Streaming giants are joining forces, and taking aim at TV’s old measurement system

“The way that measurement’s currently done, it doesn’t reflect how people are watching TV. And we need to fix that.”

When Toby Dewar delivered that line inside Netflix’s Chippendale offices last week, it felt less like an industry soundbite and more like a warning shot.

Behind the scenes, some of the world’s largest streaming platforms are quietly building one of the most ambitious measurement and advertising alliances Australia’s media market has seen in years. And increasingly, they believe the existing system no longer reflects how audiences actually consume video.

The Video Futures Collective (VFC) - whose founding members include Netflix, YouTube, Disney Advertising, Amazon Prime Video, Foxtel Media, SBS, Samsung Ads and Vevo - is now moving from informal industry think tank to incorporated industry body, complete with paid members, formal governance and a much broader ambition around measurement, planning and advertising effectiveness.

Globally, there is nothing quite like it.

“There’s no other market globally that has these eight players together,” Dewar, who holds the interim CEO title at VFC, told Marketing-Interactive.

And while the VFC publicly positions itself as a collaborative effort to modernise streaming measurement, the underlying commercial stakes are becoming increasingly obvious.

Streaming platforms believe they are still underrepresented in advertising budgets relative to where audiences have already moved. And they argue legacy television measurement systems - many built around linear broadcast viewing habits - are no longer capable of accurately valuing premium streaming environments.

“The acceleration of streaming and subscription channels is arguably outpacing what the tools and understanding is in market,” Dewar said.

At the centre of the push is measurement. Not just reach. But frequency. Attention. Incrementality. Cross-screen behaviour. And critically, independence.

“There’s a question around the independence of how that’s currently done, when the stakeholders own that measurement and they’re also the ones being measured,” Dewar said.

That word, independence, surfaced repeatedly throughout the night.

The VFC has already announced a major new research initiative with Omnicom Media Group and Adgile aimed at redefining frequency planning for streaming video, arguing the market still relies too heavily on “analogue-era TV principles” despite radically different viewing behaviour.

But beneath the technical language sits a much larger industry shift.

For decades, television advertising operated around relatively stable assumptions: mass audiences, shared viewing moments and standardised measurement systems. Streaming has shattered that.

Audiences now move fluidly between Netflix, YouTube, Foxtel, SBS On Demand and Amazon Prime Video, often within the same evening. Ad loads differ. Attention differs. Viewer intent differs. Yet much of the planning and measurement infrastructure still treats streaming as a variation of linear TV rather than an entirely different environment.

That frustration was palpable during the panel discussion.

“We’ve had solutions in the industry that are everyone without YouTube,” moderator Vanessa Hunt said during the session. “That’s completely ignoring the giant percentage of money that goes there.”

Caroline Oates, head of ads and programmatic at YouTube, said one of the core problems is that media planning systems still reflect legacy viewing behaviour rather than current reality.

“We’ve got an industry that is still set up to support a legacy business or based on legacy systems, processes and even the rules of thumb that we use in media planning,” Oates said.

“I think streaming is only just getting started.”

Craig Johnson, senior manager of ads measurement at Netflix, was even more direct.

“The whole idea of the way measurement has been conducted for the last 50 or 60 years has got to change,” Johnson said.

The timing is significant.

Australia’s advertising market is already shifting rapidly toward streaming and connected TV environments. IAB Australia data released last week showed video investment continuing to grow strongly, while marketers increasingly look for clearer evidence around frequency, effectiveness and cross-platform outcomes.

The VFC believes that confusion is now actively holding streaming growth back.

According to Dewar, one of the earliest insights uncovered by the group was that streaming currently attracts roughly 10% of media investment in many plans, despite internal research suggesting the optimal level may sit closer to 30–40%.

“So that would have taken us a long time individually to chip down that argument,” Dewar said.

“Well all of a sudden, it’s a big shot at moving 10 to 20 to 30%.”

That may ultimately be the real significance of the VFC.

For all the language around collaboration, research and industry standards, the group is effectively attempting to reposition premium streaming video as a far larger and more measurable share of the advertising market.

And for perhaps the first time, fierce rivals including Netflix, YouTube, Foxtel and SBS are publicly agreeing they have a common enemy: outdated measurement systems built for another era of television.