As many of entertainment’s biggest names scramble for a durable strategy to capture audience attention, a new generation of creators is rising on YouTube and TikTok. It's a growing market of professionally produced, episodic mini-series, from the viral 60-second dramas in China to the vertical content outpacing streamers like Netflix and Hulu. The change has left traditional gatekeepers playing catch-up to trends rather than setting them, creating a strategic opening for independent creators.
We spoke with Martin Dionne, a producer and technology founder navigating this new territory. As the founder of Prëmo Inc., he builds Web3 technologies to help creative entrepreneurs manage their intellectual property. He learned firsthand that the traditional production model was broken after a frustrating process pitching new franchise concepts to every major platform. His takeaway was clear: the supposed gatekeepers lacked a cohesive vision for the future.
A leadership gap: What Dionne saw was not a failure of a single company, but a systemic opportunity for independent creators to lead. "I realized that most of the platform executives didn't have a clear vision for where the industry would go," he explained. "Everything was up for grabs, and it became clear they no longer have the buying power because they are at the mercy of the trends."
Follow the money: He offered an alternative to the traditional Hollywood model, born from his own journey and a pragmatic view of where the market is heading. "The traditional way has much higher barriers of entry," he said. "Creator-led distribution is going to win because the platforms that enable the best monetization strategies for franchises, like YouTube and TikTok, are the ones that will succeed."
Dionne saw this change in power as a structural problem. He labeled the resulting chasm a "rapture," explaining it as an issue where the rate at which big media conglomerates adopt new technologies is not fast enough to catch the wave of innovation. But the outcome isn't necessarily the death of the studios. Instead, Dionne suggested the path forward was a strategic partnership where creators and studios act as co-builders.
The new partnership: In this model, creators would become the scouts—testing what the market wants—while studios provide the resources to amplify what works. "It's not a dynamic shift so much as a collaboration path," he said. "Creators have insights from being close to their community, and big media can use creators as levers to understand the market. When creators are put forward, collaboration can flip the script."
The economics of this model turn the blockbuster formula on its head. It’s about distributing smaller investments across a portfolio of creators instead of investing heavily on a few big-name projects. Such an ecosystem can de-risk investment and multiply impact through leverage, allowing a collection of small bets to potentially outperform a single large one.
Strength in numbers: "If you bet on one platform and one producer, you have one shot to make it work," Dionne said. "But with an ecosystem, a group of people working in the same direction, you increase your leverage. Instead of one producer retaining ownership, you now have several collaborators owning a piece of the pie. With each collaborator, you also increase the scale and the target you can reach with your audience, so the chances of winning altogether also increase."
The franchise factor: It also calls for a new way of measuring success. The old world's obsession with box office numbers or streaming ratings felt obsolete to Dionne. Instead, the focus should turn toward a platform-agnostic indicator: the value of the intellectual property itself and its potential to grow. "The true indicator of an IP's success isn't views or box office numbers, but the amount of variations or spin-offs you can generate," he said. "The question becomes: can it become a valuable franchise? Can it become an asset over time?"
Ultimately, Dionne believed the most important change is one of mindset. "When we start considering films or series as assets, as intellectual properties that can be expanded into platforms for creator-led distribution, that's when we'll start to see serious change in the industry. At the end of the day, we, the humans, get to decide what direction we want to take."
But he was quick to emphasize that the foundation of this new asset class is substance, a quality that outlasts fleeting virality. The quality of the story and the determination of its creator, he explained, are what truly matter. "For content to be worth streaming, it must have grit and character that resonates with an audience. The sustainable, determined creators are the ones worth expanding into an IP universe, because it's so much more than just publishing a clip that goes viral. It has to be consistent."
