The evidence

The Guardian published an investigation on 22 August 2026 called “Digging the grave of my profession”: the Hollywood creatives training AI to do their jobs. It found experienced writers, directors and producers earning between $12 and $200 an hour through specialist AI-training companies.

The assignments reported include:

• Creating a two-day shooting schedule from scripts, emails and production documents

• Accounting for permits, daylight, location risks, crew and child-protection requirements

• Constructing film and television pitch decks

• Evaluating scripts and other AI-written material

• Teaching systems to tell speakers apart in noisy documentary footage

The article also found a current Micro1 recruitment advert seeking experienced producers to design evaluation tasks covering budgeting, scheduling, vendors and crew coordination.

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What’s newly clear

AI companies are not just acquiring screenplay examples or finished pictures. They are buying production expertise. They are converting the tacit knowledge behind coordination, judgment and development into testable tasks.

That is a different thing to worry about. A script is a finished object. The knowledge of how to turn a script into a shootable schedule, how to read a location for risk, how to know when a pitch deck is ready, is process knowledge. It lives in people who have done the job for years. And some of those people are now selling it, task by task, to the companies building the tools.

Why it matters for producers and formats

The immediate exposure is not in the writers’ room. It’s in the development and production office: research, scheduling, deck preparation, budget reconciliation, first-pass evaluation. These are the jobs that provide the scaffolding around creative decisions, and they employ a lot of people on the way to senior production roles.

For format companies specifically, development bibles, episode structures, production schedules and commissioning responses hold accumulated knowledge built up over years. Uploading them indiscriminately, whether into a shared drive an AI tool can read or directly into a training programme, could help a tool imitate the way your company actually works, not just what your shows look like.

The inference

Production companies need a knowledge strategy alongside an AI policy. Most companies have thought about the second. Few have thought about the first.

That means drawing a line between three things:

1. Confidential competitive knowledge that never leaves the building

2. Material you’re comfortable an internal AI tool retrieving to help your own team

3. Expertise you knowingly and deliberately license for someone else’s model to train on

Right now, for most companies, those three categories are the same category. That’s the problem.

A caution worth holding onto

The investigation establishes that creatives are doing this training work. It does not establish how capable the resulting systems have become, and it does not establish that AI caused the wider contraction in production. US production had already fallen because of reduced commissioning, the strikes, and the post-pandemic correction. It’s worth being precise about what the evidence actually shows, rather than reaching for the more dramatic story.

The most consequential development

The real movement here is from generation to judgment.

AI systems already produce images, scripts and video reasonably well. What model companies want now is professional criteria for deciding whether an output works, and how to fix it if it doesn’t. That puts editorial judgment, development instinct and production experience directly inside the training pipeline, not just the output.

The trend deserving scepticism

Be careful of claims that AI has “learned professional filmmaking” because it can reproduce a checklist built from expert feedback. Editorial principles can be described. Applying them depends on intention, genre, audience and context, and that’s a much harder thing to teach a system than it looks.

A technically smooth reveal can still destroy a format’s jeopardy. A beautifully paced sequence can still tell the wrong story. Knowing the rule is not the same as knowing when to break it, and that judgment call is exactly what took the people now training these systems years to build.

The same trade, different asset

This is the same calculation I wrote about last week with the platforms. Own the relationship or the IP, and a change of mind elsewhere costs you a bad week. Rent it out, and a change of mind elsewhere costs you the business.

Training an AI model on your production knowledge isn’t collaboration. It’s a sale. You’re taking a day rate for an asset that took years to build, and once it’s in the model, you don’t own it anymore, the company that trained on it does. That’s a worse trade than renting distribution from a platform, because at least a platform relationship can be renegotiated. This one can’t be undone.

So, are we collaborating with the enemy?

Maybe the wrong question. The people taking this work aren’t traitors, they’re producers between jobs in a market that’s contracted, being paid for expertise nobody else is currently buying. The real question is whether the industry has a plan for what happens to that expertise once it’s inside a model, and right now, most of it doesn’t.

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I’m dyslexic. AI helps me make this readable. The thoughts and opinions are my own. There’s no auto generated content here, I read and research with rigour.

Jonathan Glazier | TV Format Consultant, Director and Executive Producer writer of altmedia and Format Forward a place for developers.

Like the universe, it’s relative to where you’re standing.

I’d also like to say that it’s a shame that words can get hijacked. “Reform” is just a word, but now it is a word that sends a shudder down many readers’ spines. So what a shame my colleagues decided on their latest rant at the BBC to be titled, “Reform the Industry”; what do you think?

I’ve been thinking about that a lot while compiling Format Forward’s Top 20 formats. Measuring the success of a television format turns out to be considerably harder than I thought. Is a format successful because it sells to 20 countries? Because it runs for ten series in one? Because it rates? Because it makes money? Because it is still being commissioned 15 years after it was created?

The answer depends on where you’re standing.

And I wonder if exactly the same problem sits at the heart of the current debate about BBC commissioning.

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There is now a call for reform, supported by hundreds of people from across the production community. At almost exactly the same moment, Kate Phillips has been talking to Broadcast (link is behind a paywall) about restructuring BBC commissioning, cutting development expenditure by 15%, experimenting with cheaper proofs of concept and trying to stop projects getting stuck in what she herself calls “development hell”.

There is clearly a conversation to be had about commissioning.

But before we decide whether the system is succeeding or failing, perhaps we need to answer a more fundamental question.

How do we measure a successful commissioning system?

Because I’m not sure we’ve ever really agreed.

If you’re a producer, the first measure of success is fairly obvious. You got the commission.

But even that isn’t quite as simple as it sounds.

If you spent two years developing the idea, carrying staff, attending meeting after meeting, making changes and waiting months between decisions, was it still a successful process?

Probably, if you got the commission.

Definitely not, if you didn’t.

Move to the other side of the desk and the view changes.

For a commissioner, getting programmes made is only the beginning. They have to find ideas that fit the channel, work for the audience, justify their cost and ideally return. At the BBC they also have public-service obligations, regional responsibilities and a requirement to do things the market might not otherwise do.

Move upstairs again to the channel controller and you’re looking at a portfolio. One programme might deliver a huge audience, another a younger audience, another reputation, another underserved viewers and another might drive people to iPlayer.

Then there is the distributor who looks at the same programme and asks whether anyone in Germany, Australia or Korea might buy it.

And eventually there is the audience, who couldn’t care less about any of this.

They either watch it or they don’t.

Which brings me back to something that struck me while doing the Top 20 research.

We measure programmes obsessively once they have been commissioned. Ratings, share, streams, demographics, appreciation, awards, recommissions, international sales.

But we know remarkably little about the performance of the machine that chose them.

What if we did?

Not as a league table of commissioners. I think that would be both unfair and potentially damaging. If you tell commissioners their performance will be judged purely by hit rate, don’t be surprised when they stop taking risks.

But there are things we could know.

How many ideas enter the system? How many go into paid development? How many become proofs of concept or pilots? How many finally get commissioned? How long does that journey take? And perhaps just as importantly, how quickly does the BBC say no?

That last one matters.

An unsuccessful idea sitting on a commissioner’s desk for three months costs the BBC very little. It can cost an indie quite a lot.

People. Time. Development money. Opportunity.

That’s why one comment from Kate Phillips’ Broadcast interview particularly interested me. She said the BBC needs to be realistic about how much it develops and must stop projects getting trapped in development hell. If the BBC isn’t going forward, she wants the idea put into turnaround quickly so the producer can take it elsewhere.

That sounds simple.

It could actually be one of the most useful measures of commissioning efficiency.

Because perhaps failure isn’t the problem.

Television development has to fail. It is R&D. If every idea you develop gets commissioned, you’re probably not taking enough creative risk.

The important question is how intelligently and how quickly you discover that an idea isn’t going to work.

That changes the conversation around the BBC’s 15% reduction in development spending too.

The objective shouldn’t simply be to develop fewer ideas.

It should be to make failure cheaper to discover.

A paper format might answer one question. A run-through another. Animation another. A £5,000 digital proof of concept might tell you something that once required a £100,000 pilot. And increasingly an idea might even prove an audience for itself online before anyone commissions a television version.

That doesn’t remove creative risk. It allows you to take more of it.

Then comes the measure I increasingly think we’ve undervalued.

Time.

When I started looking at successful formats across the past decade, international sales initially seemed like the obvious measure. But selling a format once and having it cancelled tells you something very different from a programme returning year after year in the same territory.

Recommissioning is evidence.

The broadcaster has seen the ratings, seen the costs, heard from the audience, dealt with the production and then made the decision to buy it again.

And again.

Perhaps we should judge commissioning in much the same way.

Not simply, what did you commission this year?

But, five years later, what did you commission that is still creating value?

That might be a returning series. It might be valuable IP. It might have created a new piece of talent. It might have established a production company. It might have travelled internationally. It might even have failed commercially but demonstrated something genuinely new that subsequently influenced other programmes.

Success doesn’t have to mean the same thing every time.

But it does have to mean something.

And at the BBC there is one final person standing in a different place looking at all of this.

The licence-fee payer.

We should care whether commissioning uses public money efficiently. But efficiency cannot simply mean spending less.

A commissioning department that saves millions by becoming increasingly cautious may look wonderfully efficient on a spreadsheet while slowly destroying the thing it exists to create.

Equally, creativity cannot become an excuse for a system that leaves hundreds of ideas floating around in development because nobody wants to make a decision.

We need risk and accountability.

Which is why I think the current argument about reforming BBC commissioning could become much more interesting than an argument about whether individual commissioners are good at their jobs.

I’d rather know whether the system is good at its job.

Does it find ideas from unexpected places? Does it recognise potential? Does it make ideas better? Does it kill the weak ones quickly enough? Does it protect the unusual ones long enough to find out whether they’re brilliant? And does it give the people who brought those ideas into the system a clear answer in a reasonable amount of time?

Most importantly, five or ten years later, what did all that commissioning actually create?

Because perhaps the measure of a successful commissioning system isn’t how many programmes it commissions.

It’s how much lasting value it creates from the ideas, money, talent and risk that pass through it.

And that depends entirely on where you’re standing.

I’m dyslexic. AI helps me make this readable. The thoughts and opinions are my own, there are no auto-generated articles, and I read and research with rigour.

Jonathan Glazier: TV format consultant and screen media strategist. Writes Format Forward and alt.Media.

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TL;DR

Everyone in this business says the same thing right now. It is quiet. Nothing is moving. So I spent the year asking one question in seven territories: what is really going on behind the downturn? I expected one answer. I got seven, and the differences matter more than the similarities. All the reports are on Format Forward, free.

The question

I did not want another mood piece. Every market, every panel, every WhatsApp group tells you the same story with no evidence attached.

So I built the Atlas around a single question, asked identically in seven places. The UK, the USA, Europe, the Middle East, India, South East Asia and Korea. What is really going on here? Not what does it feel like.

What is happening to commissions, to companies, to development, and to the people who do the work?

Here is the short version of each.

The UK. Britain has never been better at making television or worse at paying people to invent it. Record production spend of £6.8 billion, around 85% of it inward investment, domestic high-end titles down from 82 to 76, and roughly 71% of commissioning value going to shows that already exist.

The USA. The most quoted number measures the wrong thing. Los Angeles reality shoot days are down 62.7% on the five-year average, which is real, but that counts permits, not American unscripted. National orders are down closer to a third. The growth went vertical.

Europe. Not a commissioning decline. A speed problem. Scripted commissions were only 2% below 2020, but order to release has gone from 288 days to 404. Second seasons are where shows now die, with renewals down from 32% to 19%.

The Middle East. One buyer, one month, and a very long game. MBC Group revenue fell about a fifth while Shahid revenue rose 18.5% and turned profitable a year early. Saudi Arabia responded to instability by raising its production rebate to as much as 60%.

India. Not shrinking, migrating. The sector grew 9% to ₹2.78 trillion, digital passed ₹1 trillion for the first time, and television advertising fell for a fourth straight year. 745 million people still watch television every week.

South East Asia. Not buying fewer shows. Buying fewer of other people’s shows. Adaptations across Asia fell from 285 in the first half of 2017 to 78 in the first half of 2025, while South East Asian streaming subscriptions grew 19%.

Korea. The most successful content exporter in the world cannot fund its own broadcasters. JTBC defaulted and went into receivership, broadcasters have cut drama output by more than half, and Korea still launches brand-new formats every year while everyone else remakes proven ones.

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What all seven agree on

1. Demand did not go anywhere.

Not one of these reports found an audience walking away. India has more television households than ever. South East Asian subscriptions are up. Korean content is still the most watched non-English content on Netflix. Whatever this downturn is, it is not people switching off.

2. The cut landed on development, not on output.

This is the finding that repeats hardest. In the UK, seven pounds in every ten of commissioning value now goes to something that already exists, and the factual and fact ent commission value fell 23.6% in a year. In Europe, commissioners increasingly want the financing in place before they will commission at all. In South East Asia, the licensed adaptation is the specific product that stopped selling.

A returner needs a producer. A new format needs a development team, a paper stage, a taping budget and a tolerance for failure. It is the last of those that has gone.

3. The proof burden moved onto the producer.

Tape has replaced paper. In the US, a pre-existing audience does the job a taster tape used to do, which is why NBC licensed Wordle and Netflix started counting video podcasts as unscripted. Somebody funds that proof, and it is no longer the broadcaster.

The best answer to this problem in any of the seven reports comes from the Netherlands. Talpa took The House of Hide & Seek to Fox Entertainment before it had been made for RTL Nederland, and sold a share of the IP in return for money up front. That paid for a bigger Dutch build and a US pilot, and the pilot helped sell the format into Spain. Do not fund the tape out of development budget. Sell part of the format to the people who will want it later.

Where the seven disagree, which is the interesting part

Adaptation is going in opposite directions. In Europe, 7.7% of premieres are now based on existing formats, up from a 5.3% average, and game shows make up a third of all unscripted adaptations. In Asia, adaptation counts have fallen by three quarters in eight years. Both markets are de-risking. Europe is doing it by buying proven mechanics. Asia is doing it by owning its own IP.

Output genuinely fell in some places and did not in others. I need to be careful here, because it is tempting to make one argument fit seven countries. In the UK, Europe, India and South East Asia the business is broadly holding its size and changing what it pays for. In the USA and Korea, output actually contracted. American unscripted orders fell around a third. Korean broadcasters halved drama output and one of the country’s most important broadcasters defaulted on 20.6 billion won. That is not a reallocation. That is a shrinkage.

Korea breaks the returner rule entirely. Everywhere else, money is concentrating on formats that already work. Korea de-risks by backing named producers and letting them invent, and it releases new unscripted formats every year. Netflix Korea’s own content director says his overseas colleagues cannot understand how it is done. Both approaches are risk strategies. Only one of them generates new IP.

And there are seven different AI positions, not one. Europe legislated, with the EU AI Act transparency rules live since 2 August and fines up to 3% of worldwide turnover. Britain chose disclosure and caution. America went backwards, with Sora shut down as a consumer product and the rights regime holding. Korea wrote the licence and charged for it. India industrialised it. South East Asia put it in the back office and took 50 to 60% out of operating costs. The Gulf bought the infrastructure instead of the output.

If you carry one story about AI in television into a meeting, you are wrong in at least six of these markets.

Where I might be wrong

The reports lean on sourceable, published material, so coverage is uneven. Poland and the wider CEE region are not covered at all, and I have said so rather than padding it.

There is also a survivorship problem I cannot solve. I can count what got commissioned. I cannot count the development that quietly never happened, which is the exact thing I am claiming was cut. My evidence for the development squeeze is real but it is indirect.

And a fair counter-argument exists. You could say development has not been cut, it has been outsourced, and that independents were always the real research and development department. I do not think the numbers support that. If you do, bring the evidence and I will publish the better argument.

Get the reports

All seven Format Atlas 2026 reports are on Format Forward. Free, no sequence, no drip. Take the ones you work in.

Free Report Downloads

If you would rather test one specific idea than read seven reports, that is what the Pre-Mortem is for. Details on the site.

Premortem Format Analysis

Jonathan Glazier, format creator and executive producer. alt.Media.

I am dyslexic. AI helps me make this readable. The thoughts and opinions are my own. There are no auto generated articles and I read and research with rigour.

Here is a thing that happens.

A format goes out. It does not work. Six weeks later there is a post mortem, and in that room somebody says the thing that everybody half knew a year earlier but nobody said out loud, because at the time it would have sounded negative.

I have been in that room a lot. On both sides of it.

The frustrating part is never that the …

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The Audience Isn’t a Demographic. It’s a Set of Values.

Nine viewers. Five questions. Three values. And why the way they pay, and the way they want a show delivered, follows the values too, not the age on their card.

Last time I built one ordinary couple, Dave and Sam, and interviewed them about how they watch. This time I want to do something harder. I w…

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What the UK’s biggest demographic actually wants from television, according to a robot pretending to be them. And why the real data agrees.

Read this first. Nobody was interviewed. I prompted Claude to stop being an assistant and instead perform as a composite person from the largest slice of the UK population by education, income and social position. Th…

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Television likes to tell itself that the best ideas win.

They don’t.

The best protected ideas usually get the first hearing. The ideas with a known producer, a proven company, a trusted presenter, a channel relationship, a previous success, or a piece of market evidence behind them. That does not mean the ideas are bad. Often they are very good. But it do…

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Last night’s BAFTA Television Awards felt important.

Not because of the glamour.
Not because of the winners alone.
But because underneath the speeches and applause there was a quiet conversation happening about what television is becoming, and perhaps what audiences are starting to want back again.

For an industry that often feels anxious, fragmented and obsessed with algorithms, the mood of the evening was surprisingly human.

And that matters.

The ceremony itself was calmer and warmer than many expected. Greg Davies avoided turning the event into a performance about himself. The focus stayed largely on the programmes, the craft and the people making them. In an age where award shows increasingly chase viral clips over substance, that felt refreshing.

But the deeper story was inside the acceptance speeches.

Again and again there were references to:

• the BBC

• public service broadcasting

• British storytelling

• and the importance of programmes that bring people together

That last point became one of the defining themes of the night.

Judy Love’s comments about the return of “family viewing” landed and were echoed by many others, they tapped into something broadcasters are quietly rediscovering. In a world of infinite scrolling and personalised feeds, shared viewing still has enormous cultural value.

The industry may have spent years chasing individualised consumption, but audiences still crave communal experiences.

You can see it everywhere now:

• The Traitors

• Gavin & Stacey specials

• major reality finales

• live events

• appointment television moments

People want programmes they can discuss the next morning.

Not everything needs to become fragmented content atomised across platforms.

Ironically, the streaming age may actually be increasing the value of television that creates national conversation.

And last night’s winners reflected that tension between prestige television and communal television almost perfectly.

On one side was Adolescence, which deservedly dominated the night. It represents the rise of cinematic social realism, emotionally intense, technically ambitious, socially urgent storytelling designed to cut through culturally as much as commercially.

The success of Stephen Graham also felt symbolic. He represents a strand of British television that still values grounded storytelling rooted in recognisable lives and social realities.

But alongside that was The Celebrity Traitors.

And strategically, that may be the more important win for the future of the industry.

Because The Traitors is not just a television programme anymore. It is participatory entertainment.

Audiences do not passively watch it.
They investigate it.
Predict outcomes.
Debate tactics.
Create memes.
Share clips.
Build theories online.

The format continues long after transmission ends.

That is where modern entertainment is heading.

Hybrid formats.
Social formats.
Programmes that behave like ecosystems rather than single broadcasts.

And yet despite all the technology, social media mechanics and second-screen engagement, last night repeatedly circled back to something much older:

Connection.

The strongest moments of the evening were not about spectacle. They were about recognition, emotion and shared experience.

Even the repeated support for public service broadcasting carried a wider message. There is growing awareness inside the industry that purely market-driven television cannot always sustain culturally important programming.

Public service broadcasters still take risks on:

• documentaries

• regional voices

• new talent

• difficult subjects

• and programming that may matter socially even when it is not optimised for maximum global streaming retention.

That role increasingly feels fragile, which is precisely why so many people referenced it.

The BAFTAs also exposed another truth the industry is slowly accepting:

British television still punches far above its weight creatively.

Even during contraction.

Even during financial pressure.

Even while freelancers struggle and commissioners become more risk-averse.

The UK continues producing formats and dramas that influence the global market.

Last night felt less like an industry congratulating itself and more like an industry trying to remember what television is actually for.

Not just content.

Not just IP.

Not just streams and metrics.

But shared stories, collective moments and programmes that make audiences feel part of something larger than their own personalised feed.

That may turn out to be the biggest lesson from the 2026 BAFTAs.

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The Programme Itself

Hosted by Greg Davies, the ceremony appears to have landed well with viewers and the trade press. A lot of commentary online suggested the tone felt steadier and more relaxed than some recent awards shows. There was less focus on viral awkwardness and more on the programmes themselves.

Several critics noted that the evening avoided major controversies or “train wreck” moments, which in itself was treated almost as a success after the fallout surrounding the earlier 2026 film BAFTAs broadcast controversy.

The general feeling across trade commentary was that the show was:

• professional

• emotionally warmer than expected

• less self-important

• and more connected to mainstream audiences

Greg Davies’ hosting style was repeatedly described as dry, grounded and self-aware rather than overly scripted or aggressively political. That seemed to work.

There was also noticeable discussion online about how the BAFTAs are increasingly becoming a battle between:

• traditional public service television

• streamers

• and hybrid entertainment formats

That tension was visible all night.

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The Big Story of the Night:

Adolescence

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Before we get into this week’s stories, I need to reset expectations about what alt.media is, and why it exists.

Because across screen media, the old model isn’t holding.

Freelancers are feeling it first, as they always do. Work is thinner, less predictable, and harder to sustain. But this isn’t just a freelance problem. It’s systemic. Broadcast television is under pressure, streaming has moved out of its growth phase, and platforms like YouTube are now facing a different challenge, too much content, too much AI, and audiences starting to question the value of what they’re being served.

At the same time, AI is not coming, it’s already here. It is changing how content is made, who makes it, and how quickly it can be produced. So the language across the industry has become predictable. Pivot. Adapt. Diversify. Or leave.

But most of that conversation is happening in silos. Freelancers talk about survival. Companies talk about margins. Platforms talk about scale. AI sits in its own corner, treated as either a miracle or a threat.

That’s the mistake.

None of these things operate independently anymore. Each one is shaping the other, in real time.

alt.media exists to look at the whole system.

Because the truth is simple. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Whether you credit Aristotle or Émile Durkheim doesn’t really matter. If you analyse this industry in fragments, you will miss what is actually happening.

So this is not just a newsletter about television.

It’s about the creator economy, the strain on traditional media, the role of AI in content production, and the reality of freelance careers as they are now, not as they were. The aim is to connect those forces and point to where the opportunities actually sit.

And I’m not writing this from a distance.

I’m part of the shift.

The jgtvdirector label is being phased out. Not because the work doesn’t matter, but because the role, and the industry around it, has changed. So I’ve had to adapt.

My work now sits across storytelling, format development, monetisation, and the practical use of AI. It’s about taking experience and turning it into something that still has value in this new environment.

And that includes a group the industry still underestimates, older creators. People with decades of experience who are now being forced to rethink how that experience translates into income.

Including me.

So from this point on, everything in alt.media connects back to one question.

How do you stay relevant, and make money from what you know, in a system that no longer works the way it used to?

That’s the lens for everything that follows.

The week proof beat pitch

This week the signal is clear. Proof is beating pitch. Rights buyers and broadcasters are behaving like the audience already voted, and they are stepping in earlier.

You can see it in Banijay moving on a creator-born elimination engine (Stop the Train). You can see it in the safe returnables still getting ordered (Trading Places, warm dating). And you can see it in platforms quietly upgrading the surfaces and tooling that make episodic creator shows easier to ship every week.

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What I’m Seeing This Week

1. Creator proof is now the front door of the format funnel

If a mechanic can earn attention on YouTube or in the feed, the industry will buy it and standardise it. The validation step is moving upstream.

2. “Returnable” keeps winning

A clean premise that can repeat and localise is still the easiest yes in a tight market. It is why lifestyle transformation and warm dating stay in play.

3. Platforms are building “TV logic” into creator products

Season and episode packaging, auto-highlights, dual-orientation live. These are format tools. They make creator programming behave more like TV, without TV overhead.

Unscripted TV Scan

*Emily Wilson’s latest “This Week in Unscripted TV…” is a reminder of the volume of unscripted launches, moves, and commissioning signals still flowing. Lots of returning, franchiseable unscripted still getting made. Source:

https://unscriptedtvnews.substack.com/p/this-week-in-unscripted-tv-693*

Outside In

• FRIDAY’S ESPRESSO — Content Europe: a brilliant debut (Axel M. Fiacco). A useful market read on where formats are heading, and why London is still a key moment in the sales calendar. Source:

FRIDAY'S ESPRESSO

CONTENT EUROPE: A BRILLIANT DEBUT

LISBON’S NEW LEADING ROLE…

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4 months ago · 2 likes · Axel M. Fiacco

• Business of TV — The YouTuber to movie director pipeline (Jen Topping). YouTube as incubator, not destination. The TV takeaway is the same: build audience first, then scale ambition. Source:

Business of TV

The YouTuber to movie director pipeline

There is a particular subset of YouTubers that has been highly skilled at using the internet as a creative incubator and audience builder for their own film making skills and ambitions. Rather than treating it as a mechanism to (primarily) make money and as a destination in its own right, they have instead seen YouTube and social video platforms as a development pathway into the world of movies…

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4 months ago · 9 likes · Jen Topping

Format Watch

• Watch Your Back — Identity stripped to a number on your back. Social gameplay, instantly explainable.

• Pokerface — Estimation plus bluffing at a poker table. Cheap, clear, repeatable.

• Wagging Rights — Celebrity plus pets with a simple skill ladder. Warm co-viewing.

• Marriage Market — Families matching singles. High-stakes casting and instant debate fuel.

Creator Economy

• Micro and nano creators taking a bigger share of brand spend is not a fad. It is budgets moving to trust and niche authority. Build partnership formats that repeat.

• The operational edge is consistency. Weekly beats win because platforms now automate the clip layer.

Silver Creator Economy

• Over-50 creator campaigns set to double in 2026. The opportunity is to package trust into a rhythm: one clear niche, one weekly cadence, one paid layer.

• Add audio if you can. It builds intimacy and retention, and tools are getting simpler.

AI News

• Runway API adds Seedance 2.0: API plus keyframe control is the “real pipeline” signal.

• TikTok’s AI remixing pilot: creator control and licensing norms are about to get stressed.

One Last Thing

The fastest path to a global format is no longer “pilot then pitch”.

It is “prove attention, then sell the rights posture”.

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Deeper Dive

Lead Story

This week is about one shift: the industry is buying proof earlier.

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The first rule of television used to be simple. Casting is king. A very close second was “know your audience.” That idea sat behind almost every decision, from development through to scheduling and marketing. It shaped how shows were pitched, how they were made, and how success was judged.

But the truth…

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I am going to run my StraightUp news on vertical Video, as a strand of altmedia, just for my sanity!

This week the vertical drama business is starting to look less like a weird corner of performance marketing, and more like a programmable production pipeline.

The headline numbers are now too large to ignore. But the real signal is where the pressure is sh…

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The week formats moved onto trains, platforms and prompts

What stood out this week was not a single “big new show”. It was a pattern.

Unscripted is being designed as a system that can travel. Across countries. Across platforms. Across interface layers where discovery is increasingly happening in conversation, not on a homepage.

Banijay taking global rights to Stop the Train is a clean example. It starts life on YouTube with a creator, then gets packaged for international adaptation. That is the new path: build heat, then standardise the engine. In parallel, Fluent in 40 winning Content Europe’s pitch competition and Fremantle scaling 60 Day Hustle show the same appetite for formats with one sentence clarity and a visible transformation arc.

On the creator economy side, the signal is that brands are professionalising creator spend. The IAB is now calling creator marketing a core media channel, and the platforms are responding with more tooling to match creators to advertisers. If you are over 50, that shift matters. Better matching and more “always-on” spend favours trust-heavy audiences, not just viral reach.

What I’m Seeing This Week

1. The pipeline is changing: creator-led prototypes, then TV rights

Stop the Train is not “YouTube as marketing”. It is YouTube as R&D.

2. Transformation formats are back, because they travel

Language fluency in 40 days is an exportable engine. So is a 60-day accelerator. Clear stakes. Clear episode spine.

3. Platforms are competing on the moment of intent

Discovery is moving into prompts and on-screen questions. That changes what gets watched and what gets commissioned.

Unscripted TV Scan

*Emily Wilson’s latest roundup is heavy on commissions and moves, but the bigger signal is steady demand for returnable unscripted engines and franchiseable brands. Source:

https://unscriptedtvnews.substack.com/p/this-week-in-unscripted-tv-679*

Outside In

• FRIDAY’S ESPRESSO — YouTube formats, discreet AI, vertical unscripted (Axel M. Fiacco). Jeopardy! moving onto YouTube is a “this is real now” moment. Plus a smart example of AI used inside a dating mechanic without the gimmick. Source:

FRIDAY'S ESPRESSO

RESHAPING FORMATS: YOUTUBE, AI & VERTICAL CONTENT

It is evident to all that the boundaries of the contemporary media landscape are shifting and redefining themselves. And unscripted content is, of course, no exception. In today’s issue, we will examine 3 (relatively) new format models: for YouTube, those involving the use of AI, and finally, the phenomenon of vertical content. Happy reading…

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5 months ago · 4 likes · Axel M. Fiacco

• TV Futurist — The interface is the battleground (Sandra Lehner). Tubi inside ChatGPT and YouTube’s “Ask” feature are about owning intent. The prompt is becoming the front door. Source:

TV Futurist

Weekend Waves 15/26

Happy Friday, Wavemakers…

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5 months ago · 4 likes · Sandra Lehner

• Business of TV — Broadcasters collaborating to compete with tech (Jen Topping). Shared infrastructure and shared measurement are back on the table, and YouTube’s deal terms are being questioned out loud. Source:

Business of TV

Should broadcasters club together to take on the tech companies?

This week, I’ve covered the following…

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5 months ago · 12 likes · 1 comment · Jen Topping

Format Watch

• Stop the Train — A moving “real world arena” that feels expensive and contained at the same time. Great travel potential.

• Fluent in 40 — Simple transformation arc. Real-world challenges. A format you can localise anywhere.

• 60 Day Hustle — Entrepreneurship as a clock. The 60-day constraint gives it pace and an obvious episode ladder.

• Springwatch — Live factual as an exportable brand. Trust + access + on-the-ground production craft.

Creator Economy

• The IAB calling creator marketing a core channel is the story. Always-on budgets mean creators need repeatable products, not one-off spikes.

• YouTube’s AI creator discovery and Instagram’s affiliate tooling are both about reducing friction between content and revenue.

Silver Creator Economy

• Better brand matching should reward smaller, trust-heavy audiences. That is a structural win for over-50 creators.

• The opportunity now is packaging: a clear niche, a repeatable rhythm, and an owned revenue layer alongside platforms.

AI News

• YouTube’s 2026 AI roadmap is the key line: the platform will push AI creation, but it will also throttle low-quality “AI slop”. Distribution rules will matter as much as tools.

• Google Cloud + Avid points to AI landing where adoption happens: inside professional workflows and asset management.

One Last Thing

The practical shift is this. Unscripted is being built to travel across platforms and interfaces, not just schedules. If you can explain it in one line, and it can survive as a thumbnail, a clip and a prompt answer, it has a better chance of surviving this market.

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Jonathan Glazier — TV format consultant and creator economy strategist, Cambridge UK.

Follow me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanglazier/

Lead Story

This week’s strategic signal is simple: the development funnel is shifting.

We are moving from “commission, then market” to “build heat, then standardise”.

When Stop the Train starts as a creator-led YouTube event and then gets picked up for global distribution by Banijay, it is not an outlier. It is a model. Prototype in the open. Prove engagement. Then bring in the rights machine.

At the same time, the industry is getting obsessed with formats that are easy to explain and easy to localise. Fluent in 40 wins a pitch competition because it has a visible transformation arc and a clock. 60 Day Hustle travels because the premise is a business accelerator with a hard end date and a cash prize. These are “clean engine” formats. Buyers can see the episode ladder before the sizzle.

And under all of it, discovery is being rebuilt around intent. If audiences are increasingly asking a chatbot what to watch, or using an on-screen “Ask” tool while viewing, then formats that are explainable, searchable and clip-ready will win more often than formats that are clever but hard to describe.

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