Last week’s report that Paramount Skydance – which only closed its own merger in August – might be preparing a takeover bid for Warner Bros Discovery got me thinking about how OTT leaders make big decisions.

It’s a question I’d asked my panellists during a session at our conference, OTT Question Time Live, in 2024. You do your focus groups [qual] and you do your surveys [quant], but eventually someone has to make a call, right? In which case, is it done by committee or is there one market-whisperer, a shaman of some sort perhaps – like Steve Jobs – who reads the tea leaves, sniffs the wind, and says “This is the way to go”?

“We go into a room and meditate,” joked Julie Mitchelmore of Hearst Networks EMEA.

Lydia Fairfax and I returned to the topic on our Riffs show this week as we considered examples of when OTT leaders have made big moves:

• Netflix going all in on streaming from 2007

• the BBC launching iPlayer – into the zeitgeist if not technical reality – on Christmas Day of the same year

• Disney+ going live in the UK on the exact same day as the first national COVID lockdown started

Who made those decisions? How did they decide? And why did they press the green button when they did?

Some thoughts.

#1. The Repetition of Mundane Actions

Coincidentally (and we’re going to return to the idea of coincidences later), I heard a radio interview last Saturday morning with former basketball player, John Amaechi, who now, having retired, works with companies to improve leadership, communication skills, and organisational diversity.

His idea was that excellence is something that can be nurtured through “the repetition of mundane actions.” In his case, that included throwing a ball at a hoop tens of thousands of times.

It’s a good phrase, reminiscent of the rule, popularised by Malcolm Gladwell, which suggests that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is the key to achieving expertise in any field.

#2. The Competence Quadrant

Another way of looking at it is through the old competence/learning quadrant. You’ve probably seen versions of this before:

• Unconscious incompetence – you don’t know what you don’t know. Like a kid who’s never tried to ride a bike, the possibility of falling doesn’t even register

• Conscious incompetence – you get on the bike and immediately crash into a hedge. You’re now aware of how bad you are at this

• Conscious competence – after practice (and maybe a few grazed knees), you manage to ride but you’re thinking hard about balance, pedalling, and steering all at once

• Unconscious competence – eventually you just get on the bike and go, no thinking needed

For leaders, the quadrant explains why some decisions look like instinct or gut feel. In reality, they’re not at all mystical but simply the product of having gone through the earlier stages so many times that they can now act almost automatically.

Reed Hastings walking on stage at CES in 2016 to announce Netflix’s global rollout looked effortless (it was actually a bravura performance), but it was the result of years of practice: hiring, iterating and making mistakes before the big moment. (Oh, and as a Netflix exec told me later that year, lots and lots of advance testing – as you’d expect.) 

And maybe there are levels even beyond unconscious competence – what athletes call “flow state,” (when decision-making and execution feel seamless) or proprioception (the God-level when concepts and inanimate objects become a part of you – think Lionel Messi and a football). 

#3. Mythologising after the Event

But is there a danger that the decisions we might later ascribe to some sort of genius are actually things that just worked, and worked especially well, in hindsight? That’s where we come back to coincidence.

I read years ago that there’s no such thing as coincidence because:

• We have thousands of thoughts a day. We might, say, suddenly remember a song we haven’t heard in years (right now, for example, I’m thinking about Love Shack by the B52s).

• An hour later you turn on the radio and Love Shack starts playing.

• “What a coincidence!” you think.

But, the argument went, in reality it’s just maths: one thing happens and we marvel at it, ignoring all the many passing ships of thoughts that didn’t occur.

Put another way: post hoc, ergo propter hoc. After, therefore, because of it. Just because a thing follows another thing it doesn’t mean that it was caused by the other thing. 

The opposing view? Disney+ launching on the 24th March 2020 (the first day of lockdown in the UK) was a decision made – and announced – two months earlier on January 21st. That really was a coincidence, surely?

#4. Commissioning & Making Content

If strategy can sometimes be mythologised after the fact, then commissioning content is even more of a gamble. However much data you gather, however well the focus groups test, content producers are still essentially placing bets. And the odds, even when you think they’re stacked in your favour, don’t always play out that way.

Movie examples? On paper, putting Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts together in The Mexican (2001) looked like a guaranteed box-office smash. It wasn’t. Likewise, Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway were magnetic in Interstellar (2014) yet the same pairing in Serenity (2019)… eesh. There’s an alchemy at play here: combining great elements doesn’t always conjure gold.

It’s the same in TV. For every Stranger Things that becomes a cultural touchstone, there are a dozen high-budget dramas that fade away. Commissioning isn’t science. It’s a mix of instinct, data, timing, marketing, and sheer luck. And even then, the final ingredient that makes something connect with audiences can’t be bottled.

#5. Frameworks for Big Decisions

If commissioning content is a bet, and strategy calls can be lauded only later, does that mean leaders are just guessing? Not quite. (The very idea that they were “just guessing” exercised a couple of the execs I spoke to for this piece!) The best ones lean on frameworks that help them manage uncertainty.

Some of these are formal: scenario planning, war-gaming, audience segmentation, conjoint analysis – tools that try to put shape around risk and probability. Others are less tangible but just as important: building a trusted circle of lieutenants who can stress-test ideas; creating cultures where dissent is encouraged rather than silenced; knowing when to back data and when to ignore it.

Think about the BBC’s decision to launch its first iPlayer advertising campaign on Christmas Day 2007. That wasn’t blind luck – it was scenario planning. They knew usage would spike when people had time off, new devices in hand, and curiosity about what digital TV could do. It was still a gamble, but it was a structured gamble.

Frameworks don’t eliminate risk, they just make the downside survivable and the upside scalable.

Conclusion – The Balance of Art and Science

So where does that leave us? Leaders in OTT – and in media more broadly – live in a world where decisions are rarely clean, predictable, or purely data-driven. The repetition of mundane actions builds the muscle. The competence quadrant explains why some choices feel instinctive. Coincidences can be mythologised into narratives of genius. Commissioning content is an act of faith, with alchemy as the unknown (and unknowable) variable. Frameworks give us scaffolding, but never certainty.

In the end, leadership in this space isn’t about having a crystal ball. It’s about balancing art and science; knowing when to trust the spreadsheets, when to listen to your gut, and when to place the bet even though the odds can’t be guaranteed.

As Olof Lindman of SVT told me – also at our conference in 2023 – “If you’re exploring, qualitative is great. If you need to know what viewers actually think, then quantitative studies tend to be the way to go because they’re reproducible…”