I struggle with the word television. Although we continue to use that term, recent market-definition debates – including in Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) assets – make it abundantly clear that what we call television is much more than a screen in a room where we lean back to watch professionally produced, long-form content delivered linearly at an appointed time. 

What we now call television is an experience that adapts to the viewer. It’s about how, when, and where we connect to content across moments, moods, and devices. Television is the moment we decide to be carried by a story: comfort, curiosity, escape, connection. That moment can happen on a couch, in an Uber, in the kitchen, or between meetings—across any screen, any length, any format. Television has become a state of mind.

When Product Experience Becomes Strategy 

Coming back to the U.S. after working in satellite television for News Corp. in India, I could see that digital streaming was the future. That feeling turned into a reality when I moved into the internet portfolio of News Corp./Fox during the MySpace era. My first big lesson was humbling: media companies don’t “go digital” by declaring a strategy. They go digital when the product experience is the strategy.

At MySpace, we signed what looked like a genius deal: Google guaranteed roughly $900 million over three years to serve ads on the Myspace platform. Wall Street applauded. Users did not. The interface and pages got cluttered, load times slowed, and the very vibe that made MySpace culturally dominant began to erode. When Facebook arrived with a cleaner, more intuitive design, people didn’t debate the switch. They simply left.

That moment clarified something the industry still struggles to accept: users vote with their behavior, not with their loyalty.

You Can’t Litigate Your Way to Relevance

MySpace also taught me you can’t litigate your way back to relevance. When music rights pressure intensified with Universal’s Music’s high stake litigation, a partnership was built in place of a war—structuring a Hulu-like joint venture with major labels that licensed catalogs and aligned incentives. The takeaway wasn’t “we won.” It was that the winners in disruption stop fighting the new behavior and start building an ecosystem around it. Disney’s recently announced partnership with OpenAI is a perfect example of this.

Engineers as Storytellers

Those lessons followed me into launching direct-to-consumer products for a major telecom platform and later for HBO Latin America. Inside big organizations, everyone understands technology matters. What’s harder is funding it, attracting talent to buy into the vision, and giving it the runway to pay off. Streaming “wars” are often narrated as content wars, but they’re increasingly product wars: discovery, personalization, and the quiet reduction of friction that keeps people in the experience.