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✌️ TV and Digital Are No Longer Competitors
At an industry panel titled "TV + Digital: The Competition Is Over. What’s Next?"—hosted by the NRF Expert Club and the NTV channel—leading media and advertising executives gathered to address the evolving nature of content consumption and the emerging synergies between traditional broadcasting and online platforms.
The session centered on dismantling the long-held premise that traditional and digital channels directly compete for viewership. Victor Pinchuk, Deputy CEO of Mediascope, alongside Timur Vainshtein, General Producer at NTV, presented findings from a joint effectiveness study powered by digital watermarking technology. Analyzing viewership for high-profile releases like the reality show The Masked Singer (Maska) and the drama series First Department (Pervyy Otdel) across both linear TV and streaming, researchers uncovered remarkably little audience overlap: among viewers watching for three minutes or longer, the shared audience between broadcast and digital platforms was under 3%.
Ksenia Boletskaia, Director of Industry Relations at Yandex, backed these conclusions by highlighting collaborative research with the National Media Group involving STS network titles. When content debuts simultaneously on air and via streaming platforms, fewer than 10% of viewers switch away from their preferred medium. Consequently, actual cannibalization of television broadcasts remains within a modest 10% threshold, while digital distribution delivers an incremental boost in unique reach of roughly one million users.
As industry leaders—including Nikolai Duksin, Vice President of Music and Video Content at VK—pointed out, traditional device-level targeting is officially obsolete. Moving forward, the industry must transition away from categorizing content strictly as “linear” or “digital,” embracing instead unified cross-platform strategies centered on consumer behavior and audience preferences.
Source: Cableman
