Technology executive and investor Erik Huggers says the battle for distribution has already been won, and the inevitable transition from producers to creators will have a profound impact on the traditional formats industry.
Erik Huggers has spent his career at the intersection of media and technology. He helped launched BBC iPlayer and Joyn, ProSiebenSat.1’s German streaming platform; he led music streamer Vevo as CEO; and he has held senior positions at Microsoft, Intel and Verizon.
He also chairs Everyone TV, the public service broadcaster-backed joint venture behind the UK’s free television platforms Freely and Freeview, and is chairman of Magnific, an AI platform.
Few people have watched the transformation of the media industry from as many vantage points. In this conversation, he argues that the battle for distribution is effectively over but that the real disruption is only just beginning.
Huggers’ starting point is stark. The real battle was for time spent and it has finished. Broadcasters each built their own streaming product and competed locally; Netflix and YouTube built once and competed globally. Scale won. A fragmented field of national services could never match two platforms aggregating the world’s attention. What comes next is not the end of that fight but the start of a different one.
“Over the last 30 years the internet disrupted everything, including media distribution. That game is over. It’s been won by YouTube and Netflix. And now we are in a new phase: AI is disrupting media creation,” says Huggers.
He sees France as giving the clearest signal of where things stand. Within months of each other, the country’s two largest broadcasters made the same bet from opposite ends of the market. TF1, the commercial leader, has put its streaming service and live channels inside Netflix, while public broadcaster France Télévisions has handed distribution of its news and current affairs to YouTube.
In both cases the broadcasters gain reach today and give away their direct relationship with the audience tomorrow. The short-term logic of reaching audiences becomes the long-term logic of losing sovereignty. “The moment a public broadcaster says, ‘We are putting everything on YouTube,’ that is the beginning of the end. Because you have given away your distribution, and without control over distribution, you are in trouble,” says Huggers.
What France reveals, on his reading, is not two isolated deals but the old television structure reassembling itself on new foundations. The two-tier world the UK has always known – pay TV on one side, free-to-air on the other – is reforming around two global platforms. Netflix, gathering premium and commercial broadcast content behind a subscription, is becoming the pay TV aggregator: the Sky of the streaming era.
YouTube, meanwhile, gathering free, advertising-funded public-service content, is becoming the free-to-air aggregator: the Freeview of the streaming era. The familiar architecture survives. What changes is who owns the aggregation layer, and it is no longer a nationally owned or regulated platform but a pair of US companies.
“Watch France. Netflix is becoming the new Sky; YouTube is becoming the new Freeview. The old split between pay and free is back, except the aggregator isn’t ours any more. It belongs to two American platforms,” says Huggers.
His view of the traditional broadcasting ecosystem is correspondingly unsentimental. The average age of the traditional broadcast audience is now well past 60. In 10 years, he argues, that audience will be gone. The younger generation does not watch linear television. The only moments that still aggregate mass audiences are live sport events, and even those are migrating to non-linear platforms.
There is, Huggers notes, a counter-model, and it is British. Where the French broadcasters have handed the aggregation layer to global platforms, the UK’s public service broadcasters have spent two decades building and keeping their own. The collaboration runs from Freeview in 2002 through Freesat to Freely today – rival broadcasters that compete every night for audiences nonetheless co-own the gateway through which those audiences reach them.
Freely, the broadband-delivered successor to Freeview, jointly owned by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, is the clearest expression of the principle. It has already passed a million users and is forecast to reach 10.5 million households by 2034, overtaking terrestrial Freeview as Britain’s free TV gateway. The point is not the technology but the ownership. By aggregating themselves, the broadcasters retain the one thing the French model gives away: sovereignty over distribution, and with it the direct relationship with the audience.
“The lesson from France is what happens when you don’t act together. In Britain, the broadcasters have collaborated for 20 years, Freeview and Freesat, then Freely. That collaboration is the only reason free-to-air distribution still belongs to them and not to a platform in California.”
Huggers’ diagnosis of the distribution battle is consistent with what the ecosystem research identifies as the structural shift of the past decade: the progressive erosion of the broadcaster’s gatekeeper role. But he goes further than most, arguing that the shift is now complete. What is striking about his analysis is not the conclusion but the speed: he believes the next phase of disruption – AI democratising production – will move far faster than the distribution transition did, precisely because the infrastructure is already in place.
Huggers’ most consequential argument is about the asymmetry between what AI changes and what it does not. AI is rapidly democratising the tools of production. Within two to three years, he argues, a small team will be able to produce content at a quality level that currently requires large numbers of people and huge expense.
“The leadership team at Magnific believes that a team of five people with our tools can achieve the same quality and storytelling output that today requires millions of dollars and hundreds of people,” he explains.
But the democratisation of production does not mean democratisation of reach. The tools become available to everyone. The power to distribute remains concentrated in the hands of a very small number of platforms, primarily YouTube. “You are democratising the ability to make, not the ability to be seen. A tsunami of content is coming. But who gets an audience? Distribution is the moat, and that game has already been won.”
This asymmetry has direct consequences for the format industry. If production costs collapse but distribution remains concentrated, the economic power of the format trade – the IP flywheel that has sustained the creative ecosystems of the Netherlands, the UK and Flanders – is further eroded. Not because content is worse, but because the leverage has shifted irrevocably towards the platforms that aggregate audiences.
The ‘democratisation of production’ argument cuts across the conventional narrative that AI primarily threatens jobs. Huggers’ point is more structural: if the barrier to entry for production disappears, the scarcity that has always underpinned the value of the format industry – the expertise, the infrastructure, the relationships – largely disappears with it. What remains scarce is distribution. And distribution is owned by platforms that have no particular interest in the health of the European format ecosystem.
On the formats sector specifically, Huggers raises a question that is uncomfortable but important: how long will classic entertainment formats remain relevant to audiences who have grown up on YouTube?
He does not predict the immediate death of formats like The Voice, but he questions the assumption that live, structured entertainment formats will continue to generate the cultural moments they once did. The fragmentation of attention is structural, not cyclical.
“How long will formats like The Voice remain relevant? Three, four, five years into the future? Look at us. We are 50-plus. If you look at the television world and you see them gathering and giving each other awards, they are all old. It has nothing to do with the new generation anymore,” he observes.
The formats that will survive, in his reading, are those that create genuinely irreplaceable live moments. Sport is the clearest example. Live events, physical experiences, things you can only be present for, become more valuable as recorded content becomes commodified. The scarcity premium shifts from production to presence.
Huggers’ generational argument connects to a structural finding in our ecosystem research: the cultural legitimacy of entertainment formats, whether through public broadcaster investment, industry recognition or audience habits, is one of the key drivers of format innovation. If that legitimacy erodes with the audience, the institutional conditions that have sustained the format business begin to weaken.
The formats that survive will be those that can credibly claim irreplaceability: live unpredictability, cultural moments, physical presence. The formats that cannot make that claim face structural headwinds that no amount of creative talent can overcome.
Huggers’ most original contribution to this research is his vision of what might replace the commissioning model that has defined the format industry. He calls it “the label model,” drawing an explicit analogy with the music industry.
The difference is structural, not cosmetic. In the commissioning model a broadcaster pays a producer a fee to make a programme and owns the result outright; the money flows out, the intellectual property flows in, and a small number of large, fully funded bets are individually greenlit.
The label model, on the other hand, inverts almost every term. The creator arrives with the talent; the label supplies risk capital – closer to a recoupable advance than a fee – together with tools, compute and promotion; the IP is shared rather than captured; and the logic is that of a venture portfolio, hundreds of small bets in which the law of large numbers, not an executive’s judgement, sorts the winners from the rest.
There is one thing the analogy does not hand the label, and it is the most important thing of all: distribution. Record labels lost ownership of the pipeline long ago, first to radio, then to Spotify and YouTube, and what kept them powerful was never distribution but everything around it: catalogues owned at scale, the muscle to manufacture attention and privileged relationships with the platforms that do own the pipeline.
A content label would inherit exactly that position. It would own rights and generate demand, but it would still be renting reach from YouTube.
Seen this way the model is less a successor to commissioning than the arrival, in television, of music-publishing economics. The format business already licenses a show like The Voice territory by territory, much as a publisher licenses a song; the label model simply extends that logic to a world of countless creators.
“It is a [startup accelerator] Y Combinator for content. You write hundreds of small cheques. The law of large numbers means there will be good things among them. And you give creators the tools, the AI infrastructure, the compute budget and the distribution relationships that were previously only available to the happy few who happened to end up in front of a studio executive,” says Huggers.
This model, he argues, is not a distant future scenario. It is already being built. He points to companies like the London-headquartered Wonder Studios, which has developed a hybrid workflow combining live filming with generative AI post-production, allowing real-time iteration of content at a fraction of traditional costs.
The result is not lower quality content but a fundamentally different production process, one that collapses the distinction between development, production and distribution.
The IP question in this model is genuinely open. Huggers sees two possible directions. In one, the label captures the IP, much as record labels did with music artists for decades. In the other, major IP owners begin to license their characters and universes to creators, recognising that the tsunami of AI-generated content will happen with or without their consent.
“The question is whether companies like Disney will make their IP available to creators legally, with a licensing model. Because everyone is a storyteller now. And it is not only the happy few who happen to be in the right room who can tell stories,” he says.
The label model Huggers describes is the most radical reframing of the format industry’s business model in this research. Where every other interviewee has operated within the logic of the existing value chain with producers, broadcasters, distributors and platforms, Huggers proposes a different architecture altogether.
What is striking is that it inverts the logic of the format industry: instead of a small number of gatekeepers selecting from a large pool of ideas, a large number of creators produce from a small pool of platform infrastructure. Yet the gatekeeper does not disappear so much as move. With production abundant, selection migrates to the point of scarcity – distribution – where a platform’s algorithm, rather than a studio executive, decides what an audience ever sees.
The format, as a structured, transferable, licensable creative architecture, may not survive that transition. What replaces it is less clear. But the direction of travel, in Huggers’ reading, is unmistakable.