Jamie Branson’s Streaming Odyssey: Reinventing the Wild West of CTV

The streaming world has no shortage of loud voices, bold claims, and half-baked solutions. Yet, in this cacophony, Jamie Branson, founder of View TV, stands out as the rare disruptor who’s more interested in solving problems than stoking his ego. With his new platform, COMO, Branson is challenging the chaos of Free Ad-Supported Television (FAST) and offering a sustainable alternative that puts content creators, advertisers, and audiences on equal footing.

Streaming’s a Circus, and Someone’s Gotta Be the Ringmaster

Branson dives headfirst into describing the current state of CTV with the precision of an engineer and the candor of someone who’s seen too much nonsense. “The ecosystem right now is like a toddler hopped up on sugar—unpredictable and slightly dangerous,” he says, summing up what most in the industry would be too polite—or too afraid—to admit.

At the heart of the problem is a system that prioritizes flashy tech over functional business models. “The ad revenue seems to be very, very big at the top,” Branson explains, “but what’s filtering down to the bottom into reinvesting in the future of TV is kind of a fraction of what it should be.”

The result? Studios and broadcasters are quietly backing away from CTV, not with dramatic exits but with the kind of soft fades that suggest they’d rather not rattle the cage. “Quite a lot of the studios… have been in the CTV FAST space for a couple of years and have been shocked by the results,” Branson reveals. “Rather than shaking the cage and saying, ‘This isn’t sustainable,’ they’ve quietly sort of gone away.”

FAST Channels: Gold Rush or Fool’s Gold?

For Branson, the FAST channel boom isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. He likens it to a poorly organized gold rush where the real winners are the shovel-sellers: intermediaries who pocket hefty fees while content creators struggle to make ends meet. “If you take traditional television channels… their overheads are a quarter of a million dollars a month,” Branson explains. “But the figures they’re seeing are a tenth of what they need to get to.”

The problem isn’t just inefficiency; it’s structural. FAST channels operate with layers of middlemen siphoning off revenue, leaving little for the actual creators. Branson doesn’t mince words: “The actual revenue to break even is there; it’s just due to the structure of the number of intermediaries that it has to go through that the revenue disappears.”

To address this, Branson created COMO, a platform he describes as a “walled garden ecosystem.” It’s not about reinventing technology, he says; it’s about reinventing workflows. “What we’ve managed to do is make it so that the content owners… are driving or demanding what they need to get from the end platforms and the advertisers, having an element of control over that ecosystem,” Branson explains.

The Kardashians of CTV?

When it comes to the tech giants dominating the streaming space, Jamie Branson doesn’t hold back. His critiques are as unsparing as Gordon Ramsay eviscerating a soggy risotto. “It’s a boy’s club, egocentrically driven around ego and being famous more than around being a sustainable business model,” he says, with the kind of deadpan delivery that makes you simultaneously laugh and wince.

This sharp observation doesn’t just apply to the smaller players trying to climb the ladder but also to some of the industry’s biggest fish. Branson points to ad tech—a linchpin in modern streaming monetization—as a space riddled with inefficiencies and mismanagement. Even Netflix, the vaunted pioneer of streaming, hasn’t been immune to missteps. “When Netflix went into this, originally they hired Microsoft to do ad tech… which kind of failed,” he notes.

The problem, Branson explains, isn’t just about execution but about a broader misunderstanding of the ecosystem’s needs. Netflix’s pivot to building ad tech in-house, he argues, exemplifies a troubling trend. “People think the way to escape the ecosystem of multiple takes or multiple inventories is to build it in-house and build it as a silo, rather than actually tackling the root cause,” he says. This mentality, according to Branson, doesn’t solve the real issues; it simply shifts the inefficiencies into a different room, with new locks on the door.

For Branson, the tech giants’ approach reeks of hubris. He describes it as a “jack-of-all-trades” mindset that prioritizes control over collaboration, often to the detriment of the very ecosystem they claim to innovate. “We all know that we can’t be a jack-of-all-trades,” Branson says. “The good guys need to work together to create a balanced ecosystem, rather than everyone trying to do everyone else’s job.”

The implications of this siloed approach are far-reaching. Branson points to Disney, a powerhouse of content creation, as a cautionary tale. “Disney should go back to making great content rather than trying to provide an app,” he says. Their decision to build their own app wasn’t born out of an inherent desire to control every aspect of the streaming process but rather out of necessity—a response to the inadequacies of existing platforms. “They couldn’t find anybody to monetize their content in a sustainable way to keep up the high-quality work that they do on the budgets they have to spend,” Branson explains.

This disconnect, where technology supplants rather than supports content, is emblematic of what Branson believes to be a fundamental misstep by tech giants: forgetting their role. “Tech should be just a player and not a ruler,” he says, underscoring his belief that the industry must realign its priorities to serve content creators, not just tech investors.

The solution, according to Branson, lies in recognizing and addressing the root causes of inefficiencies rather than slapping Band-Aids on gaping wounds. The refusal to engage in meaningful collaboration between platforms and creators isn’t just a missed opportunity; it’s a structural failing that threatens the entire ecosystem.

 The Swiss Army Knife of Streaming

Branson’s COMO isn’t just another platform; it’s a call to arms against the inefficiencies of FAST. He calls it a “stakeholder manager to make all three parties happy,” referring to content creators, advertisers, and audiences. By cutting down on intermediaries and ensuring a fair revenue split, COMO aims to be the antidote to a broken system.

“FAST is kind of everybody is happy to be in it and happy to take a fee, but no one’s taking responsibility, and the content owner loses every time,” Branson explains. With COMO, the goal is simple: create a system where everyone gets a fair shake. “If you don’t pay them fairly, they will die,” Branson warns. “And then you’ll have to create it all yourself.”

Despite his frustrations with the current state of the industry, Branson is cautiously optimistic. “I think it’s unpredictable and slightly dangerous at the moment, but it’s starting to solidify,” he says, pointing to an emerging hybrid model that combines the best elements of various formats.

Still, Branson knows the road ahead won’t be easy. “At the end of the day, a lot of people are trying to over-engineer and over-orchestrate the technical parts of CTV,” he says. “But first principles is just monetizing content and making a sustainable solution for studios to keep making bigger, better content as audiences demand more.”

The Human Element: Why Loyalty Matters

If there’s one thing Branson emphasizes, it’s loyalty—an increasingly rare commodity in the cutthroat world of streaming. “I’ve found to earn more revenue and more value to the business by being very genuine and loyal to each particular channel, rather than just trying to take as much as you possibly can,” he says.

He’s also brutally honest about the industry’s lack of transparency. “The opaqueness of the industry at the moment is borderline criminal,” Branson says. “Nobody really knows the difference between what’s coming in and what’s going out.” For him, fair play isn’t just an ideal; it’s a necessity for long-term sustainability.

A Streaming Renaissance or a Tech-Driven Apocalypse?

As Branson sees it, the industry’s future depends on finding a balance between technological innovation and human creativity. He’s wary of AI’s growing influence but believes it can be an enabler rather than a replacer. “At the moment, what AI is allowing people to do is to express themselves,” he says.

Ultimately, Branson’s vision for the future of streaming is one of collaboration and fairness. “The Wild West can be cleaned up by a sheriff sometime,” he says. And if Jamie Branson has his way, that sheriff might just be him.

In an industry awash with hype and hollow promises, Branson’s commitment to fairness, sustainability, and first principles stands out. COMO isn’t just a platform; it’s a manifesto—a call to rethink how streaming operates and who benefits from it. With Branson at the helm, the streaming world might just find its way out of the chaos and into a brighter, more equitable future.