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.”
The goal of streaming 1.0 was subscriber scale; the task of 2.0 was turning a profit. In the 3.0 era, the calculus for broadcasters and media companies is shifting from “how much more can we squeeze out of streaming?” to “what proprietary business can we grow by using streaming as a springboard?”
The decisive question is how to combine streaming with the assets Netflix lacks — IP, theme parks and resorts, commerce and membership, telecom and broadband — and convert them into a new revenue engine. JTBC’s crisis reads as an alarm for a Korean media industry that has put off that question. For Korea’s broadcasting business, the crisis is only beginning.
CONTEXT · WHAT THE JTBC FILING MEANS
JTBC is one of South Korea’s major general-programming broadcasters, launched in 2011 by the JoongAng Group — a leading Korean media conglomerate anchored by the JoongAng Ilbo daily newspaper. The channel built its standing on influential news coverage and a run of hit dramas and entertainment. “Corporate rehabilitation” is Korea’s court-supervised insolvency process, broadly comparable to U.S. Chapter 11: the company keeps operating under court protection while it restructures its debt rather than liquidating. For a flagship broadcaster to reach that point underscores how severe the squeeze on traditional Korean media has become.
Past Scale and Profit, the Mandate Has Changed
If the goal of streaming 1.0 was expanding subscribers and the task of 2.0 was reaching profitability, in the third phase the calculus for media companies has changed entirely. The focus is no longer “how much more can we extract from streaming?” but “how much of our own distinctive business can we grow by using streaming as a springboard?” The core question is simple: where, and how, do you pair the assets Netflix does not have — theme parks, resorts, commerce and membership, broadband, local IP and fandom — with streaming to build a new axis of growth?
The Real Business Still Lies Outside Streaming
Over the past five years, the share of streaming and direct-to-consumer (D2C) revenue has steadily risen on the balance sheets of the major global media groups. Yet most large entertainment companies still make their “real money” outside streaming. Theme parks and resorts, licensing and merchandising, theatrical and events, telecom and broadband remain the center of cash generation, and there is little sign that this structure will flip soon. The 3.0 era forces an admission: the core business is not “the screen inside the platform” but the entire offline and adjacent industry that the screen connects to.
- Disney: most revenue comes from parks and experiences (38%) and sports (18%).
- Comcast / NBCUniversal: 63% of revenue comes from internet and connectivity (telecom).
- Apple and Amazon: treat streaming as a channel to sell more hardware devices and Prime subscriptions, respectively.
- Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD): still heavily dependent on TV and film. Their merger points toward lowering TV dependence and lifting streaming competitiveness, but the burden of head-to-head competition with Netflix remains.
Streaming’s share of total company revenue rose at all five companies from 2020 to 2025. Only Netflix held a share near 100% throughout — its business was built differently from the starting line.
Traditional broadcasters that have not diversified revenue across platform, IP, space and licensing the way Netflix, the world’s No. 1 OTT, has are bound to struggle structurally amid the digital transition. Behind JTBC’s filing for corporate rehabilitation — unable to bear accumulated losses and the weight of major sports rights and content investment — lie a sharply contracted TV advertising market and limited revenue diversification. The JoongAng Group’s core portfolio, heavily concentrated in the content value chain of broadcasting, content and cinema, can be read as a factor that amplified the crisis.
Legacy Media’s Weapon — Refining TV Advertising Through Streaming
Legacy media holds a card Netflix cannot easily match: refining TV advertising — still valuable to marketers — more precisely through streaming. Paramount recently introduced a “streaming fixed unit (SFU)” that places an ad in a specific position within a specific episode. Jay Askinasi, chief revenue officer of Paramount Skydance, explained in a release that pairing a Sunday-night broadcast unit with a fixed unit on Paramount+ lets advertisers design a consistent experience that reaches viewers without missing anyone.
Legacy players are also investing more aggressively in free, ad-supported streaming (FAST) — Paramount’s Pluto and Fox’s Tubi among them. Michael Wolf, CEO of Activate, told Axios that every major media, tech and streaming company is racing to become an “AI-powered advertising operating system.”
Loyalty Has Shifted — to Content, Not the Service
As cheap bundles and ad-supported options have proliferated, consumers can use several services at once more easily. As a result, their loyalty has moved toward content rather than any particular streaming platform. Liane Nadeau, chief media and investment officer at Digitas, says brands want to attach themselves to the stories that create fandom. The fandom she means is anything that pulls people in through interest, immersion and a sense of community. Consumers, she says, do not sit down deciding “I’m going to stream today”; they simply watch what they want to watch.
The Streaming Platform Is Now a Franchise Incubator
So the global entertainment giants are turning the streaming platform into a hub and incubator for franchises that earn money outside the living room. Beyond a platform that distributes content, they are making merchandise, licensing and live experiences the stage — a strategy of sustaining subscriptions through fandom rather than content alone. The growth of travel and food tourism through streaming runs along the same line.
- Disney’s ‘The Mandalorian’ lifted a character, Grogu (Baby Yoda), into merchandise — plush toys, bags, clothing — and theme-park ticket sales.
- Netflix’s animated hit ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ spread into chart-topping songs and demand for HUNTR/X merchandise, and is set to expand into a global concert tour.
- WBD’s ‘The White Lotus’ generated hotel-tourism demand, luxury-brand collaborations and social-media memes alike — so-called streaming tourism.
The Metrics Move Too — from Subscribers to Engagement
The KPIs for success across streaming and content are shifting as well. Disney and Netflix no longer put subscriber counts front and center. Comcast’s Peacock, not yet profitable, defines itself as a “participatory entertainment platform” that helps fans engage more deeply with content. The axis of evaluation is moving from how many watch to how deeply they are drawn in. Matt Strauss, chairman of NBCUniversal Media Group, told an investor meeting that the company wants to make Peacock not a streaming platform but “the best place for fans to engage and consume with our content.”
Impact on Korea — Opportunity, and Structural Risk Seen Through JTBC
The opening of the streaming 3.0 era cannot help but reach Korea. Our particular dilemma is that the place that creates fandom and the place that captures its rewards are not the same. Korea creates the fandom; the revenue that fandom generates outside the living room flows to the global platform that holds the rights. In a 3.0 era where fandom becomes a platform’s core asset, failing to resolve this structure can only make Korea’s production ecosystem harder to sustain.
The opportunity is clear. The asset the 3.0 era demands is “IP that travels far.” The franchise design that runs from music to merchandise, live and tourism is a grammar K-pop has long refined, and ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ shows that grammar being absorbed into a global platform’s growth model. As a platform’s center of gravity shifts from subscriber counts to franchise and fandom value, the bargaining power and IP pricing of Korean agencies and producers that hold worlds, characters and music together rise structurally. The ancillary-revenue loop running into inbound tourism, merchandise, concerts and festivals is open in K-content’s favor. Streaming tourism, in particular, is the heart of future fandom.
But the risk is more fundamental. The very definition of the third phase — a platform using streaming as a lever to grow its own strengths — sits uneasily with a Korean production ecosystem still largely bound to licensing and work-for-hire arrangements with global and domestic OTTs, Netflix among them. The side that makes the content and ignites the fandom is Korea, yet the merchandise, licensing, live and viewing-data revenue that fandom generates flows to the rights-holding platform. Look at who stands to gain from the concert tour and merchandise upside around ‘Demon Hunters,’ and the structure is laid bare.
A plateau in consumer spending compounds this. As platforms defend margins, per-title production budgets and licensing rates come under pressure, and bargaining power tilts further toward the platform. As KPIs move from subscriber counts to engagement, immersion and time spent, the criteria for commissioning and renewing Korean content become subordinate to those metrics. On the advertising side, as global players seize an AI-driven “advertising operating system” built on recommendation and targeting, the risk grows that brand budgets drain out of the country if domestic FAST and broadcast ad infrastructure falls behind in the ad-tech race.
The domestic streaming landscape sits under the same pressure. The 3.0-era logic that “streaming is a lever for a bigger business” fits Coupang Play precisely, backed by commerce and its ‘WOW membership.’ Players with a cash cow in an adjacent business use content as a growth engine, while pure streaming services running losses in their core business find their footing narrowing — even after the TVING-Wavve merger — before the same logic. As the JTBC case shows, when finances wobble under slowing advertising and over-investment in sports and content, a crisis spreads straight into a liquidity crisis if downstream revenue is held by the platform rather than the producer.
The conclusion, for both strategy and policy, points to a shift toward a structure in which Korea holds the downstream rights. Designing contracts and institutions so that producers hold merchandising, live and licensing rights together with the platform from the earliest planning stage — and keeping fandom-monetization infrastructure (venues, immersive exhibitions, fandom commerce, data platforms) onshore to stop value from leaking out — becomes the core task. On the distribution side, building direct-transmission channels that can bypass Netflix — FAST and ATSC 3.0 among them — is urgent. Distributing K-content through alternative platforms creates a detour that captures advertising and distribution revenue without dependence on global platforms.
In the streaming 3.0 era, the survivors will not be “the groups that make content well,” but the groups that have accumulated, onshore, the rights and infrastructure to monetize all the way through the fandom that content creates. That is why JTBC’s crisis should be read not as one company’s problem but as a signal to hurry this structural transition.
Source: Axios, ‘Streaming wars enter a new era’ (Kerry Flynn and Sara Fischer). Analysis, editing and Korea-focused implications by the author.