LAS VEGAS – The future is more complicated than it used to be. Now, a broadcaster’s go-to-market TV strategy can’t be just one distribution channel; it has to be many.

That was the verdict of several executives on a panel of industry folk assembled to discuss TV companies’ response to the burgeoning new multi-screen future.

The key question – how to approach ad sales when platforms are proliferating – leaves many with a sore head. But executives suggested one response: embrace chaos.

“We have to provide consumers with choice,” said video ad-tech firm Ooyala’s ad platforms GM Scott Braley.

“The broadcasters really need to be thinking about it holistically, and deploying analytics sitting across the licensing of content, subscription services, AVOD businesses and connect all of that together to produce a holistic content ROI across all of those models.”

Braley said his company is helping deliver that right now to clients in France, Germany and Sweden.

Fox Networks Group advertising data and technology group SVP Noah Levine echoed the view.

“My crystal ball is foggy,” he conceded. “(But) the future is one where there can be multiple eventualities, multiple currencies, flexibility to support (many advertiser choices), different types of datasets and so forth.”

And Viacom data strategy SVP Gabe Bevilacqua said his firm thinks the future will look similar, but more so.

“We are investing in the belief that a transition is happening,” he said. “There is a rate of change that you can’t necessarily, granularly predict.

“But the way you want to address that transition is, ‘Ok, so what do marketers want to buy, how do agencies want to buy this?’ Where the audience is in 2019 versus 2021, I think there’s going to be a lot of similarities in the way a marketer wants to address them.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas.   The series is sponsored by Ooyala.  For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.