A show recorded in the New York subway, with a ticket instead of a microphone, has been nominated for an Emmy. Subway Takes by Kareem Rahma made it into the nominees in the Outstanding Short Form Comedy, Drama, or Variety Series category, which the television academy announced on 8 July 2026. A host, one sharp thesis and a budget that would not cover a single shooting day in the studio world.
Producer Colin McRae points to exactly this example when describing what is changing in entertainment. “Subway Takes didn't become an Emmy nominee because it spent more money than everyone else,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “It became one because it proved that premium entertainment isn't defined by budget anymore.” McRae draws from this the thesis he put in the title of his post. “We're creating more places for premium entertainment than we're creating premium ideas to fill them.”
Screens are merging
Places where people watch premium content are multiplying from both sides. In January 2026 YouTube was the most-watched distributor on television screens according to Nielsen Media Distributor measurement, with a 12.5% share and an eleventh consecutive first place. Walt Disney was second with 11.9%.
Streaming as a whole took a record 47.5% of TV viewing in December 2025, more than broadcast and cable combined.
The movement also goes the other way. Netflix added a vertical feed of short videos, Clips, to its mobile app to compete for attention with social networks. “You can imagine us bringing more clips based on new content types, like video podcasts,” said co-CEO Greg Peters on the earnings call. Instagram went the other way, towards television. Its app for big screens brought Reels to Amazon Fire TV and Google TV from December 2025, and it is testing longer episodic formats and live broadcasts. Mobile and television are no longer separate worlds.
Brands are opening their own studios
Brands that once only sponsored entertainment now produce it themselves. On 13 January 2026 Fanatics announced a joint venture with OBB Media, Fanatics Studios, which will independently finance and produce films, documentaries, scripted and unscripted originals and live specials. It is led by Michael D. Ratner, and Fanatics estimates its first-year revenue in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
DICK'S Sporting Goods already launched its own production studio on 7 August 2025, Cookie Jar & A Dream Studios, for original sports documentaries. Its first film, Big Dreams about the Little League World Series, premiered on ESPN. “DICK'S believes that sports have the power to change lives,” said Mark Rooks, vice president of creative, entertainment and sponsorship. In June 2026 Bose launched Bose Studios, a platform for branded entertainment around music, whose launch project is a documentary series with Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh.
Among the most notable examples is WhatsApp. Together with the Mercedes-AMG Petronas team it produced the documentary The Seat about the decision to promote 18-year-old Kimi Antonelli after Lewis Hamilton's departure. The film came to Netflix on 5 May 2025. A brand that most people know as a messaging app thus supplied a documentary to a streaming service.
The list of buyers has grown
Only a few years ago, a good show was aimed at a short list of buyers. “A few years ago, if you had a great show, you were pitching broadcasters, cable networks or studios,” McRae describes. “Today you might be pitching a streamer, a creator company, a sports league, a retailer, a publisher, or a global brand.”
For brands, the brief changes. “For brands, it means building entertainment instead of campaigns,” McRae sums up the difference between a thirty-second spot and a documentary that a viewer chooses to play. A campaign buys attention. Entertainment has to earn it with content that viewers stay with willingly. That is a different discipline from buying media space, and a different measure of success.
The European brand director faces the same equation. Netflix's vertical feed and Instagram's TV app are also aimed at European markets, and WhatsApp belongs to Meta, which is testing its formats across Europe. The new spaces are available to a brand in Prague or Amsterdam too, along with the constraints that come with them. The budget opens the door; the content has to win the attention itself.
Rahma's show from the subway takes this logic to the extreme. A format that many would dismiss with the words “just YouTube” ended up on the same list of nominations as productions with budgets many times higher. “Technology will keep creating new places for entertainment to live,” McRae concludes. “The harder problem will be creating ideas worthy of filling them.”
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