Nothing to Watch on Five Subscriptions

Executives at IBC 2026 in Amsterdam say the contest has moved from adding apps to helping viewers find what they already pay for.

17 Sep 2026

Streaming executives arriving at IBC 2026 in Amsterdam named content discovery and sustainable monetization as the sharpest competitive pressures facing their industry. The show, which runs from 11 to 14 September, is expected to cover FAST channels, OTT platforms, metadata, advertising technology and the infrastructure beneath streaming services.

The complaint is not scarcity. With households already subscribing to five or more services, several executives said viewers are struggling to find content rather than lacking options. "Households already subscribe to five or more streaming services, and viewers are giving up on the hunt for content," said Karl Tempest-Mitchell, executive vice president at Setplex.

Tempest-Mitchell argued that the real contest is not between the major platforms but over solving discovery, and that the operators who win will be those that solve it rather than launch further apps. Nelson Hulett, regional vice president for the Americas at Setplex, said competition is playing out less inside individual apps and more at the device and operating system level. That framing moves attention from content libraries to the interfaces and algorithms that surface them.

Money is the second pressure. Sahil Dhar Hakim, chief business officer at Evergent, said viewers are not losing loyalty so much as becoming more deliberate about where each service fits into their media mix, a shift he attributed to rigid pricing structures.

Hakim put the alternative directly. "The strongest streaming propositions will give people more control over how they access content and what trade-off they make between price and advertising, rather than forcing everyone through one expensive package," he said. Commercial models, in his account, should reflect how engaged a given viewer actually is and be able to change as that relationship develops.

Jon Cohen, chief revenue officer at Frequency, framed the same problem in operational terms, asking "can a media company operate a growing portfolio efficiently, adapt it for different audiences and territories, incorporate live programming and produce sustainable returns?" The question was left open.

Yet none of this is new to the show floor. A NewscastStudio preview published on 27 August reported executives from Evergent and Frequency describing hybrid monetization models as exposing limitations in platform architecture amid audience fragmentation. Still, the emphasis in September sits more squarely on discovery than the August preview did. IBC 2026 runs in Amsterdam through 14 September.