By Amir Jahangir
Monday, Oct 27, 2025
Television in Pakistan is standing at the threshold of a digital renaissance. For two decades, social media and the internet have shaped how people discover and consume content – fast, personalised, and often unverified.
Yet as artificial intelligence (AI) begins to integrate deeply into the television ecosystem, the paradigm is about to shift again. AI will not only close the gap between television and the internet but redefine what broadcasting means in a connected world. The race will no longer be about ‘screen time’, but about ‘intelligent time’ – the quality of engagement, authenticity, and trust that traditional television can reclaim with the power of data and algorithms.
For years, Pakistan’s television landscape was built on a linear model: scheduled programming, broad demographic targeting, and a limited set of ratings tools. The People’s Meter system, which measured viewership through a few thousand devices installed across select urban households, served as the foundation for advertising decisions. While it provided a narrow sense of reach, it failed to capture the complexity of modern audiences who consume content across multiple screens — television, mobile, and streaming platforms.
That model is now being disrupted by AI-driven audience analytics capable of capturing granular, real-time behavioural data. The shift from statistical sampling to continuous digital measurement marks a profound change: Pakistan’s television industry will finally understand who is watching, when, and why.
AI will transform production first. What once required full studios, large crews, and extensive editing timelines will now be managed by compact, data-enabled teams. Generative tools will write scripts, localise dialogue into Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, and Balochi, and even simulate virtual anchors that can read news or host entertainment shows in multiple languages simultaneously.
Television channels could soon deliver fully localised versions of content for each province, something unimaginable under traditional production models. This will democratise creation, enabling smaller independent producers to compete with major networks. But it will also force a reckoning with originality: how much of our storytelling remains human when algorithms can predict emotional arcs better than our instincts?
Meanwhile, social media content consumption, though dominant today, will start to plateau under the weight of its own saturation. Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram thrive on virality and short attention spans, not narrative depth. Their algorithms prioritise velocity over veracity. Television’s future advantage will come from combining AI’s personalisation power with the medium’s inherent capacity for structured, long-form storytelling.
In an AI-augmented television ecosystem, viewers will not merely scroll – they will steer. A political talk show may allow audiences to select which perspective to explore deeper. A drama may branch into alternate endings chosen in real time. A cricket match broadcast could personalise statistics, language, and commentary per viewer. This hybridisation, interactive like social media but immersive like cinema, will redefine what it means to ‘watch TV’.
The economic model of broadcasting will also evolve. Advertising will move away from blunt, one-size-fits-all campaigns toward precision targeting. Instead of purchasing time slots, brands will purchase moments — AI-determined windows when a specific viewer segment is most emotionally or contextually receptive.
Pakistan’s ad agencies and rating boards will need to rethink their KPIs. The traditional TRP will give way to Engagement Intelligence Indexes, combining attention data, sentiment analysis, and real-time conversion tracking. With AI-driven analytics, advertisers will no longer rely on a handful of metered households but on millions of digital data points across cities and rural districts. The Pakistani viewer, long treated as a demographic statistic, will finally become an individual audience of one.
AI will also address one of the most persistent problems in Pakistan’s media environment – misinformation. Social media has accelerated the spread of fake news and manipulated visuals, often faster than fact-checkers can respond. But AI will soon become both the generator and the guardian of truth.
Advanced detection systems can already flag synthetic images, analyse metadata for inconsistencies, and trace source origins within seconds. This means fake content will be easier to expose, not harder. In Pakistan, where media credibility has eroded under digital misinformation, AI could help rebuild public trust by verifying every image, video, and voice clip before it airs. The same tools that once threatened truth will become the foundation of a new transparency regime.
For regulators, this shift demands foresight. PEMRA, traditionally focused on licensing, decency codes, and frequency allocation, must evolve into a digital-era media regulator — one that governs algorithms, not just transmitters. The authority should mandate disclosure when AI-generated or AI-assisted content is used, especially in news and political programming.
New guidelines will be needed to define intellectual property in an AI-driven creative economy — who owns a script partly written by a machine, and who bears liability for algorithmic bias? Beyond compliance, regulation should enable innovation by setting open standards for AI interoperability, ethical use of audience data, and equitable access to machine-learning resources for local producers.
The transition from traditional broadcasting to AI-powered television will also create a new creative economy. Universities, production academies, and vocational centres in Pakistan will need to integrate AI literacy and data storytelling into media curricula. Journalists and producers will require training in content creation as well as in algorithmic oversight — understanding how recommendation systems influence what viewers see, believe, and act upon. The next generation of producers will write scripts but also design feedback architectures that learn from viewers in real time.
Yet, the most striking evolution will be in how audiences participate. Social media today represents a horizontal network of individual expression — fast, fragmented, and fleeting. AI-driven television, by contrast, will operate as a vertical narrative architecture — deeper, adaptive, and sustained. It will integrate the interactivity of social feeds within the coherence of professional storytelling.
The line between viewer, creator, and platform will blur into a continuous exchange, a Business-to-Consumer-to-Business (B2C2B) loop where audience behavior directly shapes programming decisions. In Pakistan, this could finally bridge the divide between the content broadcast from Karachi and the realities lived in Gwadar, Gilgit, and Peshawar. The audience will co-author the story.
By 2035, Pakistani television could be unrecognisable compared to today. AI will power local-language networks tuned to provincial cultures, immersive newsrooms verified by authenticity engines, and entertainment formats that respond to emotion as much as engagement. The industry’s survival will depend on how quickly it moves from traditional TRPs to intelligent, participatory ecosystems. The challenge is not whether television can compete with social media — it is whether it can out-evolve it.
Television will not die in the age of algorithms. It will, in fact, be reborn. The future of content will belong to those who create the most meaning instead of the most noise. In the next decade, Pakistan’s television industry has the rare opportunity to leapfrog by becoming something more intelligent, more inclusive, and infinitely more interactive. The future of media will not be measured in seconds of attention, but in the depth of connection between human stories and artificial intelligence.
The writer is a public policy expert and leads the Country Partner Institute of the World Economic Forum in Pakistan.
He tweets/posts @amirjahangir and can be reached at: aj@mishal.com.pk
