. In 2010, they were predominantly an ad-based paper product delivered by diesel trucks, and now they have 12 million digital subscribers. They're considered one of the world's best gaming companies, and I think they're the world's best podcasting company.

And all they did—now, granted, it wasn't easy, and it wasn't cheap—but all they did was say, “What do our users actually want? What are our super users, the people who pay us, looking for?” And they bought Wordle as a result of that. They made podcasts as a result of that. They segmented the food section as a standalone subscription. They created a lifestyle bundle, a suite of services that they sell, and I think they're crushing it.

And then compare them to the comp back in 2010, which was BuzzFeed. How's that going?

You know, it's interesting, because particularly the bigger media companies, their answer seems to be M&A: Let's get as big as we can, and that's how we're going to capture the audience. Whereas a lot of the digital-first companies are looking at it and saying, “The audience is fragmenting. We don't need to get everybody; we just need to get our people.”

Evan Shapiro: That's the crux. That is exactly it. You've been writing about this recently. I call it the Affinity Economy. The Affinity Economy is a merger of the creator economy and mainstream media, and we're seeing it whether it's MrBeast on Amazon, Rachel on Netflix, the Breakfast Club coming to Netflix, or, frankly, the SmartLess guys, who are all mainstream people building a huge podcast that's very successful. Or FIFA broadcasting 104 matches on CazéTV, a YouTube channel.

The key here is not scale for scale's sake anymore. It's not mass for mass's sake. It is building a cult, and then building the economic inner workings, or the economic business model, around an affinity.

It isn't about getting everybody. It's almost impossible. If you're playing a scale game, you're going to lose to Google, Amazon, and Meta. They win that scale game on every match.

But if you play a passion game, you can build a wonderful enterprise around your most fervent followers and really, I think, succeed and thrive. My business is a good example of that, but The Times is, I think, a terrific example of this.

Sam Reich's company is crushing it right now with a million subscribers—not 100 million subscribers, not 200 million subscribers—and we can go on and on across the spectrum to see examples of this.

But that's not the game that these traditional media players were trained to play. They were trained to defeat everybody, conquer everybody, and play the scale-and-reach game and the M&A game.

I'm not saying it never works, but it doesn't typically work. It almost always works out badly for both ends of that M&A.

If you want to know how the Warner Bros. Discovery merger is going to end, look at the Disney acquisition of Fox. They're still $60 billion underwater on that deal, and I don't think they'll ever get out from under that deal. It did not work out.

They did not, Deadpool and Wolverine aside, get the value that they needed, and as a consequence, they also took their eyes off the ball for years.

Look at the performance of Mandalorian and Grogu in theaters. Why did that fail so badly? It's not a bad film; it's just that they did not handle the marketing—the $120 million in marketing—correctly.

And as a consequence, they got their ass handed to them by two YouTubers this past weekend. Two YouTubers crushed one of the largest film franchises in the history of movies this past weekend with teeny-tiny marketing budgets by comparison, and with inconsequential production budgets by comparison.

Well, I've been arguing that there were a lot of reasons those movies were a success. One of them is that it's increasingly easy now for someone who has a massive YouTube channel to target the right audience and get them in the theaters, and legacy companies don't have that ability. They're spending $120 million on marketing, but it's just a scattershot of billboards and this and that. You have no idea who you're reaching or if you're reaching the right people. And to me, that's the sense of the future that people are missing out on. It isn't so much the YouTube thing; it's that YouTube allows you to target your core audience in a way that a lot of traditional marketing doesn't.

Evan Shapiro: That's 100% correct. YouTube allows you to create a look-alike model, but also, it's an install base. It's a cult.

Kane Parsons has a cult. Markiplier, before that with Iron Lung, has a cult. Inoxtag in France did a documentary and broke the record for documentary ticket sales with his film Kaizen.

But I think it's just one thing I'll disagree with you on here: It's not the size of the YouTube audience. Kane Parsons has a million subscribers on YouTube. Those are big channels, but they're not MrBeast at 400 million. They're not even Sean Evans, in the tens of millions. They're relatively small, niche followings.

And yet, because of the fervency, because of the scale of the engagement—not the scale of the audience—they delivered a massive hit. Backrooms is the biggest box-office hit in A24 history by a lot.

By the way, I will say the frustrating thing for me, covering this just as a journalist, is the data is crap. I mean, there are a lot of comparisons. Another thing came up from Nielsen today, comparing Netflix and YouTube. It's like, yes, there's a lot of viewing for YouTube, but we have no idea what people are watching. So it's real. If you're looking at trying to make comps, it's frustrating.

Evan Shapiro: It is. It is frustrating. There is actually good data on YouTube. If you go to TubeFilter, there are a couple of other outlets there.

The problem is that YouTube is not a channel; it's 4.6 million channels. And 98% of its viewership comes from the top 1 million channels. That sounds like it's kind of a monolith at the top, but it's not. That's still a million channels.

So when you look at Nielsen's numbers on Gauge—and, by the way, huge grain of salt, Nielsen is just total utter bullshit. We all know it. We've always all known it. Now it's proven over the last couple of months—but even if you're just taking it directionally, you look at the Gauge.

Yes, YouTube scores as the number one most-watched distribution platform compared to Disney and NBC. And, by the way, that's YouTube versus all of Disney, Hulu and Disney+, ESPN, and ABC. But again, it's a million channels. It's not four or five or even six or seven, or even a dozen channels. And so now you can't think of it in the same manner.

The reason why YouTube is the most popular channel in the world is that it's number one on TV, but it's also number one on phones, right, for video. There are a billion hours of YouTube watched on television every day.

And the reason why they're more successful than other channels on TV is because they have 1.2 billion hours of content, which is exponentially larger than Netflix, exponentially larger than Disney, and it personalizes itself around you when you turn it on. Netflix can't do that.

I can't even find the last fucking show I was watching on Netflix. You know what I mean? YouTube—I turn it on, it's like, “This is what you want,” and you go, “You know what? That's exactly what I want.”

That's one of the things I write about. I mean, the UIs for the big streamers are terrible, and the weird thing is Netflix has the data in-house. They just never really decided [to use it]. Now they're just getting to the point where they're rolling out contextual search, where you can say, “I'd like a movie with Adam Sandler in a rom-com,” and then it will bring it up. And that's at least five years behind where they should be, and Netflix is way ahead of everybody else. It's really an astounding thing to me.

Evan Shapiro: I think the Netflix attempt to buy Warner Bros. Discovery was an admission that they're out of ideas, and the copycatting that they're doing of YouTube by putting podcasts up there and going into vertical and all these other things—I really do think they're out of ideas.

And their ad business isn't anywhere near where it should be. I mean, we have no idea how much they did last year, but let's call it $1.5 billion. They have 300 million homes that they should be doing more in advertising.

And it's an unusual thing to watch the disruptor become the man. It's an unusual thing to see the big tech platform become, frankly, digital CBS.

One of the things that I think was underappreciated in this Netflix bid for Warner Bros. was that Netflix saw this as a way to buy a movie theater or a movie studio, and it has distribution, marketing, everything in-house, and they could just turn it on, and they could get into the theatrical business, which they wouldn't mind doing. What they don't want to do is have to build it from scratch.

And so now they're in this weird thing of, “Well, we sort of want to do theater movies, but, yeah, we don't really.” So, yeah, you're right. They're sort of—and that happens with any company. You kind of get into the wilderness a little bit, trying to decide where you're going to go.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah, but I think the major problem was that Ted got mogulitis and we thought the answer was a movie studio, and overpaying for it.

On top of that, they were going to go massively in debt in order to make that deal work, and it would have done the same thing to them that Fox did to Disney.

I'm not saying the movie theater business is dead. It is absolutely not. This past weekend showed that there is a future for the movie business, but the studio infrastructure is not the answer, and these two films prove that.

Evan Shapiro: But on the other hand, YouTube is becoming its own version of appointment television as well.

I dropped a piece today: Two-thirds of the content, or the watch time, on YouTube is dedicated to content that's 30 minutes or more. Two-thirds. This has become television.

Frontline is distributing their full-feature documentaries on YouTube. Their long-form content is now the most-watched content on YouTube. It's not clip-driven stuff.

Clips generate views, and the clips, or the short-form, are like 60% of the content that's uploaded, but 80% of the view time is spent on content 30 minutes or longer.

And it's just—we have a tremendous amount of misinformation that flows through traditional media that distracts them from paying attention to the things that are actually important, which is the behavior of their own best users.

But I would say this: For a couple of years, I was the hair-on-fire guy, the sky-is-falling-and-you're-not-paying-attention-to-it guy. But at the beginning of this year, I decided to really pivot this, because there are so many examples of things that are actually working.

I'm tired of people complaining about what's not working, and so I'm trying to push them toward the things that are working.

And if you look at what TF1 is doing with Gaspar G in France, or France Télévisions' recent deal with YouTube, or what BBC Studios is doing with Bluey, or what ITV is doing with Love Island, what CazéTV is doing with FIFA—I can go on and on and on.

And so my hope, or my design, of the Media Universe Summit in Denver in a few weeks is to not be a group therapy session, not be a bitch session. We're going to provide probably two dozen case studies on what the fuck is working right now, what you can take away from that, and what you should be doing with that.

That, to me, is my role for the rest of this decade: to point out the problems, try to slap people out of their comas, but then, on the other hand, when I get their attention, to say, “Here are a dozen case studies of things that are working. Take the lessons from them and apply them to your own world.”

One of the things that I find frustrating is that, in a lot of ways, whether it's the press or the studio execs, the U.S. entertainment industry is sort of on this weird island. They don't really pay that much attention to what's going on in Europe or anywhere else outside the U.S. And there are all these great ideas, all this stuff happening, and no one knows about it in sort of the traditional press and studio C-suite.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah, and present company excluded, I think there's a real deficit of attention by trade journalists and analysts, in particular. They don't dig into the details. I'll use the Colbert thing that just happened recently as an example of this.

You know, Ellison said Colbert wasn't profitable, and the whole trade press just copied and pasted. They didn't do the math. We did the math. We proved that's not true. Is it a great business? No, it's going down.

But to look at that show, the number one show in late night, and say it's not profitable—it's obvious bullshit, and it is not looking past the edge of your own desk.

There are tons of examples: ZDF in Germany, ITV in the UK, France Télévisions, and TF1 in France. A lot of really good examples. What FIFA is doing in Brazil—there are tons of really amazing case studies that you can learn from and steal the lessons from and go adopt.

But this incurious nature of the American trade press, and frankly, the American C-suites—you're right—it is going to be the death of them.**

There's a certain amount of arrogance, because you've had all these decades of, well, no matter where you went in the world, Hollywood stuff was what people watched. And they've had a really difficult time getting their heads around the idea that it's still important, but it's not as important as it was 10 or 20 years ago.

You know, there's a lot of competition, and I'll talk to C-suite people, and they just believe it's going to turn around. You know, it's like, “Oh, this is just a temporary thing, and then we're going to find the next Big Bang Theory, and everything's going to be great.”

Evan Shapiro: I'm sure the cotton gin makers of the 18th century believed that, too. I'm sure that the horse-and-buggy people, when they saw the Wright brothers, said, “Wow, that flying machine. No, sure, it's neat, but who's gonna fly?”

And the basic misunderstanding, actually, is here's the crux of it: 70% of the world's population are millennials and younger.

I open every presentation with a bunch of data on the population of the planet Earth, and I say, “70% of the world's population are millennials and younger. Millennials are turning 45 this year. Gen Z are turning 31 this year.”

And you can see these senior executives in the room going, “Really?” As if, like, math isn't a thing, right? Pay attention to what's going on around you.

And they believe that, well, once these millennials and Gen Zers grow up, they'll have a taste for traditional media.

No. They're adults. And, in fact, the opposite is happening. The habits of millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha are becoming the habits of the rest of the planet.

The fastest-growing demographic for YouTube usage is 55+. And now when you ask a room full of adults, “Do you watch YouTube on TV?” the whole room raises their hand at this point. If you say, “Do you watch a podcast on TV?” the whole room raises their hand.

I interviewed Scott Galloway yesterday. He says 40% of the consumption of his podcast happens on television. He's not a young man. He's not MrBeast.

And if it's happening with Scott Galloway and Joe Rogan and SmartLess—well, SmartLess doesn't have video—but it's happening with everything.

And a podcast on television, let's be honest, it's a talk show. Yeah, it's not. Stop calling—stop trying to ignore what's happening around you.

But they have this fear of finding out, and there's the Boca Raton problem. A lot of people can see their retirement on the horizon. So, do I really want to upset the apple cart? Change things now?

And their compensation is tied into things like how much free cash flow they have, and that is the opposite of what you need to be doing in a situation like this.

I mean, there's this—and it's not a theory—but this idea: linear TV is dead, right? And so we're just going to milk it for everything that we can, instead of looking at it and going, “Yes, it's not increasing, but there's a core that will pay for this, so why not invest a little money, take a little less money back off the top, and you would have a business in 20 years?”

Whereas this way of just saying, “We're not going to spend money on original programming, we're not going to do anything, we're just going to wait for people to get tired and cancel”...

Evan Shapiro: And I tried to convince them to take their massive profit margins in the early part of the century and reinvest them while I was working at Comcast and IMC and other places, and say, “Why do we need a 45% profit margin? Can't we just take 33% and take that additional 12% and reinvest it into the enterprise?”

I tried to take channels digital in 2012, and everybody called me nuts. And now it's too late. Now we are past that point of no return.

And when you want to look at misaligned incentives, David Zaslav should have spent the last four years transforming Warner Bros. Discovery into something new. Instead, he concentrated on making a half a billion dollars for himself.

That was the—and he and John Malone's bank accounts were the number one and number two goals of the senior management there. That was it. And it's evident in retrospect.

And there's been a lot made lately of CEO pay, and especially in media. That's the boardrooms and the C-suites. They have no alliance or allegiance to the consumer, or at the end of the day, really even the shareholder and the investors. Their allegiance is only to the small collection of Ivy League grads in the ivory tower at the top of their building.

Where do you think the industry will be in five years?

Evan Shapiro: Five years is a difficult one, because we're going to, I think, still be in that transition. But I don't think most of them make it.

I think Disney has a shot. We'll see what happens. But I think everybody else is—you know, actually, no. Let me amend that.

I think Fox, as much as it pains me to say this, is doing a really tremendous job right now. They've got their two [businesses], they're doing exactly what you said: They're milking the cow, but they're taking that milk and they're building a new business out.

They invested in Whalar, they invested in RedBird Ventures, they invested in Holy Water, they made a huge deal with Dhar Mann Studios. Look at what they're doing on Tubi with creators.

Lachlan Murdoch, as many problems as I have with certain aspects of who he is, on the other hand, as a leader, compare him to Ellison side by side. He's really growing the next generation of that business there.

So I think they may actually make it to the other side. But I don't think the Warner Bros.-Paramount ecosystem exists as it does now after that merger by the end of this decade.

I think you're going to see Apple and Amazon and Google and potentially Meta and a couple of other new players enter the field and be the replacement.

And by the way, this is not new. This is what always happens.

We talk about Disney as if they've always owned ABC. Well, remember Capital Cities? What happened to them, right? Remember when Gulf and Western—like, you know, remember when GE owned NBC.

So people do get out of these businesses, and I do think we're watching the destruction of two of the greatest brands in the history of entertainment, Paramount and Warner Bros. and HBO, and I think that's going to continue.

I think by this time next decade we're going to talk about a whole new set of media oligarchs running the world.