RedSquid TV and Fetch.ai have announced a partnership to integrate autonomous artificial intelligence agents into a television operating system, proposing an alternative to navigating applications, menus and programme guides. The companies describe the result as the world’s first “operator-grade Agentic AI TV platform”. Meanwhile, Amazon is reportedly considering an AI-led redesign of Prime Video.

RedSquid claims this is the first operator-grade agentic television platform, rather than necessarily the first use of agentic artificial intelligence on a television.

The proposition is that viewers express an intention through natural conversation and leave software agents to perform the necessary actions. Examples include planning a family film night, booking a holiday featured in a documentary or ordering the ingredients for a recipe.

Such requests could involve finding and comparing programmes across services, checking subscriptions, coordinating connected devices and completing transactions. The ambition extends beyond content recommendation, turning the television into an interface through which software can act on behalf of the household.

RedSquid TV is a recently formed company, but it draws on experience reaching back through several generations of digital television technology.

The company was incorporated in March 2024 by Trevor Neal, a former executive at television semiconductor companies including LSI Logic, CeRoma, MStar and Amlogic. At Amlogic he was associated with the chipset platform used for Sky Glass, which placed the operator experience directly into the television rather than delivering it through a separate set-top box.

RedSquid is closely connected to Bristol-based Ocean Blue Software, which became the holder of between 25% and 50% of RedSquid’s shares and voting rights in May 2026. Paul Martin, the chief executive of Ocean Blue, joined the RedSquid board. RedSquid is also registered at the same address as Ocean Blue in Bristol.

Ocean Blue identifies RedSquid as its partner for delivering operator-branded television solutions. RedSquid describes Ocean Blue as its software and integration partner, alongside engineering company Consult Red and OEM partners including Sharp and Arçelik.
Together, they provide RedSquid with experience stretching from broadcast standards and embedded software to semiconductor integration and mass-produced televisions. Its operating system sits at the system level, communicating directly with tuners, displays, audio, networking, power management and remote controls. Operators can then supply their own user interface, applications and commercial services above it.

The attraction for pay television providers is control. Rather than appearing as one application among many on a platform owned by a global television manufacturer or technology company, an operator can control the home screen, programme discovery, customer data, advertising and billing.

Fetch.ai supplies the autonomous-agent technology. It was founded in Cambridge in 2017 by Humayun Sheikh, Toby Simpson and Professor Thomas Hain.

Simpson previously worked on the Creatures series of artificial-life computer games and became head of software design at DeepMind.

Hain is a professor of speech and audio technology at the University of Sheffield. Sheikh is a commodities entrepreneur and an early investor in DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014.

Fetch.ai originally described its software as autonomous economic agents: programs capable of representing people, companies and machines, finding other agents and coordinating transactions. That earlier proposition anticipates much of what is now described as agentic AI.

The RedSquid implementation combines Fetch.ai’s ASI model with Agentverse, through which specialist agents can be discovered and coordinated, and Fetch Business, which allows verified companies to provide commercial services.

For operators, the significance of the RedSquid partnership is that the intelligence layer could become more important than the traditional television interface. If viewers increasingly state what they want rather than selecting an application or channel, the platform interpreting that request may determine which programmes, services and suppliers are presented.

Much larger companies are also exploring more AI-led television interfaces.

Reuters reports that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has pushed Prime Video executives to redesign the service with artificial intelligence at its centre. The internal initiative, reportedly called Lighthouse, could include conversational discovery, more personalised recommendations and Alexa integration. Amazon has not confirmed the project and its final form has apparently not been decided.

Amazon is unusually well placed to pursue such a model. It has Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, Fire TV, Alexa, Ring and other connected-home products, a global retail and payments operation, a substantial advertising business and the infrastructure and artificial intelligence services of Amazon Web Services.

These assets could support an experience in which a viewer asks to find something suitable for the family, receives an explanation of the recommendation, controls the room environment, orders food or merchandise and completes payment without leaving the television.
Amazon also has the financial capacity to pursue that vision at scale. Reuters reported that Amazon has committed about $200 billion to capital expenditure this year, primarily related to artificial intelligence, in addition to multibillion-dollar investments in AI model developers.

The broader direction is becoming clearer. The next competition for control of television may be less about which application occupies the home screen and more about which artificial intelligence interprets what the viewer wants, and which companies it chooses to fulfil the request.

redsquid.tv
www.fetch.ai
www.primevideo.com

British technology company Yospace says it inserted nearly 11.6 billion addressable advertisements into live streams of the football World Cup, demonstrating how internet-delivered television can now support advertising at a scale previously associated with conventional broadcasting.

The figure is aggregated across 14 Yospace customers worldwide that streamed the tournament, although Yospace has not identified them. Its wider customer base includes several 2026 World Cup broadcasters, including ITV in the United Kingdom, M6 in France, TV4 in Sweden and Fox in the United States. Fox-owned Tubi also streamed two matches, while DirecTV distributed the US coverage.

Before the competition, Yospace had forecast that it would stitch more than 13.5 billion advertisements. The eventual total was about 14% below that expectation, but almost twice the six billion addressable advertisement insertions it reported for Euro 2024.

Yospace recorded an average of 297 million advertisements a day over the 39-day tournament. That was over 40% more per day than during the Paris Olympics in 2024, when the company reported four billion advertisements over 19 days.

The most striking figure came during the England–Norway quarter-final. Yospace says it stitched 13 million individually addressable advertisements into streams within two minutes at the beginning of half-time.

To put the 13 million advertisements into perspective, ITV alone reported a peak audience of 18 million for the match, but not all of those viewers will have been capable of receiving targeted advertising.

Yospace is not a new arrival created by the online video boom. It was founded in Staines, near London, in 1999 by David Springall and remains based there.

The British technology company subsequently experimented with user-generated mobile video. It was acquired by magazine publisher EMAP in 2007 but returned to independence through a management buyout in 2009.

As smartphones and segmented internet video developed, Yospace concentrated on server-side ad insertion. It demonstrated live server-side advertising with ITV in 2012 and subsequently deployed the technology with broadcasters and television services internationally.

RTL Group acquired Yospace in 2019 for a reported consideration of €19 million. The company now manages more than 2,000 live channels and says it normally stitches over 10 billion advertisements a month.

Yospace effectively joins an individual commercial to the video stream before it reaches the viewer. Rather than every online viewer receiving the same commercial break, each streaming session can receive advertisements selected for that viewer, device or location.

The expanded World Cup produced more opportunities to do this. There were 104 matches, compared with 64 in 2022, while three-minute hydration breaks in each half provided additional advertising opportunities for broadcasters choosing to use them.

Hydration breaks, rather than simply the additional 40 matches, were therefore central to the near-doubling of available breaks.
Short breaks during play may also prove particularly valuable. Yospace reported audience losses of only 0.4% during hydration breaks for some matches, compared with 16.82% at half-time. Viewers were apparently less inclined to leave when play was expected to resume within three minutes.

The introduction of a three-minute hydration break in each half created additional advertising inventory.

ITV decided against showing advertisements during these breaks in play, using them instead for tactical analysis. The decision was attributed partly to a desire not to antagonise viewers, as well as FIFA’s commercial restrictions. UK limits on advertising airtime also meant that advertisements inserted during play could have displaced commercial inventory elsewhere in ITV’s schedule.

The leading commercial broadcaster in the United Kingdom, which shared the rights with the BBC, described the competition as a “six-week summer Super Bowl” and its most lucrative sporting event. It said it had sold packages to 220 advertisers, including 70 appearing in football coverage for the first time.

ITV had previously said advertisers were holding back budgets to spend during the second and third quarters around the tournament. It carried 19 more matches than in 2022, with more games in peak time, while live streams on ITVX were enabled for dynamic advertising insertion.

ITV will publish its half-yearly results at the end of the month. They will not include most of the tournament period but may provide an indication of the commercial impact of the World Cup.

The Yospace figures show the infrastructure available to monetise the growing proportion of television viewing delivered online. Subsequent results from ITV may reveal more about the financial value that infrastructure helped support in one of the tournament’s major broadcast markets.

Television advertising is becoming individually delivered streaming infrastructure. The World Cup did not merely create more commercial breaks. It demonstrated that personalised advertising can now be delivered to mass streaming audiences with the simultaneity and resilience expected of conventional broadcasting.

www.yospace.com
www.itvplc.com

More than 1.7 billion unique viewers watched videos related to the FIFA World Cup on YouTube during the 2026 tournament, according to figures published by the platform. YouTube says this included more than 550 million people watching on television screens. The company described the 2026 competition as its most-viewed FIFA World Cup, taking the cumulative number of views for World Cup-related videos on YouTube beyond 200 billion.

That 200 billion figure requires some qualification. It represents lifetime views of videos related to the FIFA World Cup, rather than views generated during the 2026 tournament alone. It also includes a much wider range of material than live match coverage, extending from official broadcasters and FIFA programming to highlights, music, creator videos and other user-generated material.

YouTube reported that official streams of the final between Spain and Argentina produced an average-minute audience of more than 21 million across over 40 markets. The combined streams peaked at more than 27 million concurrent viewers.

An average-minute audience is the average number watching during any minute of the programme. It is distinct from total reach, which counts the number of different people who watched at some point, and from a peak audience, which records the highest number watching concurrently.

YouTube says the official FIFA channel generated more than four billion views between 11 June and 19 July. It added more than 7.5 million subscribers during that period, taking its worldwide total beyond 34 million.

A group of creators assembled around the tournament, with a combined following of 350 million subscribers, generated more than 2.5 billion views for World Cup-related videos. Official streams of the inaugural YouTube FIFA Creator Cup attracted more than 10 million live views across FIFA, creator and broadcaster channels.

The scale sits within a much larger sports-video market. YouTube says viewers now consume more than 45 billion hours of sports content on the platform annually.

Consolidated worldwide viewing figures for the World Cup are not yet available. FIFA said its initial broadcast reports were based on overnight data and that consolidated figures would be published after the tournament.

Up to the end of the round of 16, FIFA reported 20 billion video views across its social platforms, of which 14.5 billion occurred on TikTok and YouTube. It also reported 30 billion impressions, 1.7 billion engagements and 187 million unique visitors to FIFA.com.

These numbers provide some context for YouTube’s claims, but they cover different content, platforms and reporting periods. FIFA’s figures relate primarily to its own digital ecosystem. YouTube’s 1.7 billion figure covers unique viewers of World Cup-related videos across the whole platform, while its 200 billion figure is cumulative over the lifetime of such content.

Views, impressions, engagements, unique viewers and average-minute audiences are different measures. They cannot meaningfully be added together or compared as if they represented equivalent audiences.

In the United Kingdom, the final attracted a claimed overnight average audience of 13.9 million across BBC One and BBC iPlayer, according to figures released by the BBC. The audience peaked at 15.8 million, giving the BBC a 64% share of television viewing.
The BBC said the final was streamed 11.1 million times across BBC iPlayer and BBC Sport, including 2.4 million UHD streams. A stream is a request to watch and is not necessarily equivalent to one person or one complete viewing of the match.

ITV and ITVX, which also carried the final, reported a separate peak of 3.8 million viewers across devices. The BBC and ITV peaks should not simply be added, since their highest audiences may not have occurred during the same minute.

The absence of England from the final inevitably affected the UK audience. The BBC reported that England’s semi-final defeat by Argentina reached a cross-platform peak of more than 24 million across BBC One and iPlayer. On BBC One alone, the match averaged 15 million viewers and peaked at 21.5 million.

The 24 million cross-platform peak, the 21.5 million television peak and the 15 million television average describe different aspects of the audience. None represents the total number of different people who watched any part of the match.

Before the tournament, FIFA said it expected approximately six billion people to engage with the competition across platforms. FIFA president Gianni Infantino subsequently suggested that more than six billion people may have watched from home, while acknowledging that the official figures were still being compiled.

The six billion figure is best understood as projected global reach: people encountering some aspect of the World Cup through television, streaming, digital services or social media. It is not an average television audience and does not mean that six billion different people watched the final.

Even so, the scale of the forecast is striking. The United Nations estimated the world population at 8.2 billion in 2024 and projects it to reach 8.5 billion by 2030. Six billion would therefore represent roughly seven people in every ten worldwide.

The implication is not that most of the planet sat down to watch a complete match. It is that relatively few people will have avoided seeing anything of the World Cup—whether a live game, highlights, a goal clip, social video, news coverage or creator content.

The FIFA World Cup remains one of the most-watched television events in the world. Increasingly, however, its reach extends far beyond the conventional television audience.

www.youtube.com
www.fifa.com