With entertainment giants having woken up to the online and other new business opportunities, digital revenue could grow as much as 40 percent on a compound annual basis between 2005 and 2010 for sector biggies, Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen said in a report Wednesday. Time Warner has a leg up on its peers in the field, but News Corp. is aggressively investing, and Viacom Inc. and the Walt Disney Co. also are increasingly looking for ways to expand in the digital space, the report found. This means that overall, the financial impact for the big entertainment players could become significant during the next three to five years, the report suggests. In presenting her report to attendees of the annual Merrill Lynch Media & Entertainment conference in Pasadena, Calif., Reif Cohen said that estimating the market opportunity remains difficult as companies have so far disclosed few financials about their digital businesses.
The global streaming industry has spent the better part of a decade chasing subscriber counts as the primary metric of success. That era is now formally over. New market data from Omdia confirms that the industry has crossed a decisive threshold; one that shifts the competitive playing field from growth-at-all-costs to monetization discipline. For senior executives navigating media, advertising, and technology strategy, the implications extend well beyond entertainment. A Historic Revenue Crossover Online video revenue increased 13.5 percent to $176 billion in 2025, while pay-TV revenue declined 4 percent to $170 billion; marking the first time in the industry's history that streaming has surpassed legacy pay-TV in revenue terms. This is not a rounding error or a statistical artifact; it represents the culmination of more than a decade of structural disruption to the traditional broadcast and cable TV model. Global subscriptions to online video services reached 2.24 billion by the ...