There’s a “scary” and “fast” revolution happening in media that will get “ugly”, but is “necessary to keep going forward”, the founder and chief executive of Vice has claimed.

An ethnically diverse and hard-to-reach Generation Y had broken the baby boomers’ grip on the industry, but media must now adapt to their needs, Shane Smith said yesterday as he delivered the 2016 James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh International TV Festival.

Smith said there would be a seismic change to both new and old media, and called on companies to give young consumers meaningful content about the social issues which were important to them.