Ashwin Navin

Entrepreneur, Investor. Co-Founder of @Samba_TV, @BitTorrent Inc. I’m not saying I hate social media, but I believe posting is literally the Monday of my life.

[Samba @sambaintel]

In Q1 2026, the biggest AI brands ran nearly the same TV campaign.

~35% of US households saw @ChatGPTapp , @claudeai , and @Copilot.

Same Super Bowl. Same networks.

Reach became a commodity 🧵

[Ashwin Navin @ashwinnavin]

Here's the question the industry should be asking: If 70% of digital ad spend flows through four companies, who should be responsible for measuring performance?

The platforms selling the inventory? Or an independent source that can evaluate every channel using the same standard?

The more concentrated media becomes, the more important independent measurement becomes.

[Ashwin Navin @ashwinnavin]

@PrometheanActn Adam Smith slammed British Mercantilism. They weren’t intellectually consistent. Hamilton and the founders were freedom loving but pragmatic and understood economic independence and reciprocity.

[Ashwin Navin @ashwinnavin]

Walmart’s $1.4B acquisition of https://t.co/mXDpHEfJbD is bold step in its push to compete with Amazon in advertising with focus on the long tail of advertisers.

First Vizio, now an activation layer for SMB advertisers who were previously shut out of TV-scale buying.

The direction is clear: Walmart is turning retail into a media platform. And CTV is becoming a core battleground for retail media growth. https://t.co/P0Vm9lkCCk

[Ashwin Navin @ashwinnavin]

Samba is now Unity’s preferred TV data partner, connecting first-party TV viewership signals (1.5B opted-in profiles) directly into mobile gaming inventory.

That means CTV, linear, and gaming can be planned and measured together—using real viewing behavior, not demographic proxies.

This way, gaming stops being a standalone channel and becomes part of one unified screen strategy. https://t.co/MAFotSDLro

[Ashwin Navin @ashwinnavin]

If you're scared of using OpenClaw, you're going to fall behind.

After experimenting with it myself, it's clear that this AI application is now the tool advertisers can’t afford to ignore. It acts agentically—planning, buying, and optimizing campaigns across platforms in real time.

The brands that adopt OpenClaw first will redefine ROI and leave traditional media planning in the dust.

[Ashwin Navin @ashwinnavin]

The Fox–Roku merger was top of mind in #CannesLions this week. Two companies coming together to enter the top tier of media relevance addressing both the attention shift in TV from linear to streaming, but also the structural shift to be more vertically integrated to compete with Google and Amazon.

Fox continues to control share of premium live sports and news while Roku owns a large share of the operating system where viewing decisions are made.

The combined stack—Fox, Roku, Tubi and Roku Channel is a scaled, ad-supported distribution powerhouse and must-buy for brands and must-play for publishers.

[OpenRouter @OpenRouter]

Introducing the Fusion API, the smartest compound model in the market.

Fusion achieves Fable-level intelligence at half the price.

How it works 👇

[Ashwin Navin @ashwinnavin]

@harvilicz She’s my hero.

[Senpai Sweetness Esq III @SenpaiSweetness]

@StrangerNews11 Known for his role as Bob? He didn't walk through mordor and the fires of Mount Doom to be simply known as Bob.

[Ashwin Navin @ashwinnavin]

We’ve moved through three eras of media, and each one was defined by who controlled access to the consumer.

1. Broadcast era: ABC, CBS and NBC acted as the gatekeepers. Once granted a license to the airwaves by the government, a handful of networks monopolized what the world saw and heard.

2. Distribution era: Cable flipped the balance. Distributors like Comcast and programmers like Disney became locked in a different kind of power struggle—control of the channel guide vs. control of the content. Who owns the customer relationship? It was a epic battle that introduced leverage from distribution.

3. Platform era: The internet broke that model entirely. Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix came over the top, and were no longer dependent on gatekeepers, they direct to the consumer and scaled globally. Distribution became commoditized by IP; platforms became dominant.

And now we’re entering the intelligence era. Frontier models—OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc— intermediate demand/supply and generate, distribute and generate content. But they are fundamentally dependent on one thing: data…. for pretraining and inference.

This is the new oil-and-refinery dynamic. Data is the oil—context, behavior, signals. The model is the refinery, turning that raw material into usable intelligence.

And just like every era before it, they will be existentially linked.

[Ashwin Navin @ashwinnavin]

We’ve moved through three eras of media power, each defined by who controlled access to the consumer: broadcast (CBS, NBC as gatekeepers), distribution (Comcast vs. Disney in a battle over pipe vs. content), and platform (Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix going direct and commoditizing distribution).

Now we’re entering the intelligence era. Frontier models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) distribute content as well as interpret and generate it. But they’re fundamentally dependent on one thing: data. Without it, they’re generic.

This is the oil-and-refinery dynamic: data is the oil (context, behavior, signals), models are the refinery (turning it into usable intelligence). And as with every era before it, value is consolidating around the new constraint.

[Ashwin Navin @ashwinnavin]

With less than 30 days to the World Cup, Telemundo is setting a new standard in multi-platform coverage—700+ hours across live matches, shows, documentaries, and social. By designing co-viewing experiences, they engage fans and advertisers alike, showing that thoughtful, audience-first execution drives both engagement and brand impact. https://t.co/pmGv0oNTFE

[Ashwin Navin @ashwinnavin]

This is a supply‑chain problem, not a creative one. Platforms and ad‑tech vendors that invest in foundational audio infrastructure now will avoid costly rework later and deliver the kind of premium experience audiences expect.

[Ashwin Navin @ashwinnavin]

3. Verification before distribution

[Ashwin Navin @ashwinnavin]

2. Metadata preservation through transcoding

[Ashwin Navin @ashwinnavin]

At the @AsiaSociety Game Changers Gala in SoCal tonight, I heard award recipient and one of the greatest living artists @takashipom say this:

“Every day I have [less] confidence… but I have a big hope right now, because my favorite painter [Willem de Kooning] — when he was diagnosed with serious Alzheimer’s, his painting was greater and greater, because the instinct is the most important thing in making art pieces. That’s why I hope when I get into a serious mental [decline], maybe you guys can enjoy [my art] more.”

[Ashwin Navin @ashwinnavin]

Big credit to Yan Liu and the TVision team for building something genuinely differentiated, and to the Vanderhooks at Viant for making a bold move in the right direction.

[Ashwin Navin @ashwinnavin]

Viant’s acquisition of TVision shows where adtech is heading:

[Ashwin Navin @ashwinnavin]

Owning infrastructure without owning data is like building refineries before you’ve secured supply. Useful, but incomplete. The value is increasingly shifting to whoever controls the raw material—first-party behavioral truth—and everything else is downstream of that.