The global film and audiovisual industry has entered a phase of sustained structural stress, marked less by freefall than by a hardening “new normal” that forces producers to rethink scale, strategy and survival. At the Berlinale’s European Film Market (EFM), a session called “The Big Picture 2026: New Industry Trends and Shifts” opened with a rapid-fire market overview by Guy Bisson, co-founder and executive director of Ampere Analysis, who distilled what he sees as five defining trends shaping the current moment.

Introduced by conference curator Erwin M Schmidt, the presentation was framed as deliberately pragmatic, rather than speculative: a data-driven snapshot of where the industry now sits and where pressure is most acutely being felt.

Returning to a theme he has repeatedly stressed over the past two years, Bisson opened with what he described as “good news, if you know where to look”. Global commissioning remains stuck at roughly 75% of the 2022 peak, a level that has proven remarkably stable. “This is the new steady state,” Bisson argued. The problem, he noted, is not further decline, but the mismatch between this reduced volume and an industry infrastructure built for peak TV levels.

Within that flattened landscape, however, some growth persists. Streamers continue to increase overall content spend, albeit far more slowly than during the expansion years. By contrast, public and commercial broadcasters remain flat or in decline, a dynamic that disproportionately impacts Europe, given their central role in financing scripted production. The result, Bisson suggested, is a paradoxical environment: more money in the system overall, but fewer viable pathways for individual projects.

From there, Bisson widened the lens, describing the current period as a “once-in-a-generation transformation”. The catalyst, he argued, is straightforward: the emergence of global platforms. In response, companies are reorganising around a global audience through new forms of integration. Revisiting concepts he has outlined in previous years, Bisson pointed to a renewed push towards vertical integration, now centred on streaming, rather than cable infrastructure, alongside what he terms “diagonal integration”, where legacy players align with or merge into newer platforms.

High-profile consolidation, including the mooted Netflix-Warner Bros Discovery merger, was framed as emblematic of this shift, blending legacy assets with global streaming scale. Around this core, Bisson outlined further concentric layers: broadcasters rushing into partnerships with streamers and social platforms, large independent production companies positioned as potential M&A targets and, at the outer edge, social media platforms emerging as a new third-party distribution layer.

That outer layer led directly into Bisson’s third trend: the growing role of YouTube. While it is increasingly being embraced as a distribution opportunity, he cautioned that monetisation remains the fundamental unresolved issue. Social platforms, he argued, were built for low-cost content, while broadcasters and streamers evolved to sustain high-cost production. The resulting imbalance between content costs and advertising value creates structural tension.

Bisson outlined three broad scenarios: using social platforms primarily for promotion; increasing ad loads around premium content to compensate for lower CPMs; or creating two-tier systems that allow rights holders to retain control over ad sales and pricing. The latter approach, he noted, is increasingly favoured by broadcasters seeking “fair value” while attempting to stabilise rapidly eroding younger audiences. Yet the risk of dependency and cannibalisation remains a live concern.

The fourth trend focused on micro-drama, which Bisson positioned as the latest iteration of “crossover content” designed to capture the engagement dynamics of social media. Professionalised short-form, vertical storytelling has found its strongest footing in Asia, where mobile consumption and micro-payments are deeply embedded. Outside the region, Turkey, Brazil and parts of Latin America show promise, driven by established melodramatic and soapy storytelling traditions. Europe, by contrast, remains a marginal market, with only a small minority engaging regularly with professional short-form vertical content.

Still, Bisson highlighted one encouraging signal: micro-drama viewers are “super-consumers”, watching significantly more video overall than average audiences. As with early streaming adopters a decade ago, their behaviour suggests addition, rather than displacement.

His final point addressed sport as a double-edged sword. Streamers now allocate around 11% of their content budgets to live sports, up from virtually nothing five years ago. Should that figure approach the 30%-50% levels typical of broadcasters and pay-TV operators, tens of billions could be diverted away from film and TV commissioning. At the same time, Bisson identified sports-related companion content, particularly documentaries, as one of the few consistently growing commissioning areas in an otherwise contracting market.

In the discussion that followed, Bisson elaborated on the apparent contradiction between stable or rising spend and declining commission numbers, pointing to inflation and rising production costs, as well as the growth of unscripted commissioning by streamers. Advertising-funded streaming and reality formats, he suggested, are reshaping commissioning priorities beneath the headline figures.

Asked about long-form content on YouTube, Bisson acknowledged data indicating that a substantial majority of viewing time on the platform now comes from videos over 15 minutes. While not equivalent to traditional films or series, this shift underscores YouTube’s evolution into a space for professionally produced long-form content, including deals offering minimum guarantees to studios and broadcasters. European players, he noted, are increasingly active in this space, although the balance between reach, revenue and platform power remains delicate.

Taken together, Bisson’s five trends painted a picture of an industry no longer in freefall, but locked into a demanding equilibrium. As Schmidt noted in closing, the challenge now lies in how producers translate these macro shifts into workable strategies on the ground – a question that would be taken up in the session’s second half, focusing on lived producer experience.