255 SENIOR ROLES.
THE NUMBER THAT
STOPPED US IS EIGHT.

Four Mondays ago, on the twenty fourth of August, eight of the vendor and media technology companies on our list were hiring at director level or above. The Monday after that, eight. Then eight. Then eight. This morning, eight. In that time the number of vendor boards we could actually get into has gone 32, 23, 34, 36, 35, so we have now looked at that layer of the industry five different ways, from twenty three doors to thirty six, and the number of companies hiring a leader has not moved once.

Seven of this morning's eight are the same seven as last Monday. Bitmovin, Brightcove, Deltatre, Dolby, EVS, Kaltura and NEP Group. The eighth is MediaKind, which is new to the list only because we found a way to read its board for the first time. Qvest, which was on the list last Monday, genuinely came off it.

So eight held this week partly because our reach improved in the same week that one company stepped back, and we would rather tell you that than not. Across five Mondays and five different denominators, though, it has never once been anything other than eight.

Twenty seven vendor boards opened for us this morning and carried nothing we would count at director level inside a media business: 3 Screen Solutions, Accedo, Ateme, Axinom, Backlight, castLabs, Cleeng, Conviva, Friend MTS, Grass Valley, Harmonic, Irdeto, JWX, Kiswe, M2A Media, Magycal, MainStreaming, Mux, Nagra, NPAW, OTTera, Qvest, Qwilt, Telestream, Titan OS, Verimatrix and Vizrt. Titan OS is worth a second look, because we flagged its ceiling a week ago and the ceiling has held: still nothing above Lead, and senior engineer seats down from six to four. It carries thirteen roles rather than the sixteen we published last Monday, and that difference is our arithmetic rather than the board moving, which we have corrected below. Harmonic's board opened to us for the first time in five weeks, and the block was ours rather than theirs: twenty seven live roles, one director seat, and that seat sits in its broadband business rather than its video business, so it falls outside what we count here. Irdeto's entire board is still two internships. These are not dormant companies. They are building capacity right now, and the leadership layer is simply not showing up on the public boards, which is worth knowing before you assume the door is open.

Everywhere else, hiring is genuinely up, and this is the first week we have been willing to say so. On leadership titles only, across the 31 companies that produced a senior seat in both weeks, the market is up 19.1 per cent. Strip out the single biggest mover and it is up 14.1 per cent. Strip out every company whose read got materially deeper and it is still up 11.9 per cent. Last Monday those three measures bracketed the week at minus 1.1, plus 4.2 and plus 9.9 per cent, and we said plainly that we would not call a direction on a single week. This week all three agree, and the breadth is what convinces us rather than the percentage: twelve companies up, seventeen flat, and only two down. The two are NEP Group, from ten to five, and Samba TV, from eleven to nine.

But the market is far narrower than 255 makes it sound. Paramount, NBCUniversal, Disney, Netflix and Crunchyroll are carrying 116 of the 255 between them, which is 45 per cent of everything open from five employers out of a hundred and three. Last week the top five held 43 per cent. Underneath that, sixteen companies have now carried a senior opening on every single Monday since the twenty fourth of August, and thirteen individual seats have been open on all five of those Mondays. If you are building a target list rather than refreshing a job board, that sixteen is worth more than any search you can run. The one company that fell out of it this week is ITV, whose board we read end to end and which carried nothing above Lead Data Engineer this morning. Two of the three seats it held last week were interim contracts, so that is a softer story than it first looks.

And the Gulf produced nothing again. We reached all five of OSN, STARZPLAY, MBC, e& and stc this morning, ten live postings between the five of them and not one a senior media role, against nineteen last Monday. The Middle East appears twice in the list below and both seats are in Israel, at Kaltura and at WSC Sports. Across five Mondays we have now counted 859 senior seats in this industry. Six hundred and fifty were in North America. Six were in the Middle East. Two were in Africa. Two of this morning's five Gulf readings we hold lightly, and you should too: stc returns zero across five separate passes, which is not a credible figure for a telecom of that size, and at e& we could only find the group board rather than an evision or media one. Shahid, beIN and Anghami we still cannot read at all. Senior hiring in the Gulf mostly does not start on a public board either, so what we can measure and what is actually happening are not the same thing. Five Mondays have given us the same picture, though we have only been reading these five at source since last Monday, so we would not yet call it evidence. If you know how any of those boards are really published, we would genuinely welcome the steer.