50 VOD Professionals 2026 (our 13^th edition) is now live and as usual, it’s been an interesting, entertaining and illuminating process seeing who made the top 50. I’m not a judge myself (I’m actually more like Andy in The Devil Wears Prada, whispering names and mini-bios to Miranda at a party) but I do get to see our adjudication panel in action as they debate and deliberate before making their calls.

So, what did they decide this year? Are there any patterns we can discern? And what does our new 50 tell us about where UK streaming is right now?

The Numbers

Of the 50 people on this year’s list (well, 51, because there was one joint-entry), 21 are new faces – and not one of them featured in 2024 either, so this is genuine fresh blood rather than the usual round-trip of names that drift in and drift out. 21 in obviously means 21 out. That’s a striking amount of turnover for a list that you might think trades on continuity.

But the churn hides the real story which is concentration. Influence, at least this time round, is pooling at the top. If we include their studios businesses, three public-service broadcasters – the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 – more than doubled their combined footprint, from six seats last year to fourteen this. ITV and the BBC took five apiece, Channel 4 four. Google and Amazon each added a seat. The net effect: the 2026 list represents 38 different companies – five fewer than in 2025.

A churning edge, a hardening centre

Those two facts – record turnover and tighter concentration – might sound contradictory. They aren’t. The volatility is happening at the edges, among the long tail of one-seat companies cycling in and out, while the centre hardens around a shrinking group of large incumbents. So the list isn’t ossifying at the top and stagnant below; it’s the opposite. A stable, expanding core of broadcasters and platforms, ringed by a dynamic periphery where a place is never safe two years running.

The Broadcasters’ Moment

Why the PSB surge in particular? Partly because they’re in the middle of an existential pivot, judged now on streaming – rather than broadcast – success in a way they simply weren’t a few years ago. And partly because of a genuine regulatory tailwind: the Media Act 2024’s new prominence regime, designed to guarantee that PSB apps are carried and surfaced on CTV platforms, moved decisively this past winter, with Ofcom recommending fifteen platforms for designation in December and consulting on the code in January. That puts the people running PSB streaming squarely at the centre of the industry’s most consequential live debate.

Another structural change which explains why not all of the BBC’s rise is fresh influence: when BBC Studios took full ownership of BritBox International in 2024, those people were reclassified under the BBC banner. Same faces, different label. A chunk of the concentration then is corporate plumbing not a sudden rise in clout.

Advertising is the engine now

Look at who is climbing and the throughline is advertising. There was a time, back in the early OTT era, where we thought that SVOD would rule the new TV world forever. It didn’t. The advertising renaissance has become a full-blown restoration and the names rising reflect it: ITV’s advertising and FAST leads, Channel 4’s sales and social-ad-sales leaders, Google Ad Manager, Prime Video advertising, Samsung Ads.

If anything, given the number of intermediaries in this part of the industry – the ad servers, SSPs, DSPs, dynamic-ad-insertion specialists – it’s perhaps a surprise that there aren’t more people from this space.

The Vendor Question

Which brings us to the flipside. A clutch of vendors and tech suppliers who featured in 2025 slipped off the list entirely to be replaced by a different, smaller, cast of experts including Manhattan TV, Merzigo and ThinkAnalytics.

The tidy read is that streaming has matured and the platforms have absorbed those capabilities in-house. Hmm. That’s a bit too neat.

Anyone who’s watched this industry across its twenty-odd years knows the build-versus-buy question never really settles; it just ebbs and flows. Right now, DIY may simply be in vogue, perhaps given fresh legs by the things AI lets in-house teams do for themselves that once needed an external supplier. Or the vendors may just be telling their stories less loudly this year. Or, even, they’re telling them perfectly well, just not to our judges. The pendulum has swung back before and we expect vendors to return in greater numbers next time.

And in 2027?

A closing thought, framed as a question rather than a prediction: will next year’s list look markedly more AI-heavy? I suspect it might. The people running AI initiatives inside the broadcasters and streamers are, for now, working largely out of sight. But as those projects turn public-facing, or simply get talked about more openly at events and in the trade press, their architects will become far more visible. At the same time, the specialist AI vendors landing their first big industry clients will have sharper stories to tell. Put those two together and 2027 could read rather differently. 

We shall see.

See the full list of 50 VOD Professionals 2026 here.