The Information’s 2026 Predictions, PwC Leader on Media & Ecomm, ByteDance’s Victory | Dec 19, 2025

0:13Welcome, everyone, to the Informations TI TV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Friday, December 19th. We are honing in on our newsroom's predictions today for the new year. I'll be joined by our editor-in-chief, Jessica Lesson, along with our AI, venture capital, and crypto reporters. We'll then dig into predictions for the worlds of media and e-commerce, and we will wrap with our weekly editor's cut. Martin Piers joins the show to talk about who he thinks is the real winner of the US-China TikTok battle after TikTok signed a deal to spin off its U.S. business. It's going to be a fun show, so let's get right on into things.

0:52It is the end of the year, which means it's a perfect time to sit down and make some predictions for 2026. The information will be putting out a bigger package of predictions in the new year, but we want to give you a sneak peek of what our newsroom is thinking about. We're going to start with our editor-in-chief, Jessica Lesson. Here is a conversation about what Jessica sees coming. Hey, Jessica, how you doing? I'm great, Akash. Looking at 2026 already. Can't believe it. 2026. Well, look, you hosted your predictions webinar for our pro subscribers last week, I think it was, and there was a lot there.

1:30And what I want to do is I want to give people a little bit of a taste of the highlights of that. And so walk us through some of your biggest predictions for 2026. Absolutely. So, you know, I'm really predicting major tech layoffs. And I think perhaps this is surprising because everything seems up and to the right. And there's so much exuberance in the tech economy, but also a lot of questions. And so first off, I think that the combination of cost pressure, pressure on these massive AI infra spends, and also the fact that these big companies can do more and more efficiently, I think is going to lead to very substantial layoffs.

2:12We've seen a small drumbeat, and I think that will accelerate in 2026 for sure. So feel confident about that one. And I think it's an interesting one because it shows sort of this dichotomy that has started this year, this exuberance, but this paranoia, this invest for growth, but keep belts tight elsewhere. So I think that will continue. So if you had to pick one company that you think for certain, I mean, is there any one name you're looking at? Is it a hyperscaler? I mean, who are we thinking about? I think the Amazons, Microsofts, Googles, Metas, Salesforces act in concert. I mean, if there's one thing I've learned in 20 years out here covering big tech companies is there's a lot of looking and seeing.

3:01I mean, I guess I've learned many things, but they really act in concert. It's like there's a window where you have permission from the markets, permission from the talent markets to belt Titan. So I actually think it's not a question of problems at one company, although everyone's got their issues. And I'm also predicting that we'll see, instead of like a tailwind that rises all boats, some real winners and losers when it comes to the major big cap tech companies. But I think when it comes to layoffs, it will be across the board. Okay, so now we published a story this week about how the organizational structure at OpenAI has led to some of the challenges with ChatGPT over there.

3:44I wonder how you're thinking about the ChatGPT-Gemini rivalry. Do you have any predictions there? You know, I think it will continue. And I do think that it's a momentum game when it comes to some of the capabilities of the models. I do think all models converge to some respect, although they also diverge in terms of their specialization. But, you know, I think Gemini's momentum is going to continue. And I think we're going to see another major tech player, maybe on the enterprise side, probably enterprise versus consumer, really adopt Gemini and maybe sort of throw in the towel on some of their own custom model development and really figure out that that's not the place to play.

4:29I mean, perhaps Apple is foreshadowing this a little bit in that we've seen it go first with OpenAI, but now more deeply Gemini for Siri. Although Apple is still committed to its own foundation model development, we hear. But I think if you look, if you zoom out and you look across consumer and enterprise, I think more and more CEOs are going to make the calculus that this is not the CapEx race, the research race, the talent race they want to be in. and that they want to get their edge, they want to get their margin in their more custom use cases and use other models. Now, we've obviously seen this in search.

5:06We've seen this in many other paradigms in consumer tech. And I think Google, with all its relationships, is really poised to make a move here. Right. Okay. Now, speaking of predictions, what do you make of these prediction markets? I mean, how do you think that story changes in 2026? You know, well, first, what a story of 2025. Kalshi, Polymarket, not only just in their user growth, but in their embedding in the traditional financial system with partnerships, New York Stock Exchange and more traditional institutions. The information broke a week or so ago, news that Coinbase was partnering with Kalshi, which came out this week.

5:46Wouldn't quite call Coinbase a traditional financial institution, but it's on its way. It's more traditional than the prediction markets in some ways. Yes, that is where we've ended up, yes. And it certainly wants to be. So incredible momentum. But I think 2026 is going to be a very, very tough year for the prediction markets because I think the regulators are finally going to catch up. This reminds me of when Uber kind of came roaring into the taxi and ride-hailing market and said, all the traditional regulations around this, they don't apply. And it got them great momentum. And then it got them years and years of battles with regulators.

6:25Now, this is kind of how tech plays out. And I definitely don't think it spells doom for these prediction businesses, which are fascinating. But I think in terms of where the energy and momentum and time spent is going to be next year, you know, it's going to be pushback from the states on sports betting. I mean, I just don't believe that the states are going to turn a blind eye when so much revenues at stake for them. And I think that will play out in other areas as well. So I think adoption will continue, but there could be some recalibration. There could be some changes to the business model.

7:00There could be some deal cut for those platforms to see the next phase of growth. And I think, I mean, to your point, all it would take is really one mega trade. We've written about some of the suspicions around insider trading on these platforms, stuff like that. I mean, And really, all it takes is one wake-up call, as we've seen with crypto and maybe with predictions markets, to change the entire game. I want to ask you about - Of course. You know, I do, to be clear. If there's any other - so many lessons from 2025, but finally seeing the Google Monopoly search deal come to a close, which, let's face it, is not the most pressing issue in the technology sector over the last six months.

7:43We've moved beyond it. I am in the camp that this regulation ultimately doesn't tilt these companies or destroy them. But in terms of the ins and outs of what they're going to be spending their time on, what headlines you're going to see, how products are going to adjust, I feel that's a certainty for next year. Right. What about media? Yeah, I mean, this has been a crazy two weeks for media, not just with the Warner Brothers Paramount Netflix saga, but we just saw this week that YouTube is getting the Oscars. How do you think that story changes in 2026? You know, you just can't bet against YouTube.

8:20I actually predicted on my podcast with some friends and my husband this week that a creator is going to win an Emmy next year. Okay. We'll see. But I do think that the sort of YouTube-ification of media or whichever direction we're going in is a real, real thing and pretty unstoppable. And I think ultimately, you know, people who exist only on YouTube, not like then license a show for Netflix, have a real shot at an Emmy. So that was a different prediction I made. And in our industry, Akash, I think it's more troubled waters in media. I think we are going to see a lot of publications realize that people aren't reading their stories because they're not original.

9:10You know, when I even our best institutions doing excellent journalism like The Times are pushing us into other experiences. When I open my Times app, you know, there are five tabs and only one of them is news and four of them aren't. And that's the main interface to the New York Times app. So the Times is a leader and I think others will really push that playbook. And that's going to, you know, potentially mean more fewer or less attention and fewer resources to certain types of journalism across the industry. So I think it will be tumultuous and, you know, more of the same and probably consolidation as well.

9:56So I would look out for those of our listeners who are into the inside baseball of the digital media landscape. I would look out for many more airmail puck like tie up tuck ins. This is when puck bought airmail earlier this year, having very common ownership on its investors. So I think that consolidation, we'll see what plays out with Netflix, Warner Brothers, and Paramount. And I think that mentality will trickle down as well. Well, let me ask this very quickly. If there's an Emmy in 2026 for a creator, is it Mr. Beast or is it somebody else? I think it's someone else. Someone else. I think the field's open.

10:36I also think that this is on YouTube's radar. I think create, I've spoken to creators who said they're going to YouTube saying, help me win an Emmy. And, and I think, I think these companies and creators are great executors. And so I think it's going to happen. Great. Well, Jessica, it was great to have you on. Look forward to seeing all those predictions, how they in turn actually evolve in 2026. It's going to be a busy year, I'm sure. And thank you again. That is Jessica Lesson, our editor in chief here at The Information. Let's go now to our reporters to see what predictions they are thinking about.

11:15We're going to start with AI, and then we're going to go to venture capital and crypto. Joining me now is Stephanie Palazzolo, our AI reporter. Hey, Steph, how's it going? It's great. So let's talk about predictions for the upcoming year. What is one prediction that you want to make here on the show? Yeah, so I think the tough thing about AI is it's very hard to predict, you know, what the next month is going to bring, let alone the next year. But I think my prediction for next year is that Amazon will have to acquire a large AI lab. I think out of all the cloud providers, it does seem like the one that's perhaps furthest behind on its AI strategy.

11:57Obviously, Microsoft has a very close relationship with OpenAI, and Google has models that are doing super well, especially in the last year or so. So I think for Amazon, we can even see some of the troubles that they've been going through through some recent changes at the company. So just this week, it had a reorg of its AI development team, where we saw a AWS exec become the head of the team, which was quite an unusual choice. And it just seems like there's a lot of people changing positions there, people moving around. Kind of makes me feel like maybe going into this next year they're going to be prepping to make some serious changes to the company and perhaps you know bringing in an outside startup okay so which lab do you think it's going to be yeah i mean if they really wanted to go crazy i would say anthropic although that would obviously be a very expensive deal i think a more realistic but still pretty out there uh prediction would be something like thinking machines lab which of course is is founded by um former chief technology officer of OpenAI, Miramirati.

13:03Right. And do you think that that is an outright acquisition? Do you think it's more of one of these acqui-hire type funny deals that we've become so familiar with? Yeah. I mean, it seems like at this point, the traditional acquisition just doesn't really happen anymore. So I think with that and the fact that Amazon would obviously be under a lot of kind of antitrust scrutiny, I think it'd probably be the acqui-hire route. Obviously, that's continued to be a really big trend this year with things like the Google windsurf deal and meta and scale. And so I think they would probably also fall within that trend.

13:44Great. Well, Steph, I want to thank you for coming on. It is a bold prediction, but hey, if Mira Mirati joins Amazon, then we will be sure to play this clip one year from today and we'll hope to tell you that you were right. That is Stephanie Palazzolo, our AI reporter here at The Information. Okay. Well, next up, we are moving to venture capital and we are bringing on our Deputy Bureau Chief of Venture Capital, Katie Roof, for a conversation on what her predictions are. Katie, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Great to be on with you. So what is your big prediction for 2026?

14:25Well, I have several predictions, but my first - Several? Okay, not even one. Okay, all right, I'm ready for it. Lay it on us. Well, the first is that the AI boom and the private financing side is going to continue to at least Q1, because we're already hearing about a lot of companies that have marked their calendars and said, all right we're gonna do a round in q1 and so um that doesn't show signs of slowing even though there have been some market jitters recently it can take a minute for the private markets to catch up with the public markets so at least for now okay ai fundraisings what what about with ipos i mean you have any predictions there so i actually think the first half of the year is gonna be pretty slow.

15:14There's a handful that might go, but the big names that we're hearing rumored, none of them seem to be ready for the first half of the year. But the second half of the year, or by mid-year, it could be very active. You know, I recently broke the SpaceX IPO. There've been many, many stories about that now, but I'm hearing that they're aiming to go mid to late next year. Obviously, sometimes IPO plans change, but that would be possibly the biggest IPO in history. And then we also have potentially Anthropic and then some of the other big names looking at the second half of the year. Okay, but how big an H2, Katie?

15:59Because we're going to break the fourth wall here a little bit. Okay, we did talk about this out of time. You told me you were expecting a record H2 for IPOs. Are we willing to say that that's going to be the case? Yeah, because SpaceX by itself is going to help cement a record. I mean, they are an$800 billion company by their own valuation they recently set. And if they exceed that or even match that, it's just, you know, very unusual because, you know, if they float, you know, 15 % of the company, I mean, it probably less, but we'll see. I mean, if they float a lot of these shares, then there's just so much transaction volume to trade right from the get-go.

16:49And so it's record setting in the sense that you have SpaceX, potentially another record IPO like Anthropic and, you know, several other big, really big names thinking about it. Right. So we could see, I mean, this is a lot of capital being raised, as you said, so we could definitely see that play out. What about with fundraising? I mean, you talked about the the AI startups raising money. What about in venture capital and what what predictions do you have there? So I had a chart that recently went viral about how it's actually the most difficult year for venture capital firms to do their own fundraising in a decade, in at least a decade.

17:35And so I think that that might continue. I don't know if it will go declined further or remain constant, but it seems like the expansion we saw with lots of tiny venture firms springing up in 2021, 2022. Unfortunately, a lot of those firms are going to have trouble raising their second fund unless they were really early on some AI thing. um and so it yeah it feels like it's a tale of two cities in venture where you know i've been saying this for a while that you know you have on the one hand like andreason horowitz and lightspeed and some of the big names raising like record you know many billions of dollars and then you have the smaller firms that just can't even get a little more money right okay Okay, well, the big get bigger, as they say.

18:31So I'm excited to see how all that plays out. Katie, it was great to have you on the show. And we'll have you on again soon. That was Katie Roof, our Deputy Bureau Chief of Venture Capital here on TI TV. Okay, next up, we are going to wander into crypto. It has been a crazy year and we are anticipating things will only get crazier. I want to bring on our crypto reporter, Yueqi Yang. Yueqi, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Hey, great to be here. Okay, so 2026, what are you thinking is going to happen next year in crypto? So my prediction is Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer in the world, will start to lay the groundwork to go public next year.

19:13Tether, oh my gosh, of all companies, Tether. And they're going to lay the groundwork. I mean, talk a little bit about why you think that. So this might be a more controversial prediction. I will start by saying that Tether itself has said that they do not have plans for an IPO. But then at the same time, I think there are reasons for them to try to go public. First, going public is a great way to gain legitimacy, especially in the US. And this is the best regulatory environment that they can ever get. We know that the Trump administration is very pro-crypto. The investors on Wall Street right now love crypto companies.

19:52stable coin legislation was just passed this year and circle which is the biggest competitor of tether was doing very well in the stock market so i think there is appetite and regulatory environment for tether to go public and then on the other hand tether is currently raising a massive round of funding of up to 20 billion dollars and so at some point in the future they will need to figure out a way to provide liquidity for investors that are participating in their fundraising around. So can I ask a bit of a stupid question here, which is that I know that when Circle went public, I sort of understood the corporate structure here.

20:29There's Circle the company and Circle issues USDC. Is Tether structured the same way? Is there like a corporate entity that would be going public that issues Tether? How does it work? Yeah, that's a great question. Yes, Tether issues the USDT Tether stablecoin and Tether, the company itself is a very tightly controlled company. They don't have many shareholders. So their corporate structure is kind of different from Circle, which prior to them going public, it raised rounds of VC funding, and they have a lot of outside investors. So in that sense, Tether is different. Tether recently also launched a US entity that they used to issue a U.S.

21:20version of the Tether stablecoin, which will be targeting the U.S. market. And that token hasn't gone live yet, but we expect it to go live very soon this year. And that's a smaller business to start. So we'll also be watching out if that business might potentially grow big enough to go public at some point. Do you think that Wall Street is ready for a Tether IPO? I mean, crypto is already the most volatile thing in the world. And here you're adding Tether. I mean, what do you think happens? So when I talk to investors, when I ask them about their appetite for Tether, the first thing that everyone says is Tether has the greatest business model ever.

22:02Oh, okay. To make stable coins and then they earn interest on the money that they take from you. and they do not give you or pass along those interests back to you. And Tether is expected to earn more than$15 billion in profit this year. And it is just one of the best business models that people have seen. So in that sense, there is great appetite for being able to gain exposure from Tether. But then at the same time, I think people are pointing out that there are significant hurdles for Tether as well. The first thing is that Tether does not have audited financials, and that's a must have for any company that want to go public.

22:45Tether for years talked about working on audited financials, but that hasn't come into place yet. And at the same time, there's also regulatory concern for Tether because the main Tether stablecoin is not genius compliant. And they will need to figure out a way to comply with the new stablecoin law in the U.S. And I just want to put a finer point on it. You're saying that the groundwork will happen in 2026, but maybe an IPO is more of a 2027. That's my expectation. Okay. That gives me more room to make the expectation. More, there you go. All right, well, it's a fun one, Uichi, and I can't wait to see how things play out.

23:30That is Uichi Yang, our crypto reporter, here at The Information. Okay, our next segment is with our sponsor, PwC. It's been a busy year for tech and media trends, and PwC has had a front seat to it all with the many clients that it serves. I want to play for you a conversation that I had with Dallas Dolan, a leader at the firm's tech, media, and telco practice, to talk a bit about what he sees being the defining themes for 2026. Here is that discussion.

24:04Dallas, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. So I'm excited to talk all about your predictions. I want to start with the media sector because, look, the Netflix, Paramount, Warner Brothers Discovery is continuing to make news this week. I mean, if we take a step back, what are the trends that you see being the defining themes for 2026 in that sector? Yeah, I mean, we wake up every morning to new news on that front, especially if we're on the West Coast, right? I think what we're seeing probably is a couple of things. First and foremost, it's the need to demonstrate that there's value in new formats, that the bundling and the overall experience is something that the consumers want to pay for.

24:45We're starting to see some level of integration of technology. Certainly, it's been happening for some years as far as the recommendations you might have been getting on different services. But the reality is we still haven't seen the requisite probably amount of consolidation to create the amount of value that the users and really the people who are, frankly, funding all this in the content space really need to get out of these services. And you also have probably too many subscale streaming services that are out there in the market. And so consolidation is inevitable. These latest sets of deals that are coming down the pike and that are the front page news for every cycle here are really just an example of the big guys getting together and figuring out what that looks like and some of the muddling through on the same.

25:30But I think we'll see a lot more of it in the year to come. So you hit on a good point there, which is a consolidation. I mean, from a business perspective, sometimes these businesses have to consolidate to make the scale work. But on the consumer side, I'm curious, I mean, are you seeing fatigue from consumers with respect to having too many subscriptions? And is this ultimately a trend that we're seeing on the ground? A hundred percent. I mean, here's the reality. I'll use my example from last night flying back from Texas. I sometimes don't even know what subscription services I have access to and what passwords I am used to get into them.

26:03And I'm texting with my wife trying to figure that out. But beyond just the practical application point of that, you do have the affordability. dynamic, which affects a lot of other decisions too that we'll talk about. I think that affordability piece, especially if you don't have the convenience feature built into it and people begin to see some lack of value and or the lack of use because they're doing other things, they're working more, they're spending more time with family and friends and the like, especially this time of year, you're going to start seeing decision making, I think, happening there finally.

26:34That, of course, assumes, by the way, that there is pressure on the consumer from a financial point of view. And we are seeing that in the data, right? The data says that consumers are incurring more debt, that they feel less confident about the economy overall. That has to come to a head at some point, I think. Now, we're in prediction land here for 26. And so the reality is it doesn't mean it's absolutely going to happen. But I have the sneaky suspicion that eventually, either the financing side and or the consumer side is going to put a lot of pressure on, especially the subscale ones and say, hey, look, we can't continue to support funding to build these one-off services.

27:10And the pressure will be on to consolidate or close or do something along those lines, especially to the extent that they've built original content and have followers of that content. And there are great pieces of content spread across a lot of different providers. Well, and you hit on a good point, which is that, look, we haven't talked about the social media or the YouTube element of all this being the elephant in the room as it relates to these media companies competing. and I think that could be something as well that continues into 2026 is this idea, how much share does YouTube have of watch time on televisions?

27:45I think it's going to be interesting. Absolutely. And maybe the word to describe that is the traditional media companies are really still playing catch-up with some of the techs who've done this already, whether we want to admit that or not. There's the intermediary type of companies you mentioned before who, you've, you know, bridged that had one foot in one land, one foot in the other. You're starting to see other deals that are coming through, especially with the AI native companies saying, oh, hey, can we produce content more effectively and efficiently? And also, can we take costs out too?