• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, Yesterday

When TV consumers will have their own agentic AI operators at work, what’s the business plan from streaming platforms, pay TV distributors, or linear TV networks?

Battle plans could become complicated.

Imagine an agent subscribing and cancelling all types of TV services (streaming and linear)  every month, every week -- all to create a consumer’s own bundle.

This could include specific price and advertising-load targets. Big tech companies like Apple, Google, or Amazon could control this -- possibly independent AI agents as well.

In the future, an agent could select your own three-hour FAST channel or early 2000 sitcoms with modest ad messaging. Your new, not-so-FAST channel could give you a lighter ad load in exchange for some personal information that doesn’t violate your privacy parameters.

Better yet, according to analysts, the future could be for agents giving consumers more time to actually watch content.

So that whole process and downtime of scrolling through the Netflix programming guide and sampling some previews on the page will no longer be needed. Your 15 minutes or so of program "discovery" is eliminated.

The downside -- for programmers and streaming -- seems to be concerns around possibly volatile ad pricing -- the traditional cost per thousand viewers. Perhaps this would be good news for some programmers -- attention data now becomes much more valuable.

Does that mean less emphasis on engagement? The first couple of minutes of a particular TV show will be key for viewers, and thus TV and movie producers focus on specific genres and style.

In that regard, those "sleeper" TV shows -- those that take a slightly longer time to build a following -- might not survive.

In that regard, think about Netflix's trend over the last few years -- 8 to 12 episodes per season, perhaps only the last two or three seasons at best. This may get squeezed to even shorter program lifespans.

Consumer-owned agentic AI software could mean traditional TV/streaming distributors would have much less power and control.

Included in this list are multichannel video program distributors (cable, satellite, virtual) systems, smart TV home operators, and even new streaming distributors, say Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Xumo, or Amazon Channels.

But those legacy systems likely would not go down without a fight.