By Andre Christensen, Founder and CEO, Quickplay
Broadcasters haven’t lost their audience, they gained another one.
The new majority of younger viewers – Millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha – have become the most valuable audience the industry has ever seen.
For decades, media companies utilized an operating model that works very well for what I’ll call the Habit Audience — viewers who arrive intentionally; watch longer sessions; and value reliability, schedules, and depth.
They value this routine because it’s what they’ve always known: Linear TV. Premium OTT. Live sports. News.
This audience is still large, still valuable, and still well served by broadcasters’ operating models.
But the new majority – or the Experience Audience – doesn’t “tune in” like their predecessors. They flow. They discover, sample, follow, and return — across feeds, formats, and platforms.
Both audiences matter. But trying to serve both with a single operating model won’t work.
Broadcasters want to serve both audiences. They’re just using the wrong rulebook for the new one.
Two Audiences. Two Rulebooks.
Imagine bringing an American football rulebook to a European football game. Same name but completely different strategies. Each team wants a goal, but one’s game plan won’t serve the other.
The same applies to broadcast.
The Habit Audience was born into the traditional broadcaster operating model. They are dependable and consistent. Yet, the Experience Audience, growing in size and importance every day, plays by new rules. Most importantly, they let algorithms – not schedules – decide discovery and what comes next.
The Habit Audience plays by familiar rules (so far..):
- Comes directly to a channel or app
- Values trust, consistency, and brands over experimentation
- Stays for long sessions
- Uses linear for habit (decreasingly), OTT for convenience (increasingly), and social for sampling
- Success is measured through ratings, retention, subscriptions, and CPMs
The Engagement Audience plays by different ones:
- Discovery happens passively in social feeds, depth in YouTube and OTT, and intentionally on linear, especially for events
- Values engagement, involvement, personalities, and identity over institutional polish
- Short-form leads; long-form follows
- Frequency, relevance, and learning matter more than schedules and even recency
- Success is measured through engagement quality, fandom, ARPU, and repeat behavior
The rulebook for the Habit Audience comprises:
- Planned releases
- High production standards
- Strong brands
- Clear schedules
- Stable formats
- Predictable monetization
- Owned destinations (Linear and OTT), Social for reach
Serve this model to the Experience Audience and be prepared for them to do what they know best: flow to another platform. Reaching them requires:
- One story adapted into many formats across platforms
- Continuous publishing across feeds
- Fast feedback loops
- Platform-native packaging
- Learning what works and iterating quickly
- Social Media for discovery and building communities, owned destinations (OTT) for the deepening fandom and retention
Despite these differences, there is one constant that will appeal to both audiences: Your library.
Broadcasters can capitalize on the same libraries and content across the two audiences. But the Engagement Audience requires using those same inputs differently:
- The same story, re-formatted for feeds and different use cases
- The same IP, distributed upstream before commitment
- The same trust, expressed through relevance and frequency
In other words:
- Owned branded OTT remains the target destination of the flywheel
- Premium libraries remain the advantage.
What’s changed is where the journey starts — and how much work and monetization happens before someone ever opens a broadcaster’s app. YouTube will be the end-destination for some of your audience, your branded OTT platform the destination for your most loyal fans.
While it can be the same content, the gap lies in reaching these distinct audiences where they are — without splitting teams, workflows, or economics.
The Bottom Line
Two audiences now exist — and the second one has become the new majority. To win, you don’t have to abandon the Habit Audience, you just have to welcome the Experience Audience in the way they expect to be welcomed.
This requires operating fluently across both rulebooks — with one connected engine and unifying operating model. This requires three shifts:
- Distribution → Orchestrate, Don’t SyndicateSocial → YouTube → OTT must function as one ecosystem, not separate teams.
- Measurement → Replace Reach with RelevanceRatings and impressions no longer explain growth. Engagement quality, fandom, and lifetime value do.
- Monetization → Every Format Drives ValueCreators monetize every surface. Broadcasters can do this at a far greater scale once the system connects.
AI is the underpin that brings these together in a holistic ecosystem.
The technology is ready. Economics already rewards this model. The audience has already moved.
The only question left is how quickly media companies adapt their operating model to keep up..
In my next post, I’ll break down the Creator Operating Model — the structure designed to serve both audiences, at scale.
Download the whitepaper to see the full playbook for distribution, measurement, and monetization in the Creator Era.