Scale and profit are settled. Streaming is no longer the destination but the lever to grow the core business — and the broadcasters without one are now exposed.
As of June 2026, the premise that streaming is a growth engine in its own right no longer holds. Global consumer spending on video subscriptions and advertising has flattened since the pandemic — and in Korea the strain has already broken through. JTBC and its parent, the JoongAng Group, unable to withstand accumulated losses and the burden of sports and content investment, have filed for court-supervised corporate rehabilitation.
Jung Han
It is a stark signal of the risk facing broadcasters and media companies that hold channel and content strength but lack the downstream revenue structure and portfolio to reach beyond the streaming screen itself.
Meanwhile, the global players that have secured scale (1.0) and profitability (2.0) have begun using streaming not as a destination but as a lever to accelerate the core businesses where they hold an edge over Netflix.
Consumer spending on video has not risen meaningfully since the pandemic; it has plateaued, and advertising revenue is not climbing fast enough to offset the decline in the near term. Even Netflix — which has pushed outward into gaming, licensing and live events — is feeling the ceiling of growth built on a single streaming-revenue axis. Axios calls it the arrival of “the 3.0 era of the streaming wars.”