The State of Digital-First in 2025 and What Comes Next in 2026

In this special end-of-year episode of TellyCast, Justin Crosby looks back at 2025 and unpacks the structural shifts that have quietly but fundamentally reshaped the digital-first production economy.

Drawing on reporting from The Drop, conversations on the podcast, and insights from TellyCast events throughout the year, the episode breaks down six defining trends: the rise of creator collectives as studio systems, the explosion of micro drama and vertical video, the maturation of vodcasting as a business model, YouTube’s dominance as the world’s leading AVOD platform, brands operating as broadcasters rather than advertisers, and AI becoming everyday production infrastructure rather than headline disruption.

Justin then looks ahead to 2026, outlining how the industry is moving from speed to value, from publishing videos to building IP, and from chasing reach to prioritising audience loyalty. The episode explores why YouTube is now television, how brands are shifting towards funding entertainment rather than interrupting it, why social platforms have become the industry’s R&D engine, and how relevance is overtaking recency as the key performance driver.

This episode is a clear-eyed assessment of where the digital-first industry stands, and what producers, creators, brands and studios need to focus on next to build sustainable businesses in the new production economy.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hi, I am Justin Crosby and welcome to a special end of the year episode of TellyCast. Today we are looking back at 2025 a year that didn't just push the content industry forward a little. It fundamentally changed the center of gravity across platforms, producers, creators, brands, studios, and distributors.

Everything quietly realigned, not in one dramatic headline, but in hundreds of small shifts that all pointed the same way. So today we are pulling those threads together. This is the state of the digital first industry in six main trends told through the stories and reporting of our news website and magazine, the drop, the conversations we've had on this show and our events throughout the year.

We are then gonna look forward to 2026 and summarize a list of predictions collated over the past couple of weeks from articles from the digital First industry [00:01:00] leaders on what next year in digital first might look like. So let's get into it. Our first trend this year was creator collectives as studio systems.

Let's start with the clearest shifts this year. The rise of creator collectives, not as loose networks, but as fully fledged studio systems. We've seen this with Sidemen, of course, beta Squad, the fellas, and countless others, building out on YouTube. But in 2025, it became clear that these groups are no longer just producing content.

They're running studio organizations, writers' rooms, data analysts, production teams, thumbnail experts, publishing workflows. Creators have industrialized. They've created a new production landscape, while many traditional TV production companies have watched on from the sidelines. The Sidemen model is no longer an outlier.

It's the blueprint for Creative studios. Collectives now behave like [00:02:00] digital first broadcasters, multiple shows and formats, recurring slots, brand deals, spinoffs, live events, merch and diversified revenue. They control the ip, they control the platform relationship, and crucially, they control the audience.

This creator led studio infrastructure is now one of the most powerful parts of the production economy, and it's only getting more sophisticated as more and more investors are flocking to the sector, valuing businesses by the depth of engagement with their community audiences as one of the key factors.

I think we'll see more and more Creator collectives and digital studios scale attract, investment and sell to legacy media in 2026 as they seek a shortcut into the new production economy. Trend number two from 2025 is micro drama pointing the way for vertical video. So the next big shift we've seen in 2025 is of course micro [00:03:00] drama. And indeed overall vertical video. Vertical micro drama solidified into a real format category, scripted series with character arcs, seasoned structures, and bingeable narratives. Gamma time launched in the US with over $14 million in funding.

Fox Entertainment bought into Holy Water. The sole publishing launched short. And Drama box, drama Wave. Short max, real short and good. Short and amongst many others, continue to grow. Om Dear forecasted, that revenue from this format is forecast to be nearly twice that of Fast Channels globally, generating around $11 billion in revenue in 2025.

Traditional producers are now studying this format closely. Creator Studios are building writers' rooms, and specialist directors are in high demand. It is cheap. It travels globally. It builds enormous loyalty, and it fits a consumption patterns of Gen Z like nothing else. And the biggest series are [00:04:00] generating huge revenues.

Micro drama and vertical storytelling isn't fringe anymore. It's now a pillar of the new content economy and looks set to explode in 2026 with higher quality productions, a-list talent and unscripted formats coming to the fore who were potentially huge opportunities for producers and distributors, and especially brands.

After all, the soap opera, opera genre was created by brands in the fifties. We're starting to see a full circle movement involve in vertical video with beauty brand Maybelline Proctor and Gamble's p and g studios already launching micro soaps.

Trend number three in 2025 is VOD casting. 2025 was the year that Digital First Studios perfected the visualized podcast, and it became established as a powerful business model. Diary of A CEO, creator, Steven Bartlet's firm raised $425 million in funding.

They're getting 50 million YouTube views a month. [00:05:00] 30% of those views are happening on a TV set. They now see themselves as a media company, not a podcaster like other players in this space, they build mission-based content ecosystems on a global scale goal. Hanger struck deals with the international football bodies for rights for their podcasts.

Mark Goldbridge, an independent creator, did that too. The drop covered, multiple creator led podcasting launches across the year, and this pattern is unmistakable. Video podcasts are now an attention format. Not a passive background medium or just a companion show for broadcast tv. For production companies, the opportunity is enormous to apply the skills from tv, format thinking, segment structure in casting talent, partnerships, pacing.

They all map perfectly into the new wave of podcasts. In fact, you could say broadcasting is now the new TV just built from the bottom up rather than the top down. In traditional TV producers, of course, [00:06:00] deliver a program, wait for the TX, and then wait for the ratings to be given to them by the broadcaster to work out if a success or not.

In the digital first world, you drop the content, review the data, change the thumbnails, maybe recut it, and continue to optimize as you go forward. Responding to the audience in real time. These new digital teams are thinking like YouTubers, content creators, editors, packaging specialists. The opportunity is there for indies to create in their own IP and exploit it in multiple ways, including licensing to TV and monetizing through FAST and other platforms. This has got to be the most logical transition step for traditional TV producers looking to make the move into digital.

And my prediction is we're gonna see much more of it in 2026. Number four, YouTube dominated A VOD and streaming platforms turned to creators. Now let's talk platforms because 2025 was the year the [00:07:00] market finally understood YouTube's real position. The drop covered this again and again throughout the year.

YouTube is no longer seen as a social platform. It's the biggest AVOD platform in the world. Ofcom data says UK audiences watch four and a half hours of TV and video a day. And YouTube alone counts for 39 minutes of that. That puts it second only in the UK to the BB, C. And viewing is moving more and more to the big screen uK viewers watched 16 minutes a day of YouTube on TV sets. 16 to 34 year olds watch 18 minutes and over 50 fives doubled their YouTube on TV viewing with 42% of their YouTube time happening on the living room screen.

Then in the us, YouTube became the first streaming platform ever to take more than 10%. Of total TV viewing, it's currently around 13%. No SVO has ever hit that level at the same time. Fast platforms, Roku, [00:08:00] Tubi, Pluto, Samsung TV Plus had their biggest years yet. Roku hit 2.8% of all TV viewing in the us. Tubi hit 2.2% in the us but the big twist was fast platforms starting launching creator led TV channels.

And Svod starting commissioning content from creators. On the drop, we covered Samsung TV plus launching full 24 7 channels for Darman and Mark Rober Jelly Mack launched creator led fast channels on Roku. And Roku is launching 14 new fast channels alone by the end of 2025. So creator content isn't adjacent to TV anymore.

It's becoming established as a key part of the ad supported tV ecosystem. Number five. Brands are now broadcasters.

All right. The next big shift in 2025 with brands stopped becoming advertisers and started becoming broadcasters. Now, it probably [00:09:00] started much earlier than that, but let's talk about foot asylum in particular, , we've reported on them all year in the drop foot Asylum is operating like a youth entertainment network. We've covered the new dating format, tick or IT with Harry Panero, produced by Cow Shed Collective dropping on a channel with nearly 3 million subscribers.

We've covered Specs Revenge, a Foot Asylum commissioned Entertainment Special around the Side Men Charity Football Match at Wembley, and they won the Brand Channel of the Year award at the Telecast Digital Video Awards. Of course, that's a retailer beating media companies at their own game.

Then of course we've got Boohoo, man, our story on the heist, and are you even real highlighted, real entertainment series being produced as part of a larger slate of content on their YouTube channel. This is a brand building formats and franchises, not campaigns, and brands with smaller budgets are starting to test and collaborate together across non-competing [00:10:00] categories to get into the game.

And then there's a host of other brands, major brands like Starbucks, creating their own studios, becoming lifestyle and documentary businesses. The brands aren't buying around the shows anymore. They're making the shows. And finally, AI becoming plumbing, not posturing. So let's finish with ai 2025 wasn't the year AI replaced the industry?

It was the year AI became invisible, and that's exactly why it mattered. AI became infrastructure, the quiet, boring, everyday plumbing behind the production economy. Development teams used it to visualize pitches, overnight. Editors used it to automate and become a key part of the editing process.

Social teams used it to test thumbnails titles, using it for localization , versioning, rights tracking, and analytics. It didn't just replace jobs, it replaced tasks and unlocked speed. [00:11:00] Companies that treated AI as a novelty didn't move. Companies that treated AI as a workflow have moved faster. 2026 will widen that gap dramatically. AI won't replace people totally, but people using AI will replace people who aren't. So how about 2026? Well, it looks like 2026 isn't gonna be defined by a new platform, new format, or sudden technological breakthrough.

It's gonna be defined by a change of intent For the last few years, digital first production has been about speed. More content, more platforms, more output, be everywhere, more noise. What we're seeing now is a decisive shift away from that. 2026 is the year digital first stops chasing momentum and starts building value from publishing content to building ip.

The biggest shift I see in 2026 is the move from publishing [00:12:00] videos to building intellectual property. An upload is no longer a units of value. A format is a world is a relationship with an audiences. One-off videos. Even successful ones don't build businesses. Returning formats. Do ideas that can sustain seasons, spinoffs, partnerships, and extensions Do.

The producers who will win in 2026 won't be the ones who publish the most. They'll be the ones who design ideas that compound over time. Engagement, beating reach for years, reach, and subscribers was the metric that everyone chased. 2026, that obsession finally starts to break. Platforms are now rewarding behavior that signals intent.

Watch time, return, visits, saves, shares, comment, depth. Community behavior, reach without connection is becoming worthless. What matters now is whether people come [00:13:00] back, whether they care, whether they follow you across formats and platforms because they trust your voice. This is the shift from a creator economy to an audience economy.

Loyalty beats scale. Another trend we're gonna see, I think, is YouTube. It's not social anymore. It is tv. We mentioned that earlier. One of the most important changes is already underway is how YouTube is being. It is no longer behaving like a social platform. It's becoming the default free TV layer of the internet.

Living room viewing is rising fast, long form watch time on connected TVs is growing series, appointment viewing and 30 to 60 minute formats are being actively encouraged. The implication is massive. Digital first producers are now competing directly with broadcasters and streamers, and they're doing it without any gatekeepers.

In 2026, YouTube isn't feeding television. It is television [00:14:00] brands stop interrupting and start investing in 2026. Another continued shift is how brands show up. The old model of interruption advertising is broken. Audiences avoid it. Platforms deprioritize it.

Brands know it doesn't work like it used to. In 2026, more of the smart money moves into brand funded entertainment brands, underwriting, ip, co-creating formats, investing in ideas people actively choose to watch. This isn't branded content as TV once understood it, it's brands acting as entertainment partners, production companies that understand audiences, not just production, will be treated as collaborators, not suppliers.

Social will become the r and d engine. Well, it probably already is, but social platforms are no longer just distribution. They're the industry's r and d lab formats are being tested in [00:15:00] public, refined in real time, and scaled. Once they prove they work, development no longer happens behind closed doors.

This flips the traditional pipeline on its head. Ideas don't move neatly from broadcast to digital. They flow both ways. The producers who succeed in 2026 will treat publishing as an ongoing development process, not a release moment. Relevance beats recency. Another quiet but important shift is how content ages.

Platforms don't care when something was made. They care how it performs. Smart reuse of archive, timely re-edits and reframing content around cultural moments are increasingly outperforming brand new uploads. This isn't about reposting for the sake of it. It's about understanding, relevance, timing, and audience Mood newness in 2026 isn't about recency necessarily.

It's about resonance. AI scales, output. [00:16:00] Humans create value. AI is everywhere in the conversation, but it's not the headline. In 2026, AI becomes even more central to the infrastructure speeding things up. It unlocks archives, it supports iteration, it reduces friction, but it doesn't replace the human core.

If anything, low quality AI output is making personality, authenticity, and voice more valuable, not less audiences can tell the difference. AI helps you make more. Humans help you matter. Talent, personality, and trust. We're fully in the age of Parasocial relationships. Audiences follow people, not logos.

They invest in voices, perspectives and personalities. They feel connected to. That doesn't mean polish. In fact, it means quite the opposite. Looser, more authentic, more human content builds trust faster than [00:17:00] overdue output. For producers, their role is shifting. It's less about managing shows and more about building worlds with talent at the center.

From commissioning to collaboration, the old buyer supplier relationship between broadcasters and digital studios is breaking down. The future is shared risk, shared data, shared ip, and the collaboration at the idea stage, not the delivery stage. Broadcasters bring scale sales and rights expertise.

Digital studios bring speed, cultural fluency, and audience insight. The smartest deals in 2026 will be partnerships, not transactions. So if I had to boil all of this down to one piece of advice, it's this, stop chasing the algorithm. Start understanding your audience. Build returning formats, not isolated videos.

Spend wisely, test publicly [00:18:00] learn fast. 2026 isn't about doing more, it's about doing the right things deliberately. So that's our take on 2025 and some predictions for next year. I hope you enjoyed the show. I wanna say thanks for listening to the show this year. For reading the Drop Online and Imprint, and coming to our events, the Digital Content Forum.

The Digital video awards, and how to make money in digital if you had the chance to. All three events are returning in 2026 plus our Telecast Digital Bootcamp training courses and one or two other initiatives in the Digital First Space designed to help you make sense of the new production economy.

Thanks also to our production partners, spirit Studios who produce the show for us. . We'll be back in January with a new look in the studio and more great guests. Until then, have a great Christmas and New Year and above all, stay safe.

We'll see you in [00:19:00] 2026.