Stuart Keith, vice president of global ad strategy and partnerships at Rakuten TV Enterprise, told ExchangeWire in a video published on October 14, 2026 that the "profound" disruption caused by global streamers is driving public service and single-market broadcasters into restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, while holding companies are buying data and software businesses to build their own curated marketplaces.

In Short

Big global streaming services have taken viewers and advertising money from national TV channels, and a Rakuten TV executive says that is why so many broadcasters are now merging or being bought. At the same time, the large agency groups are buying data companies and building their own private marketplaces for ads, so publishers have to bring their own customer data in a privacy-safe way to win budgets. Nothing new was launched; this is one executive's view of where TV money is moving, recorded at ATS London 2026.

A four-minute interview with a broad thesis

The video, titled "Profound Disruption From Global Streamers": M&A and Advertising in TV, runs just under four minutes and 40 seconds on the ExchangeWireTV YouTube channel, which had 2,980 subscribers when the page was captured. It had 17 views and no comments at that point. The description says Keith "joined us at ATS London 2026 to discuss strategic and structural changes across the supply chain." The video carries the hashtag #ATSL26. Neither the description nor the video gives the date of the interview itself, only the publication date of October 14, 2026.

Keith opened by separating short-term noise from deeper shifts. "I'd argue there's an awful lot of change and evolution that's actually happening in in the media markets and some of that is the global um geopolitical climate, but I think a lot of that is actually strategic and and structural change," he said, according to the video's automatic transcript. "And that change is being felt right across the supply chain."

What followed was a tour of the supply chain from the sell side to the buy side, ending with what Rakuten TV is doing in response. The speaker offered no figures on revenue, audience share or deal values. The interview is a statement of position, not a data release, and the claims in it are his.

Broadcasters on the defensive

The sharpest claim concerned television. "There's been quite profound um disruption particularly from those those global um streamers and that's being felt particularly in the TV market uh by those public sector broadcasters or those mono market broadcasters who who in turn are having to redesign and restructure uh their business models um accordingly which is kind of leading to a lot of M&A and a lot of consolidation," Keith said.

He placed the buyers on one side of that divide. "Those acquisitions tend to be happening by the multimarket broadcasters um not just um with Sky and ITV in the UK but RTL and and MF in Europe and more broadly globally we're seeing that the the ongoing situation with Warner Brothers and Paramount."

Each of the deals he gestured at has a paper trail. In the UK, Sky and ITV formally confirmed on July 6, 2026 that Sky would acquire ITV Media and Entertainment for up to GBP 1.6 billion, a package covering ITV1 through ITV4, ITVX and UTV, with ITV Studios staying independent. The transaction had not cleared the Competition and Markets Authority or Ofcom at the time of that report, and no closing date had been set. Sky's own ownership is moving too: Comcast said in late June that Sky would go to NBCUniversal as part of a 12-month tax-free spin.

In continental Europe, RTL Group agreed in June 2025 to buy Sky's businesses in Germany, Austria and Switzerland for EUR 150 million in cash plus share-linked consideration. When the deal closed on June 1, 2026, the upfront payment was EUR 68 million, a figure PPC Land reported in its coverage of former Enders Analysis analyst Francois Godard, who described Europe's TV consolidation as "glacial but unstoppable". The same piece recorded that MFE had secured 75.61% of ProSiebenSat.1 by September 4, 2025, and that France remained largely blocked after the TF1-M6 merger attempt was abandoned in 2022.

The "ongoing situation" Keith mentioned in the United States has been anything but quick. Warner Bros. Discovery switched on February 27, 2026 from a Netflix agreement to Paramount's USD 31-per-share offer, and Paramount paid Netflix's USD 2.8 billion termination fee. EMARKETER's forecast that the US would have six TV majors by 2027, down from 10 was published by PPC Land on September 27, 2026, two days after Paramount said in a filing that the closing timing was still not certain.

Why would single-market broadcasters be the ones under pressure? A Boston Consulting Group survey of 3,500 consumers in the UK, France, Germany and Switzerland, covered in October 2025, found that streaming platforms reached 97% of viewers and accounted for 64% of weekly viewing time, while broadcasters typically reached about two-thirds of viewers in their home markets. Global streamers' share of UK creative and entertainment revenue roughly doubled from 22% in 2014 to 42% in 2024, according to the same survey.

Advertisers, CRM data and the collapsed funnel

Keith then turned to the buy side. "But if we move to the right hand side of the Lunaccape, if you will, uh we're seeing advertisers becoming a lot more savvy and sophisticated with their CRM data," he said. The ExchangeWire description renders the same passage as "the LUMAscape", the long-running industry chart that places advertisers on the left and publishers on the right.

His argument was that digitisation has removed the old separation between brand and performance media. "I I think we're probably seeing a collapse of the the conversion funnel, the the media funnel. um and probably benefits of the 360deree benefits of that digital shift, that digital transformation whereby what were once analog channels are now fully digitized and with that the digital accountability."

That accountability, in his telling, reshaped how agency groups are organised. "So it's the ability to have that um delivery of business outcomes through that media mix and media planning strategy process that in turn is had knock-on effects on the the structural focus of of hold codes as well," he said. "So where we once had channelized silo channels, it's now fully integrated systems looking to solve that fragmentation and deliver sort of addressability right across the media mix."

"Hold codes" in the transcript almost certainly stands for "holdcos", the industry shorthand for advertising holding companies such as WPP, Publicis, Omnicom and Dentsu. The ExchangeWire description does not repeat the term, so the reading is PPC Land's.

Holding companies and curation

The point with the most direct consequence for publishers came next. "We have also been seeing quite considerable investment and acquisitions of those data intelligence software packages and services from from hold added to their curation strategies to build their proprietary um marketplaces which delivers sort of unit margin increases for them and helps deliver on those outcomes," Keith said.

He did not name any deals. The most prominent one in PPC Land's records is Publicis Groupe's all-cash agreement to acquire LiveRamp, announced on May 18, 2026, with Publicis planning to fold LiveRamp's clean room and data onboarding tools into Epsilon. The same coverage noted that Omnicom is building its own identity product, Real ID, through Acxiom. Reported values for the Publicis deal differ between outlets, and PPC Land's roundup itself carries two different dates for the announcement.

Curation - the packaging of publisher impressions and data signals under a single tradable deal - has been contested ground. The German digital association BVDW published a 12-page whitepaper in February 2026 that defined curation and named media buyers, including agencies, as one of four curator types, with WPP Media and Mediaplus Realtime among its authors. A year earlier, an IAB Europe panel had ended without agreement on whether curation benefits publishers, with fee transparency flagged as an open gap.

Keith's own phrasing of the margin question was candid. He described the holding companies' marketplaces as delivering "sort of unit margin increases for them", which places the financial gain with the agency group rather than with the seller of the media. From there, he said, the burden moves down the chain. "So once more that gets passed through to publishers. there's it's kind of an obligation on publishers now to ensure that we can we as publishers can um safely match securely and a privacy compliant way our first party data with quality content into these marketplaces to ensure that we we can garner that spend."

That is an unusually direct statement from a seller. In effect, a publisher that wants budgets running through holding-company marketplaces has to bring its own first party data to the table, matched in a way the buyer will accept. He closed the section with: "So, a lot of change, a lot of disruption, um, but exciting times."

What Rakuten TV says it is doing

The third chapter dealt with his own company. "We are a multimarket streamer. Uh, we're now present in, I think it's 45 different markets and 160 billion devices," Keith said, according to the transcript.

The device figure cannot be correct as captioned. 160 billion is roughly 20 times the world's population, and the number is most likely a mis-transcription, possibly of 160 million. Neither the video nor its description resolves it. The market count is also hedged by the speaker ("I think it's"). When PPC Land covered Magnite's deal to monetise Rakuten TV inventory in Europe in June 2021, Rakuten TV was available in 43 European territories, reached more than 90 million households through Smart TV preinstallation and a branded remote button, and had more than 12 million monthly unique viewers.

"Um it's that latter part that we're working very hard on ensuring that they our audience signals and bid signals are incredibly clear and transparent um for whoever that demand channel may be not just those hold codes but also potentially mid-market and thememes," Keith said. "So perhaps uh a wink to something happening future there we want to talk about."

"Thememes" in the caption is unclear; "independents" or "SMEs" are plausible readings, but the audio has not been checked against the caption for this article. The "wink" suggests an upcoming product or channel for smaller buyers. He gave no detail, date or name.

On identity, he said Rakuten TV is "aligned with those um verified uh accredited um ID uh resolution vendors to ensure there's better precision in our in our match rates so we can deliver on efficiency and reach and frequency." He did not say which vendors. Identity resolution - deciding which devices and contact points belong to the same household and assigning them one identifier - is the step that determines whether a publisher's audience matches what a buyer brings to a marketplace, and low match rates are a frequent complaint on CTV, where logged-in data is uneven across devices.

The company is also looking at measurement partners. "We continue to investigate relationships with international j panels with ACR vendors with uh attention with attribution capabilities and brand uplift to ensure that we have a full um value ad package for our solutions," Keith said. "International j panels" is probably a caption error for "JIC panels", the joint industry committee currencies used to trade TV in many markets, though the description does not confirm this. ACR refers to automatic content recognition, the TV-set technology that identifies what is on screen.

The stated goal was an audience graph. "And as we build out our audience graph, we hope to be able to assist with the delivery against those um KPIs and outcomes that are necessary from advertisers, but also to solve for the complexity of fragmentation and um deliver addressability at scale across the media landscape."

The event itself

The final chapter is labelled "ATS London highlights", but it contains no highlights from sessions or speakers. Keith described ATS as "one of those temple events in in the calendar" and praised the "scale and scope" of the attendance "geographically and cross channel." He said that after the pandemic, "with the onset of you know remote working hybrid working," in-person events had become more valuable for networking. He ended: "So yeah super excited. Keep up the good work and change wire. Thank you." The last words are a caption error for ExchangeWire, the publisher behind the ATS event series, which also produced the video.

Why it matters for the trade

For publishers, the interview names a pressure that is usually discussed obliquely: the holding companies that buy media are also building the marketplaces through which that media is bought, and are capturing margin by doing so. A seller saying on camera that it now has an "obligation" to bring matched first-party data into those marketplaces is a concession about where negotiating power sits.

For buyers, the remarks about Rakuten TV's bid signals and the hint at "mid-market" demand suggest a streamer trying not to depend entirely on agency-group pipes. Whether that becomes a self-serve product, a new reseller arrangement or something else, the video does not say.

For anyone tracking European television, the interview adds one more voice to the view that the Sky-ITV, RTL-Sky Deutschland and MFE-ProSiebenSat.1 transactions are responses to the same force, rather than separate national stories. Keith offered no evidence beyond the deals themselves, and the interview format did not test the claim. But the direction he described matches what PPC Land has recorded deal by deal over the past 16 months.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Stuart Keith, vice president of global ad strategy and partnerships at Rakuten TV Enterprise, interviewed by ExchangeWire. The deals he referred to involve Sky, ITV, RTL, MFE, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount, and his comments concern advertising holding companies and publishers.

What: Keith said global streamers have caused "profound" disruption for public service and single-market broadcasters, driving M&A by multi-market groups, and that holding companies are acquiring data software to build curated marketplaces that raise their margins and oblige publishers to match first-party data into them. He said Rakuten TV operates in about 45 markets and is working on clearer bid signals, identity partnerships and measurement.

When: The video was published on October 14, 2026. It was recorded at ATS London 2026; the recording date is not stated.

Where: ATS London 2026, published on the ExchangeWireTV YouTube channel. The deals discussed span the UK, continental Europe and the United States.

Why: The interview gives a seller's account of how TV consolidation and holding-company curation shift negotiating power and data obligations onto publishers, at a moment when several of the deals he cited are still awaiting completion.