For years, the television industry has been shifting away from traditional pay-TV and toward streaming. However, the evolution of content consumption is turning out to be more complicated than a simple switch from one model to another. As streaming services multiply and content becomes increasingly fragmented across platforms, consumers are facing a different challenge: finding an easy way to access the content they want across the devices they already use.
The modern household doesn’t always gather around a single screen anymore. A television in the living room may be the primary screen for live sport, but tablets and smartphones are also a part of the viewing experience. The viewing experience has become more mobile, personal, and simultaneous. Streaming platforms were built to support this behavior on an app-by-app basis, but as consumers manage multiple subscriptions to access sports, news, and entertainment they want, this convenience can also create friction.
This fragmentation is driving renewed interest in hybrid television models which combine the flexibility of on-demand, multi-device access with the reliability of linear broadcast. The appeal isn’t nostalgia for the traditional pay-TV model. Rather, it is a response to the real-world challenges of the streaming environment. Consumers want to be able to access a wide range of content in one place, and they increasingly expect that content to work across all the different screens in their homes.
The advertising equation is additionally changed by this shift. Multi-screen viewing creates an opportunity to better understand viewing behavior across devices and households, supporting the kind of targeted, addressable advertising that has always been one of streaming’s advantages over traditional linear television. For operators, the challenge is finding a way to bring those digital capabilities to a distribution model that can still deliver content reliability at scale.
Industry players are taking notice. At SET Expo 2026, the largest broadcast and new media event in Latin America, SES demonstrated this shift with DVB-NIP, an IP-native satellite transmission standard designed to distribute content across multiple screens within a single home. By combining IP delivery to phones, tablets, and televisions with satellite’s broad, cost-effective reach, the technology points to the next stage of television where it’s not cable versus streaming, but the ability to deliver a seamless and personalized experience across the devices in a household.
Following the event, Marcelo Amoedo, Senior Sales Director of Media & Broadcast Services at SES, reiterated his outlook, noting that the conversations from the event reinforced his belief that “the future of media will be increasingly connected, collaborative, interactive, and hybrid.”
The future of the television industry may not be about which pipe delivers the signal; it’s about how many screens that signal can reach.
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