Media Companies Stopped Making Stars. Now They Rent Them.

Hollywood and media companies are rushing to repaint the walls of a burning building — and calling it a fix for the cultural apocalypse underway

In the last few weeks, the ball has started rolling fast. M&A wars are accelerating, streamer-legacy media partnerships are multiplying. Commentators are calling it: 'finally, legacy media is fighting back against the platforms.' There is no fight. We are witnessing the biggest, most seismic shift in pop culture legitimacy ever recorded. Traditional linear TV, which once shaped and mirrored culture, is now working the lowest part of the funnel — distribution — to defend what's left of its reach-based advertising business, or handing its content over to streamers chasing audiences where they already are, with content still shaped for the previous generation. Brands need to watch this turmoil closely, to understand the new rules of connection with the customers and fans who actually choose them.

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Let’s go into this.

Samsung TV Plus just produced its first original scripted series. It didn’t hire a writer’s room. It partnered with Dhar Mann, a YouTuber known for morality-tale videos with tens of millions of subscribers, and lined up a dedicated channel with Mark Rober, the former NASA engineer turned science YouTuber, on the same FAST platform. Netflix, Tubi, Paramount and Roku are chasing the same land grab — the trend now includes creators like Jesser and Dude Perfect, per Adweek, which reported the whole shift under one blunt line: platforms producing “YouTube-style” content at a fraction of studio cost.

Read that again. The companies that spent a century building the machinery to manufacture stars — casting departments, writers’ rooms, promotion budgets, decades of institutional memory on what makes an audience fall in love with someone — are now buying access to stars that machinery didn’t make. They’re renting credibility instead of building it, because building it, apparently, no longer fits the timeline or the balance sheet.

This isn’t a side story. It’s happening at the exact moment the same companies are spending tens of billions defending what’s left of mass reach. Streaming passed the combined viewership of broadcast and cable in May 2025; by March 2026 it was at 47.6%, per Nielsen. Fox paid $22 billion for Roku, whose infrastructure now carries 44% of all US streaming hours — more than triple its nearest competitor. Comcast split NBCUniversal from Sky over how capital markets value content versus infrastructure, then had Sky buy ITV’s broadcast arm a week later, pushing the combined company past 70% of the UK TV ad market. None of that is growth. It’s consolidation on shrinking ground — the last reservation where mass advertising still behaves the way it did twenty years ago, defended because it’s the only thing left that’s still purchasable with the old playbook.

And on that same shrinking ground, the players with the most resources to build something new are choosing to rent instead. That’s the part worth sitting with.

The obvious defense is that a company fighting for survival doesn’t have seven years to spend building anything. Fair — except defending the shrinking room while doing nothing to build a foothold in the next one is closer to repainting the walls while the fire is still burning downstairs. Consolidating faster doesn’t renegotiate the mortgage on the next thirty years. Only new content and new faces, in front of the audience nobody’s currently fighting for, does that.

Nobody planned this. Someone still cashed in on it

Pop culture used to be born on television and trickle down. That machine is broken, and not just for the reasons above. For two decades, ordinary people uploaded videos, argued in comment sections, and built communities around shared jokes and shared taste — with no strategy, no expectation that any of it would be worth anything. YouTube didn’t plant that. It just happened to own the field where it grew, and twenty years later it’s harvesting a cultural dividend nobody, including YouTube itself in its early years, saw coming. Meanwhile a generation that grew up disintermediated — no gatekeeper between them and the people they actually want to hear from — has simply stopped waiting for television to tell them what matters.

European broadcasters spent decades holding something no platform has yet replicated: the deep cultural roots of their own countries — the shows, the fiction, the new local talent that defined how a nation talked to itself. What the current wave of consolidation actually trades away is that position. Fox, Sky and MFE (Mediaset’s pan-European holding company) are buying five, maybe ten more years of the audience that still watches linear — an audience that skews older every year. Social platforms, in the meantime, have already mortgaged the next thirty: an entire generation is forming its cultural vocabulary somewhere broadcasters don’t control and, increasingly, can’t even see.

Brands do the exact same thing, and call it strategy

A company pays a creator for a three-month campaign, gets a burst of borrowed relevance, and calls it influencer marketing. It’s the same transaction Samsung just made with Dhar Mann, just smaller and with a product placed instead of a plot. The credibility isn’t transferred — it’s leased. When the contract ends, the creator’s audience stays exactly where it always was: with the creator. The brand is right back where it started, except now it needs a bigger budget to rent the next one.

Two cases from this year show what the alternative actually looks like — not because they’re unusually cool, but because neither started with anything to rent.

Niccolò Moriconi — stage name Ultimo — was playing to 500 people at a Milan club in January 2018. He won Sanremo Giovani, Italy’s national song contest, that December, sold out Rome’s Olympic Stadium eighteen months later, and by 2022 was drawing 70,000 people to the Circus Maximus with almost no media coverage in between. On July 4, 2026, he gathered 250,000 paying fans at Tor Vergata — the largest paid concert in Italian history, and among the largest paid concerts ever recorded anywhere. Seven and a half years, fifty-three stadium shows, over two million tickets, built one date at a time. The contest gave him exposure once. Everything that actually moved a quarter-million people to camp out for two weeks came after it, built by him, offline, with nobody renting anybody.

Sides — the fried chicken chain launched by British creator collective the Sidemen — started as a group chat about who made the best fried chicken. No media moment, no launch campaign borrowed from anyone else. First store opening: a 38-hour queue. Today: five UK locations, a Singapore outpost, plans for fifteen more. Whatever risk the model carries — and the May 2026 departure of member KSI shows there is one — it isn’t the risk of having rented someone else’s relevance and having it expire.

Neither of these required being interesting in an obvious way

A guy playing a 500-capacity club. A group chat about chicken. Nothing here started with a competitive edge worth renting out. What both had was something more specific and less flashy: an honest point of view that nobody else in their exact lane was saying out loud, built and rebuilt in public until it became something people would show up for without being told to.

That’s available to a mid-market software company as much as it is to a singer or a chicken shop — a real position on a real tension its customers live with, that no competitor is naming. Companies that skip that step and go straight to renting a creator aren’t doing something cheaper. They’re doing the Samsung TV Plus move: buying a temporary shell of relevance from someone who actually built it, on ground that gets more expensive and more contested every quarter it isn’t their own.