Evan Shapiro raised eyebrows, and provided laughs, during a keynote for an industry crowd in Lisbon on Monday at the first-ever StreamTV Europe conference. His topic, “The New Normal in Streaming,” led him to talk about such success stories as Bluey and a key “fork in the road” for the industry, which he illustrated via what he called “the battle of two nepo babies.”
A former top executive at the likes of NBCUniversal and Participant Media, as well as producer (Portlandia, Brick City), who has in recent years made waves as a “media universe cartographer,” sharing charts and unconventional thoughts on digital platforms, was referring to the different strategies that the Lachlan Murdoch-led Fox Corp. and the David Ellison-led Paramount have been following.
“I sometimes can be dark with my predictions, but it’s because I care about this industry,” Shapiro said early in his appearance to warn those who have not heard him speak before. “Yes, there are things wrong with our industry right now, but most of them can be fixed by people in this room if we make choices about the future and do not cling to the past.”
The media universe map that he has continuously updated over the past six years or so “reveals a fork in the road at this moment for all of us – one path leads to the past, and the other leads to the future,” and everyone in the sector can make choices to take the path to the future, Shapiro suggested. “I’ll give you a case study that proves that: the battle of two Nepo babies, Fox and Paramount. What you have here is two companies that are very similar in their genetic code, both run by family enterprises, both traditional media companies.”
But a few years ago, Shapiro argued, Fox looked at the two paths moving forward and chose to take the one to the future as predecessor 21st Century Fox sold its studio and key cable networks to Walt Disney. “They held on to the broadcast and a cable network [Fox News], but they reinvested the positive cash flow from those platforms and from the sale into a billion-dollar portfolio of creator enterprises,” the media cartographer said. “Paramount, on the other hand, is doing the opposite” with its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, he suggested.
“Fox has become the home of a creator lab that is really crushing it and demonstrating that creator content and traditional content can coexist on the same platform,” Shapiro concluded, mentioning investments in the likes of Whalar, “which is a great studio and agency at the center of creative culture where brands meet creators, Red Seat Ventures, vertical micro-drama firm Holywater and Dhar Mann. Fox’s enterprise value “has gone up dramatically,” he added.
“On the other end of the nepo scale,” Paramount “bought a Substack [The Free Press] and gave [it] 60 Minutes and CBS News to destroy.” Also, “rather than reinventing late-night, and they had some great late-night properties there, they just replaced Stephen Colbert with Comics Unleashed. And rather than investing in creators and technology to change their company, they’re putting $110 billion into a very legacy company with no future-looking strategy behind it, and they got $80 billion in debt. This is the familiar fork. This is the comfortable fork because we’ve done it before, but this is the Hollywood mobile fork that we know is not working.”
In more general comments, Shapiro highlighted on Monday at StreamTV Europe that members of Gen Z and millennials are the biggest part of the population, so media companies must see the world through their eyes and look to appeal to them, along with others.
For example, YouTube is not a young people’s platform anymore, but is becoming “an everybody platform,” Shapiro offered on Monday. “YouTube is TV,” he concluded. “You have to be on all screens.” Europe is only behind the U.S. in terms of the move from traditional TV to streaming and social video because of Europe’s higher average age and vast amount of free TV, he said.
For too long cable networks were the business focus of media giants. “We depended on profits from [pay TV]” in the U.S., but the same trends are now starting to hit subscription streaming, he warned. Pointing to flattening subscriber trends, he mentioned that production is falling “very quickly.”
Amid all this, fragmentation should be the top, second and third priority for industry folks, Shapiro argued. “The cure for it is fandom, affinity and engagement.” Reach and frequency and a “top-down” programming mentality are the focus of old, Shapiro said, urging sector people to think more like creators. “Mentioning the global success across platforms of RuPaul’s Drag Race, he also suggested tp the StreamTV Europe crowd: “Be more like a drag queen.” After all, drag queens are the original creators, doing everything from deciding and handling outfits and make-ups and beyond.
Key Passion Indexes and quality of community should take the focus instead of Key Performance Indicators, he concluded. Shapiro pointed to such success stories as Bluey and BBC Studios, which he said is now one of the biggest distributors on YouTube thanks to its leaning into fandom. He also mentioned French broadcaster TF1, which is co-creating content with young news creator Gaspard G, whose engagement metrics outperform those of TF1.
Look for premium vertical programming to become a bigger part of people’s media diet, too, and look to leverage that, the expert also suggested to the Lisbon crowd.
All that makes for a winning formula in what Shapiro on Monday called The Affinity Economy, which is all about community, loyalty, and love.
Alejandro Piñero, event director, StreamTV Europe, organized by Questex, opened the conference by pointing out of a higher-than-expected 1,000 attendees and 45 exhibitors. Lisbon mayor Carlos Moedas, in his opening remarks, welcomed the members of an industry that, as he mentioned, is about storytelling, touting the Portuguese capital as a natural place for them by arguing that “there is no better story than Lisbon.” Highlighting that an old nickname for Lisbon was “safe haven,” he said that the city has for centuries been where “diversity meets poetry and innovation.”
