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When Mark Ashbridge took over as CEO of VA Media in 2017, streaming services were still in the beginnings of their ascendancy, with Netflix reaching 100 million subscribers and Amazon reportedly committing $6 billion to original content.
It wasn’t clear then that YouTube would ultimately emerge triumphant in the battle for eyeballs eight years later.
Back then, the video-sharing platform was a new frontier for VA Media, having previously served as an audio distributor to companies such as Spotify and Apple. When A...