The vendor layer is not shrinking. It is holding very still.

Eight companies hiring leaders, four Mondays in a row, out of a pool that keeps getting bigger. Look inside the boards and the picture sharpens further. Titan OS has sixteen live roles open right now, six of them senior engineers, and the ceiling on every single one is Lead or Manager. Mux is carrying two postings. Irdeto's whole board is two internships. These are not dormant companies, they are companies hiring plenty of people and nobody to run anything. If you are vendor side and senior, that is worth sitting with. The work is there. The rung above it is not being cut, but it is not being added to either, and it has not been for a month.

Sixteen senior seats have now been open for the entire month

Same company, same title, every Monday since the twenty fourth of August. Roku has four of them. Netflix has three, including Director of Cloud Gaming Infrastructure and an Engineering Director in Warsaw. Deltatre has three, including the Technical Director for OTT delivery, which on Monday was open in five countries at once. The rest sit at Amazon, Brightcove, Comscore, Sportradar, Tubi and iSpot.tv. A month is a long time for a director level seat to stay open, and it usually means one of three things: the brief is harder than the company thought, the budget is less certain than the posting suggests, or nobody internally has decided what the role actually is. Worth knowing before you spend an afternoon on an application.

This market is far narrower than the headline count makes it look

Across the four Mondays we have counted a little over six hundred senior seats, which sounds like a wide open industry. It is not. In no week has less than a third of everything we found come from just five companies, and in two of the four weeks it was more than half. This week Paramount, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Nielsen and Crunchyroll account for ninety one of the 213 between them. And the same seventeen companies have produced a senior opening in every edition we have run. Amazon, Bitmovin, Brightcove, Comscore, Crunchyroll, Deltatre, Disney, Genius Sports, ITV, Innovid, Netflix, Nielsen, Paramount, Roku, Sportradar, Tubi and iSpot.tv. If you are building a target list rather than waiting for a posting, that list is a better starting point than anything else on this page.

The geography has not shifted, and it is the number we keep hoping will

Of the six hundred odd senior seats we have found in four weeks, four hundred and fifty one are in North America. Four were in the Middle East. Two were in Africa. Six, in a month, across two regions where a great many of you live and work. We can now say that with more confidence than we could a fortnight ago, because on Monday we got into OSN, STARZPLAY, MBC, e& and stc directly and read them at source rather than guessing. Between those five there are nineteen live postings of any kind and not one senior media role. But five companies are not a region, and most of you know better than we do that senior hiring in the Gulf rarely starts on a public board. What we can measure and what is actually happening are not the same thing here, and we would rather say that plainly than pretend the number is the whole story.

Nothing confirmed this week.