If you’re reading this you probably work in the OTT industry and on this side of the glass-to-glass process. That is, you’re likely nearer to the final screen on which the end-user watches the content rather than the first one – the camera – where the movie or TV show is being filmed.

In which case, do you think of yourself as a creative?

It’s a question that’s been floating around my mind for the last few weeks and was given the spark of life this morning when I was listening to the first part of an excellent documentary on BBC Sounds called What Happened to Counter-Culture?

I guess it depends, right? If you define “creatives” narrowly – as the writers, musicians, directors, and performers who originate cultural artefacts – then you, and most people in OTT, are not creatives. We’re not Bob Dylan scribbling lyrics on napkins in Greenwich Village. We’re not Allen Ginsberg howling into the void.

But if you define “creative” more broadly – as people who design, shape, and reframe how culture is discovered, distributed, and interpreted – then yes, the OTT industry contains a layer of creative workers. You could be creating new user experiences, shaping how metadata affects discoverability, producing promo reels, designing data dashboards that determine greenlighting decisions, or inventing a brand new format for a streaming-first content strand.

Still, most people in the OTT space aren’t creating culture; they’re curating, commercialising, packaging, or scaling it. That doesn’t make the work meaningless, absolutely not, but it makes it dependent on the core creative act that happened earlier in the chain.

The Connection to the Counterculture of the 50s and 60s

The original counterculture was about rupture, about tearing down old norms and creating alternatives in music, poetry, politics, identity, and society. Its participants didn’t just distribute ideas, they lived them, often at personal cost. They weren’t the managers of rebellion; they were the authors of it.

Wasn’t OTT born as a disruptor too? A child of the internet? If Broadcast was the parent – staid and stuffy with its scheduled conformity, OTT was almost the opposite. A hedonist: watch whatever you want, whenever you want (as long as you can pay for it). Promiscuous: with no loyalty to “channels”. Evangelical: spreading the message and putting growth before profit.

Whatever happened to that kid?

Today’s streamers mediate culture on a vast scale. They democratise access but they also commodify it, optimise it, A/B test it, localise it, and, yes, monetise it. That’s not a critique, it’s an observation: the OTT industry is not a cultural vanguard. It’s an infrastructure layer. A powerful one. An influential one. But not one that necessarily originates.

And now, into its early-20s, OTT mimics the traits it rebelled against:

• Appointment-to-view is back via live drops and watch parties.
• Content scarcity is engineered via weekly releases, windowing and “leaving soon”
• Advertising – rather than subscriptions – is once again the prime funding model
• Even the idea of “channels” is back. Now it’s just called FAST.

Can OTT Now Forge a New Counterculture?

As an industry, probably not. The commercial incentives are too entrenched. Most of OTT is now infrastructure for capitalised content – no longer a space for radical experimentation, just refined, optimised delivery.

But individuals within OTT? That’s different and once again it depends on definitions.

Traditionally (if something can be called “traditional” after just 20 years), OTT has meant services like Netflix, Disney+, iPlayer. Professionally commissioned content, centrally distributed, relatively “TV-shaped.”

What then of TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, YouTube, AI-generated video? These are all delivered over-the-top. Are they what we’d label OTT?

And if we say they are, then maybe that’s where the next OTT revolution is happening.

It might not look like the OTT we’ve built our careers around but it still uses the same pipes. TikTok creators aren’t waiting for commissioning rounds. AI-gen video doesn’t care about channel brands. These platforms, chaotic and decentralised, are where new cultural codes are being written in real time. They’re not disrupting broadcast anymore but they may be bypassing OTT as we’ve conceived of it so far.

And as audiences learn to expect content that’s faster, looser, and less polished – but maybe more alive – that shift will ripple back to the “traditional” streamers too.

So as the landscape shifts again, and a new kind of counterculture takes shape, it’s worth asking yourself once again: is there more creative power in your hands than you thought?

DM me on LinkedIn – would love to hear your what you think.