Creation is exciting. But in media, the real revolutions always happened in distribution.
There’s a popular belief in our industry that new technologies disrupt media because they enable new kinds of content. It’s a comforting thought, especially for an industry that likes to see itself as creative. It flatters our creative ego. But if we look closely at history, media revolutions don’t start when we invent new forms of expression. They would rather start when someone changes how creative expression travels.
It’s in our DNA to create and tell stories. People have always written text as soon as the “technology” was there for it, painted images with charcoal on cave walls. Yet it was not the writing of individuals or the genius painting of a master that really changed the game. It was the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg that impacted how the word (literally) was spread amongst the masses. The printing press didn’t all of a sudden make better writers, but it made written words multiply. Gutenberg’s technological innovation made the written word replicable and widely distributable. Suddenly, knowledge escaped the monasteries and flooded the streets. The church lost its monopoly on truth not because someone wrote better sermons, but because someone built a better distribution machine.
The same with images. People have always made them. But photography was more than just a new format of image creation. It gave everyone a copy machine for reality. Suddenly, the gatekeepers of “art” were outnumbered by anyone with a camera and half an eye for framing. That’s when visual storytelling stopped being sacred and started being democratic.
And the same happened with moving images. We had Super-8 cameras and VHS recorders for decades. They were nice toys for family evenings and bad holiday films. But that didn’t disrupt television. Streaming did. Or more precisely: data compression did. Once video could flow through the internet efficiently, the walls around broadcasting collapsed. The disruption wasn’t that we could film differently. It was that we could share differently.
Disruption happens when access changes, not when aesthetics change.
That’s the fundamental pattern: every major media revolution is a distribution revolution.
We will face the next big disruption of the distribution chain through the use of AI. Artificial Intelligence will do the same to our industry, not by creating new content, but by redefining distribution.
The Myth of the Creative Revolution
Right now, the narrative around AI is obsessed with the creation side. We marvel at generative tools that write, compose, or edit at superhuman speed. We argue whether they are “creative” or not. But these are surface ripples.
The deeper change is in how those things reach people. AI is about to rewire distribution: the invisible half of the media business that actually decides what matters.
Look at your daily feed with all its playlists, recommendations, and “For You” tabs. They all make you believe you’re the one who chooses. Yet in reality, it’s someone else’s algorithm that decides what lands on your screen. You are not the master of your choice; you are the target of someone else’s schedule. In fact, you’re being scheduled. The algorithm is your new channel director; you just happen to be the unpaid intern pressing play.
AI Turns Distribution Into Cognition
Traditional distribution was a mechanical process: broadcast, print, upload. AI turns it into a cognitive process: predict, adapt, deliver.
The flow has reversed. Instead of content moving from producer to platform to audience, now context moves from audience to platform to producer. The machine doesn’t distribute programs; it distributes matches. AI manages perfect little encounters between your momentary need and a piece of content designed to satisfy it. What travels through the pipe isn’t information anymore. It’s relevance.
Platforms will survive if they have the best dynamic pairings between a piece of media and a moment of attention. The “feed” is not a pipeline anymore; it’s a neural network.
That’s when AI stops being a recommendation engine and starts being a broadcaster.
Each of us becomes our own channel. Our moods, habits, and micro-behaviours feed the machine that programs what we see next. Two people can open the same app and never share a single experience.
Television fragments into a billion private streams.
Who Owns the Audience Now?
In this emerging landscape, the true power doesn’t belong to the studios, the creators, or even the platforms; rather, it belongs to those who own the AI distribution layer.
Owning that layer means owning the attention flow. It means controlling the invisible hand that decides what gets surfaced, what gets buried, and how long it stays in your field of vision. That’s the new network. It is not NBC, BBC, YouTube or Netflix, but the algorithmic ecosystem that filters your world. And that can come from a new app or service provider – not necessarily from the ones that currently own the distribution gateway.
In other words, the medium is no longer the message. The model is.
The Cultural Bill
There’s a price, of course. When everyone watches a different version of reality, we lose the shared moment that once defined television. The power of TV was never just entertainment; it was synchronisation. It gave society a common reference point, the famous campfire moment and the conversation after the show. AI-driven distribution, if left unchecked, risks replacing that with a billion silent silos and bubbles. We are already on this path through social media, and AI will perpetuate and strengthen that inroad into how our societies stick together or not.
The Next Disruption
So what happens next? Soon AI will not only curate distribution but handle it end-to-end. Imagine autonomous systems and agents negotiating rights, assembling programming schedules, or remixing footage for every context – on every screen, everywhere for everyone, yet individual to the widest possible extent. Content will no longer be delivered. It will be dispersed.
When that happens, the question for broadcasters won’t be “What do we produce?”
It will be “How does our content travel?” The battle for attention will be fought in the algorithms of distribution.
AI isn’t the new camera or production studio. It’s the new satellite; it is the new ‘channel’. Not a creator but a transmitter. And in the end, every person on the planet will be both audience and broadcaster, viewer and channel director, living inside their own self-curated media reality.
If that’s not disruption, I don’t know what is.
