The last decade’s acceleration toward streaming, data-driven targeting, and audience-based buying has fundamentally reshaped how video is distributed, consumed, and bought. This has created a far more complex ecosystem for agencies and advertisers to navigate. The TV landscape hasn’t evolved — it’s fractured.

Now, as Upfront season forces long-term commitments in a short-term world, that accelerating complexity feels like it’s reaching a breaking point — and we’re hearing a rising chorus calling for something simpler and smarter.

Cynopsis spoke with Jason Hernandez of DIRECTV Advertising about how the industry got here—and what it will take to move toward a more flexible future.

Cynopsis: The TV buying landscape has changed dramatically in recent years. What are you hearing most from agency partners right now?

Jason Hernandez: The biggest thing we hear is just how overwhelming the landscape has become — for buyers, but also for viewers. You feel it as a consumer: You’re trying to find a game, and it could be on a regional sports network, a streaming app, a national broadcaster — it’s not always clear. That same fragmentation exists on the buying side, but at a much larger scale.

Agencies aren’t just deciding between linear and streaming anymore. They’re navigating a huge number of endpoints, platforms, and buying methods — and their clients expect strong, measurable outcomes. Managing this complexity requires significant resources, and the reality is many organizations are just trying to keep up.

Cynopsis: How did we get here? Why did TV fragment so quickly—and why did it make sense at the time?

Hernandez: Fragmentation was a very intentional strategy, fueled by innovation and demand, and pursued collectively by just about everyone in the industry.

We saw that digital was steadily gaining ground on traditional TV, and that led every major publisher to invest heavily to win the “arms race” to build out streaming platforms and capabilities.

The goal was to draw audiences to streaming by giving viewers more choice and flexibility — and the industry more than achieved that goal. Audiences loved it, and they migrated en masse toward streaming platforms.

But the result is what we see today: a massive expansion of channels and inventory that’s made the ecosystem far more complex.

You’re seeing agencies trying to adapt — like converging linear and digital buying roles into more holistic “video buyers” — but it’s still a work in progress.

Cynopsis: How is that shaping this year’s Upfront conversations?

Hernandez: Upfronts are traditionally about making large, long-term commitments — and today’s reality is so much more dynamic. Audiences are moving across platforms, performance can shift quickly, and advertisers need to be able to adapt in real time. There’s no question that buyers feel like Upfronts are too rigid — that they’re not getting what they need in terms of the ability to adjust, optimize, and even move investments if something isn’t working.

That’s why flexibility became the buzzword in Upfronts in the last few years.

Cynopsis: Flexibility is definitely a major theme, but it’s also something the industry has been talking about for years. If everyone agrees it’s needed, why hasn’t it really materialized yet?

Hernandez: A big part of it is the pressure everyone is under to prove outcomes, and that can push organizations toward short-term execution instead of stepping back and rethinking how the system should work.

A lot of the time, flexibility is limited by how deals are actually structured. Especially with large Upfront commitments, there are still expectations around how dollars are allocated — how much goes to linear and how much goes to digital. Those constraints can limit how much buyers can really move investment based on performance.

So, even though the need for simplification is clear, the way the ecosystem is set up today makes it hard to fully deliver on that promise.

Agencies want flexibility in buying modality, whether that’s direct IO, programmatic guaranteed, PMP, or managed service. They don’t want to be locked into one path.
More importantly, they want the ability to shift investment toward what’s working. If something is performing well, they want to scale it; and if it’s not, they want to adjust in real time.

That’s a big shift from the traditional model we associate with Upfronts, where spend is often fixed across channels regardless of performance.

Cynopsis: So how is DIRECTV approaching Upfronts differently this year?

Hernandez: We’ve always been known as a leader in linear addressable TV. But over the last year and a half, we significantly expanded our digital capabilities, including programmatic access to our inventory.

That means we now have multiple endpoints — linear, digital, even out-of-home — under one roof. That makes it a lot easier for agencies to plan and execute holistically, instead of managing everything in silos, and it’s something that DIRECTV is really uniquely positioned to offer.

That’s what we offer, but I think what’s just as important is how we present that offering to agencies. We’re not trying to force a specific path. We just want to help agencies and their clients achieve their KPIs, and we don’t care what channel(s) or method(s) they use to get there.

That means agencies can engage with us in whatever way best fits their goals. If a household addressable linear buy is working, they can lean into that. If a PMP or programmatic approach is performing, they can shift or expand there.

The key is giving advertisers the flexibility to choose the right balance for each campaign and not be locked into a single strategy.

On the infrastructure side, we’re still dealing with a fragmented ecosystem. You’ve got multiple platforms and endpoints that aren’t fully connected, which makes it harder to execute and measure campaigns seamlessly.

On the data side, there’s still too much reliance on probabilistic approaches. What agencies and advertisers really want is deterministic, authenticated data: they want to know exactly who they’re reaching at the household level.

We’re lucky at DIRECTV because we have such a direct relationship with our customer base. With how much time they spend on our platform, we’re able to provide a deeper, more consistent view of the audience. That helps close that gap. And it’s not just good for our agency partners — it means our customers are getting more relevant, useful content experiences.

Cynopsis: Measurement is another area where fragmentation causes frustration, and there’s a lot of finger-pointing going on. How should the industry be thinking about accountability for measurement right now?

Hernandez: The challenge here is very similar to the larger fragmentation problem: consumer behavior has evolved faster than how we measure. People move across screens and platforms seamlessly, from linear to streaming and back, but we’re still trying to measure that journey with tools that were designed for a linear TV experience.

That disconnect leaves gaps in terms of understanding what’s actually working. But solving that isn’t something one company (or even one side of the table) can do on its own — it has to be an industry-wide effort. We need to commit to creating better standards, more transparency, and better ways to measure performance across the full video ecosystem.

Cynopsis: We’ve talked about a lot of specific friction points, but when you zoom out, what does a healthier version of this ecosystem actually look like?

Hernandez: Upfronts can still be valuable, but it needs to look a lot more like a partnership than a transaction.

The old model was very much about hitting spend commitments. Today, we need to be figuring out how to align the goals of the agency, the client, and the publisher. When everyone is working toward the same outcomes, and everyone feels like they have flexibility and transparency in how they get there — that’s when the system works better for everyone.

Cynopsis: Assuming the industry moves in that direction, what’s one assumption about TV buying that you think will feel outdated in a few years?

Hernandez: We’re not going to separate everything into “linear” and “digital.” We’re moving toward a world where it’s just video. Budgets and strategies and planning won’t be split across channels — they’ll all be handled together. Flexibility will be the default, and the most successful teams will plan, buy, and optimize across all video seamlessly.