“We have a lot of data, which now for the first time can really be used.”

Yann Courqueux, VP Home Products, StarHub

This week I leave Europe for once and head to Singapore. On that trip, I’m joined by fellow frenchmen Yann Courqueux, VP of Home Products at StarHub, and Olivier Bastard, Chief Sales Officer at Hoppr, StarHub’s technology partner for Connected TV advertising.

Telcos and Pay TV operators have been in living room for decades, so no question they have the eyeballs. Turning them into addressable TV inventory is where the ecosystem lags way behind CTV, which is among the segments that drove 10.5% growth in European digital ad spend in 2025. With Pay TV penetration shrinking by 5 to 10% a year, in Singapore as everywhere else according to Yann, there’s no other option than for players like StarHub to find new pockets of revenues and instead of investing in net new plays (FAST being one he’s casted aside), it’s crucial to focus first on unlocking additional value from your existing assets.

As the incumbent Pay TV operator and one of the main telcos in the region, StarHub has household composition, location and browsing history alongside what people watch, which Yann calls a goldmine, and its Dynamic Ad Pods swap the ads inside live channels so two households watching the same broadcast see different ones.

Olivier explains how Hoppr adds a layer on top of the ad technology an operator already owns, without replacing any of it. Yann explains why StarHub, already in the advertising business, still needed that layer, and what it took to get live ad replacement running: content partners who had to agree to it and months of technical groundwork.

If you run advertising at a Telco or Pay TV operator, take notes: how StarHub finds a sports fan while they’re watching a film, the flood of orders it expected from programmatic, an electric car brand’s WhatsApp campaign with TV in front of it, and the roadmap Yann gives operators for where to start.

Watch our full conversation, in partnership with Hoppr 👇🏻

That’s it for today.

See you next Thursday for a state of the CTV landscape, my Google Playtime keynote.

It indeed feels like every major broadcaster or streamer’s mobile app now has a vertical feed, is in the process of rolling out a vertical feed, or has announced plans to do so soon.

To clarify, by “vertical feed,” I mean a swipe-able, full-screen stream of short clips built into the streamer or broadcaster’s own app. The vertical content is typically re-cut/verticalized long form content on the app designed to lead users to bookmark, share and watch the full movie or series within that same app.

By mimicking dedicated social media apps from TikTok, Instagram Reels to YouTube Shorts, or even standalone micro drama apps like ReelShort and DramaBox, streamers and broadcasters hope that they can claim a piece of that scrolling action. Their vertical feeds ultimately need to drive engagement, promote existing content and keep users on the app a bit longer. For them, the vertical feed is more about discovery than endless scrolling.

Who’s doing it? Is that working? Do viewers embrace these feeds? To what end? Full transparency, we don’t know, well I don’t know as no public data was released as far as I could find. In an unexpected, yet perfect timing, Bango did release today the results of a US survey trying to answer just that.

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Which apps have vertical feeds

It’s only recently that global streamers have started launching vertical feeds, but several European broadcasters incorporated vertical feeds into their apps years ago (yes we did it first, not so boomer of us right?!). First, BBC News launched a curated vertical newsfeed back in November 2016.

And France’s M6+ was later, but still two years ahead of the curve. M6+ included its vertical feed “M6+ Stories” in the app’s initial launch in May 2024.

Arte followed a year and a half later with its “Shorts” feed in October, 2025.

Only in 2026 did the global giants start following suit in part due to the relentless growth of social video and the buzzy micro drama trend (a whole different ball game, one I hope most of you won’t follow blindly due to the ill conceived business model it runs on, a topic for a future edition of Streaming Made Easy).

So when did global players pull the trigger on vertical:

• Disney+ launched “Verts” (sorry Disney that’s a boomer name for vertical content) in the US in March;

• Paramount “Clips,” Netflix “Clips,” and Peacock’s vertical feed all launched in April;

• BBC launched “Shorts” feeds on BBC Sports and updated BBC News’s feed throughout June;

• HBO Max Shorts launched at the end of July.

P.S: Did your app launch a vertical feed? Hit reply and tell me about it. I’ll add you to this visual.

Can a vertical feed fix discovery?

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“Attention is not a business model.”

Emily Horgan, Independent Kids Media Consultant, EHorg Media

This week Evan Shapiro and I finally get Emily Horgan on the pod. A former Disney EMEA exec, she publishes the Netflix Kids Content Performance Report twice a year, writes The Kids StreamerSphere and co-hosts the podcast. Her latest edition of the Performance Report is why we called.

Ms. Rachel built her audience on YouTube and her show was the seventh most-watched on Netflix in the first half of 2025, on four episodes. Where does the next Ms. Rachel come from though? YouTube, where she built her audience, agreed to pay $170 million in 2019 to settle FTC and New York allegations over children’s data and since then the monetisation of kids content there has collapsed.

Netflix’s own kids chart raises the same question. On Emily’s H1 2026 chart, seven shows clear 200 million hours viewed and she points to two in the top 10 that started life on Netflix, Gabby’s Dollhouse and The Creature Cases.

Newer names such as Sheriff Labrador and ChuChu TV arrive from YouTube and apps. We wanted to know why Netflix licenses rather than builds and what Emily would ask of YouTube.

We also get into the Nickelodeon live-action series still pulling viewers on Netflix, Toonstar’s mix of human and AI animation, how Sesame Street windows between Netflix and YouTube and the research Emily is finishing on why parents subscribe. She and Evan are both on stage at MIPJunior in Cannes this weekend, go check them out live.

Emily first floated the idea for these reports to me over a coffee in Cannes, with an "is this crazy?" attached. Definitely not crazy. The latest edition runs to 35 pages, it’s both insightful and actionable for kids operators. If you want it, email Emily at emily@ehorgmedia.com.

LISTEN and/or WATCH in full 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.

That’s it for today but before you go:

🗳️ Poll time

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The numbers come from the Living Room study I ran with RTL AdAlliance (1,009 German respondents, fieldwork 19 January to 4 February 2026), VAUNET's May 2026 forecast and ARD/ZDF 2026 Media Study.

At the end, a poll: tell me if you want more of these.

P.S: if you use these slides, do credit Streaming Made Easy 🙏🏻

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No other route gets within 24 points of linear TV

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“I was very wrong. I did not think that this deal would close, certainly not this year or until the trial started.”
, co-host, The Media Odyssey Podcast

Paramount settled with the state attorneys general on 21 September, a judge approved it on 30 September before the ticking fee of $7 million a day could even be triggered.

Anyone who has sat through a carriage negotiation knows the last days before a deadline are where the leverage is. Evan and I compare notes on what the states did with theirs. I come at this wearing my usual European hat: why jobs come last on that list of mandates negotiated by the AGs? We also talk about Pluto TV, which feels like the odd one out next to HBO Max and Paramount+, but presents a huge opportunity for both to finally offer a free front porch.

We then couldn’t avoid getting into the fear marketing campaign triggered by Jacob Coxon when he left Anthropic, Meta's Muse, and where Europe sits in the AI race, with Mistral's €3 billion round and Nvidia's roughly $13 billion purchase of Hugging Face.

LISTEN and/or WATCH in full 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.

That’s it for today but before you go:

🗳️ Poll time

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“We’ve got 40 million active users. If I open this up to all of them, I would be out of business in a week.”

Scott Olechowski, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Plex

Every M&E company says it uses AI and yet over 70% of enterprises are experimenting with it while fewer than 20% have taken it past two core functions. So I went looking for a streamer, a telco and the data layer underneath to understand where they actually use AI, how it impacts their teams and what reaches viewers.

Meet my speakers: Scott Olechowski, Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder of Plex, Christofer Peilitz, Head of Product Area Pay TV at Telia, and Tyler Bell, SVP of AI Products at for Gracenote. I opened by asking for one word each: evolution or revolution and got a split panel.

Scott's answer starts with a discovery tool Plex has built for internal use. It plugs users’ viewing history, ratings and reviews with metadata and he uses it all the time: “It is amazing. It is unbelievable.” But at today’s running costs he can’t hand it to 40 million active users though.

Viewers aren’t waiting for the maths to work though. In a Gracenote survey of 4,003 US chatbot users, 57% said AI tools could become their preferred way to find something to watch and 49% of Gen Alpha already prefer chatbots for recommendations. So I asked the panel whether ChatGPT and Claude become the new gatekeeper between a platform and its viewers.

We also get into the week Plex stopped all other work to learn the tools, the top engineer who hasn’t written a line of code in three months, Gracenote’s sports MCP server, the coding tool that invented its own Gracenote data (sounds familiar?), why Christofer wants the content lawyers in the tech booths and where each of them expects to be a year from now.

At a time where AI doomsday headlines dominate, it feels good to bust some myths on what AI can and cannot do but more importantly to understand how us mere humans are trying to make sense of these new cards we’re being dealt with.

Hope you like it.

That’s it for today but before you go:

🗳️ Poll time

“Brands, despite everyone saying, ‘It’s about quality, not quantity,’ still, in their briefs it’ll say, we’re looking for 250K-plus follower accounts.”

Shira Lazar, Founder and CEO, What’s Trending

This one we recorded with Evan Shapiro in the coolest podcast studio (this thing’s on wheels!!) outside at IBC (you may hear the suitcases rolling past…) with Shira Lazar, as they released the Affinity 100 Quotient.

They built it with Whalar Group and Foam and it ranks nearly 700 eligible creators on how many people react to each view. The #1 has about a million followers in total. The biggest creator in the world ranks in the 80s.

I love the approach but I also told them that letting go of vanity metrics is very hard to do. I’ve made my peace with a post that gets 10 likes, but the people on the other side of the table (brands and advertisers) still count followers. Shira agreed: the briefs still say 250K-plus.

So are you in the scale game or the trust game? Evan puts it as a cost-benefit call for brands: 500 million fans with 1% reacting, or a culinary creator with a million engaged fans and 10%. Shira names the creators she sees starting to change the briefs and explains why it will take time.

We also get into YouTube’s new view count, the creator middle class Shira thinks everyone forgets and why the next list may measure offline influence through events.

The second edition of the Creator Ecosphere Map, built around the Affinity Quotient, launches on 8 October at Jupiter Festival in Miami. Shira and Evan, let’s meet same time next year: let’s see if the briefs have moved.

LISTEN and/or WATCH in full 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.

That’s it for today but before you go:

🗳️ Poll time

The theme was The Long Game: five years of quarterly pressure and short-term pivots have left this industry good at firefighting and less good at building and I wanted one afternoon about the building.

Every session is now online. They’re all below, in running order, so you can catch the one you missed or send the right one to your team.

AI in Action: four live demos

“AI is only as good as what it knows” Jon Block, Founder, Syllepsis

“Retention, rebuilt: Agentic AI for subscription businesses” Gilles Domartini, CEO, and Kübra Güven, Director of Product Marketing, Cleeng.

“Synthetic Research: Accelerate and Scale Innovation with AI” Paul McCormick, Head of Consulting, EPAM

“Explore the next generation of storytelling with Google Flow” Jamie Barrar, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Google Flow

“One app, two worlds: Inside the Netflix and TF1 partnership” Emma Lloyd, VP of EMEA Partnerships, Netflix, and Laurence Pera, Head of Strategic Partnerships & Distribution, TF1

“The Format Playbook: How The Traitors turn risk into a sure bet” Taco Rijssemus, Partner, 3Rivers

“Six Years of FAST: What building it from the inside has taught us” Sidharth Jayant, Chief Product Officer, Rakuten TV Enterprise, and Chris Gregory, Head of Content Development, Samsung TV Plus EMEA, moderated by Alan Wolk

“The future of the living room: are you ready to shape it?” Tom Smith, Co-Founder, FX Digital

“The race to scale: Streaming’s path to profitability”, a live Media Odyssey recording Jonas Engwall, CEO, Bedrock Streaming, Rowan de Pomerai, CEO, DPP, and Bjarne Andreas Myklebust, Head of Distribution, NRK, with Evan Shapiro and me.

“Bundle or be bundled: Four signals shaping 2027” Giles Tongue, VP Marketing, Bango

Four signals from Bango's 2026 research on where bundling goes next plus a bonus report called “Banking on loyalty” where we learn nearly 1 in 3 Americans would switch financial provider for free access to their favourite subscription.

“Capped, frozen and still expected to deliver: The state of European public service media” Lieven Vermaele (VRT), Serge Schick (France Médias Monde), Christophe Chantraine (RTBF) and Bastiaan Toering (NPO)

I packed too much into one afternoon this year, a good learning for 2027. Until then, having it all online means you can take it at your own pace.

Next year Streaming Made Easy Live goes on the road to Paris, Lisbon and Amsterdam, with Amsterdam back at the Rode Hoed on 9 September 2027, the day before IBC. More details here.

🗳️ Poll time

“It’s frozen with inflation. It actually means it’s cut. Let’s be clear.”

Christophe Chantraine, Director Digital Platforms, RTBF

I closed SME Live 2026 with four of Europe’s public broadcasters on stage: Serge Schick from France Médias Monde, Lieven Vermaele from VRT, Christophe Chantraine from RTBF and Bastiaan Toering from NPO, for a session called “Capped, frozen and still expected to deliver” and all four recognised themselves in it.

Public service media reach 81% of Europeans every week (on stage Serge Schick puts the figure for 15 to 24 year olds close to 70%), at an average of €3.6 a month per citizen and that funding has fallen 9% in real terms over a decade. RTBF has to find €132 million in savings by 2028. NPO is closing four channels, with deeper cuts landing in 2027 and a reform of the whole system on the way.

The pressure is political too. In France, a parliamentary commission of inquiry spent six months on the "neutrality, functioning and financing" of public broadcasting. This week Delphine Ernotte Cunci said France Télévisions has to find €90 million in savings in 2027, €47 million of it from a cut in state funding. I'd expect that in some markets, less so in one of Europe's big five. Serge's read, in his words: "It's not only a matter of money. It's also a matter of ideology." He points to a country with no public deficit to close where the budget is being cut anyway.

They're asked to reach younger audiences on every platform, on budgets frozen at best, while politicians question what they're for. So I asked them how they're handling it: what each of them has already stopped (a radio station, football rights, apps), NPO Plus's decade as a paid subscription, Wolven with Disney+, four different YouTube strategies and the one thing each would steal from someone else in the public media sector.

LISTEN and/or WATCH in full 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.

That’s it for today but before you go:

🗓️ Mark your calendars

Streaming Made Easy Live Amsterdam will be back on Sept. 9th, 2027. Until then, we’ll take this show to Lisbon in partnership with Stream TV Europe (taking place on April 20-22nd, 2027) and to Paris (more details to come).

🗳️ Poll time

“I didn’t think that the streaming platform would be “cheaper” than the broadcast platform.”

Bjarne Andreas Myklebust, NRK

We recorded this week’s Media Odyssey Podcast live on stage at Streaming Made Easy Live. Evan Shapiro and I were joined by Jonas Engwall, CEO of Bedrock Streaming, Rowan de Pomerai, CEO of the DPP, and Bjarne Andre Myklebust from NRK. We talk a lot about what streamers spend on content. We rarely talk about what they spend on product and tech.

Bedrock and the DPP built a metric for it, the Streaming Platform Ratio: the share of streaming revenue spent building and running the platform. Make $10 million, spend $2 million and you’re at 20%. The DPP estimates Netflix at around 10%. 16 platforms, mostly European, shared their numbers anonymously.

Bjarne’s line makes sense once you hear NRK’s side. Almost 90% of his budget still goes on traditional networks like DTT, while 20 to 25% of viewing already happens on NRK’s streaming platform.

The results come back to the point Jonas has made for years: scale. Rowan split the platforms by revenue and put a figure on what scale is worth.

We also get into build vs buy (Bjarne picks a side), vertical feeds on premium services, and NRK's first microdrama, 21 Dager: 21 episodes about a woman with 21 days left to live, released daily on TikTok and Instagram and in full on NRK TV. It comes from a self-described broadcast guy who used to hate vertical.

Listen or watch and tell us where you land on these topics 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.

That’s it for today but before you go:

🗳️ Poll time

"We weren't just then dropping 40,000 hours of TF1 content into Netflix. This had to be, basically, reconceived."

Emma Lloyd, VP EMEA Partnerships, Netflix

On 10 September, the day before IBC, I brought both sides of the TF1 and Netflix deal onto the Streaming Made Easy Live stage in Amsterdam: Emma Lloyd, who leads partnerships for Netflix in EMEA, and Laurence Pera, Head of Strategic Partnerships at TF1 Group. Their teams spent more than two years on it, from the first conversations to the launch on 19 June of this year.

I’ve covered the product since day one. On stage I wanted the thinking behind it. TF1 went in with everything: 5 linear channels, the TF1+ brand on screen and ads for Netflix members on every tier, ad-free plans included.

Emma described the goal as making Netflix “an entertainment hub as opposed to the fully effectively walled garden that Netflix has been up until today.” Netflix put a team of around 200 on the build and designed it from the start to work for partners beyond France.

TF1 says it hit its 18-month audience targets in under three weeks. Whether Netflix opens the door to other broadcasters, and when it decides, is the last thing we cover.

We also get into why TF1 picked Netflix over Prime, how the ads are sold, what Netflix’s recommendations did for TF1’s older titles and how you get hundreds of episodes of a daily soap from live TV to on demand in a matter of hours.

I could have spent an hour with them but I’m thrilled to have had them on stage for 25 precious minutes.

WATCH the full session 👇🏻

That’s it for today but before you go:

🗓️ Mark your calendars

Streaming Made Easy Live Amsterdam will be back on Sept. 9th, 2027. Until then, we’ll take this show to Lisbon in partnership with Stream TV Europe (taking place on April 20-22nd, 2027) and to Paris (more details to come).

🗳️ Poll time

"I think they're late. I don't think they're too late."

Me, on Disney’s busy summer

We’re back with Evan Shapiro for season three of The Media Odyssey Podcast, going through what media got up to while we were away. August is supposed to be boring but thank god it wasn’t.

So here’s what we caught media doing this summer:

The World Cup went everywhere at once. Records on the telly, new ones on YouTube and TikTok, and a tournament that played out in clips, exactly as Scott Melvin called it on the pod in June. It also brought new traditions to football that I hope don’t make it to 2030 and beyond.

The platforms carrying all that noise had a rougher summer and Meta’s $18 billion cheque is where Evan and I split hardest. Disney spent the same weeks chasing those very teenagers, handing Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars to TikTok creators. Vertical got its own headline number, how close or far off is it? We weigh in.

The money moved under all of it. PwC has advertising passing consumer spending this year and while everyone now repeats the same line about ad tier ARPU, I hear otherwise from streamers which means brace yourselves for more price hikes. Netflix just took its UK ad tier up by a third, to £7.99.

Last but not least, Paramount spent the summer standing still, well kind of. They’re three weeks from the day the $7 million-a-day clock starts running.

Listen or watch and tell us where you land on these topics 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.

That’s it for today but before you go:

🗳️ Poll time

“Even if we were to stay with a one-stop shop, we would have still brought in the payment provider. When you look at e-commerce, or just the transactional piece as a while, that’s one of the most important ones in terms of customer acquisition and retention.”

Stéphanie Giardina, COO, VBTV

Number 6 in the run-up to Streaming Made Easy Live and this one is all about the checkout page. Stéphanie Giardina is COO of VBTV, Volleyball World’s platform, streaming over 3,000 live matches a year. Two years ago she took the one-stop shop she had launched on and split it into three specialists. Payments and subscription went to Cleeng, where Joachim Bergman is COO. Two years on, both of them were willing to talk on camera about how the split has gone.

Brazil is where the decision got tested. VBTV had opened the market recently and demand was climbing fast. Then people started stalling at the last step of the funnel, at a rate worse than anywhere else they operate. Nothing about the demand explained it. What they did about it was launch Pix Automático together, just like the streaming giants Netflix, Disney+ and Globoplay had done. Joachim’s constraint: 200 countries and thousands of payment methods and you cannot say yes to all of them. Brazil was a no brainer with Pix reaching 76.4% of Brazilians, more than debit cards do.

Stéphanie then puts the conversion lift down to trust, the same instinct that makes you buy a German concert ticket from Eventim rather than a site you have never seen.

We also get into where the monthly-to-annual split has landed since it started at 90% monthly, the three e-commerce metrics Joachim’s team checks every week, why volleyball escapes football’s three-month churn gap, the iDEAL bug that only showed up on iPhone during a big event and what happens to support when contact volume goes up tenfold overnight.

Subscription management has always arrived as a dashboard. You read the chart and you ask your team what it means. On September 10th, Gilles Domartini and Kübra Güven are showing the other version, where you put the question to a retention agent sitting on your own subscriber data. That is the MCP server Cleeng published last week. Stéphanie is game but she spent this year building VBTV’s data infrastructure first because there is no point slapping an agent onto something patchy.

Watch our full conversation 👇🏻

That’s it for today but before you go, check out who’s attending Streaming Made Easy Live. This event is a labor of love and we work hard to bring the best of Media and Tech under the same roof.

The last 15 spots are available at this link with readers of SME getting 15% off on all passes. Hope to see you on the 10th!

🗳️ Poll time

"When companies start experiments, they don't have an end goal in mind. They're not designing the business case end to end, and therefore they're stuck in this experimenting mode, which definitely doesn't bring any value."

Eduard Malets, Director, EPAM Systems

Five conversations into the run-up to Streaming Made Easy Live and this is the first one I’ve dedicated entirely to AI. Eduard Malets is a Head of Media & Entertainment at EPAM Systems, 62,000 people across 55 countries, doing AI transformation work with their clients. We opened with a client story.

A UK client was quoted nine man-months to build its iOS app. Ed’s team did it with OpenAI’s Codex in about a month plus six weeks tailoring. Then the app sat there because the client’s marketing cycle wasn’t ready to release it. The rest of the organisation was simply not built to absorb the speed.

According to EPAM’s own research, over 70% of enterprises are experimenting with AI, fewer than 20% have it running across more than two core functions. Ed has four reasons for the mismatch and none of them is the model.

Which is why he’d point an AI programme at the legacy stack first and foremost. The business logic and the requirements are already sitting in that code, it's just old.

We also get into metadata as the media use case that’s ready today, why personalisation has no business case at frontier model prices, what Gamescom taught him about audiences and AI-generated content, the three groups he sorts every company into, and what happened when EPAM put 550 of its own salespeople through a bootcamp.

Paul McCormick from EPAM will demonstrate how to use synthetic personas to conduct customer research at scale on September 10th. If you're defending a research budget this year, that's your session.

Watch our full conversation 👇🏻

That’s it for today but before you go.

Speaking of AI, we have a last minute addition to our program and not any addition: Jamie Barrar, Senior Product Manager at Google who will demo live the storytelling capabilities with Google Flow. Jamie joins a stellar line up of industry OGs, meet them all below:

The last 15 spots are available at this link with readers of SME getting 15% off on all passes. Hope to see you on the 10th!

🗳️ Poll time

A year on, that ace is still a massive advantage for telcos and on Friday I bet every TV maker in the business walks into Messe Berlin for IFA to show us a brighter panel or their latest AI integration. These features matter to sell TVs (and hopefully AI brings relief to the content discovery headache we face as users every night) but does that do enough to become (and stay) the default entertainment hubs? I have my doubts as evidenced by the scoreboard I built earlier this summer to grade who was best placed to be THE super aggregator in Entertainment. Let’s dig in.

Today at a glance:

• Everyone wants to own the front door

• But who builds the till

• Before AI assistants become subscription managers

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Everyone owns the front door

The growing importance of the CTV homepage as an entry point to entertainment is undeniable (pushing Telcos to seek distribution of their apps on CTV). In the 2026 Living Room Study we ran with RTL AdAlliance, 58% of Europeans say the smart TV homepage is how they get to video on the TV set; 53% in the US (surprisingly low number but I guess makes sense with sticks added to the mix) and 69% in China.

In the Nordics (where I was last week for the Copenhagen TV Festival), the trend holds (except in Norway where set top boxes lead).

But who’s grabbing that subscriber money past the CTV homepage?

Only two player types score full marks in my score card.

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If you’ve been reading Streaming Made Easy for a while, you’ve heard that tune from me before but here’s why it needs to be said over and over again. Almost every headline or strategy deck in this industry is still influenced by US numbers and trends. Those numbers and trends are real but they describe a market most of you don’t sell into.

So I gave the room the European picture instead. What our viewers actually do, what’s actually breaking and what I’d do about it. On the playbook itself, I ended my talk on a scorecard where I graded the US and Europe across 7 pillars: Local content & audience trust; Distribution / home screen; Advertising stack; Aggregation / bundling; Data & AI-readiness; Funding resilience; New formats, creators & fandom. Some scores sting. We have a lot of catch up to do but we nail the strongest pillar of all, the one that makes the rest moot. We just need to keep at it, relentlessly.

Now the full deck can be accessed in this edition but today I didn’t want to stop there. I spent half an hour telling a Danish audience that European markets deserve European analysis, it seemed only fair to do the work so the rest of this edition is all about Denmark with a bunch of cool charts.

Today at a glance:

• The Danish living room never went mobile

• Linear lost 3 points of Danish media time in a year

• Denmark pays for streaming it doesn’t use enough

• But Danes are loyal subscribers

• What I’d do if I sold into Denmark

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The Danish living room never went mobile

66% of Danes say they watch video on a TV set or projector every single day. In the US, that number is 41%. Turn it around and look at the phone: 81% in China, 61% in the US, 48% in Denmark. The EU15 average on the smartphone is 58%, so Denmark sits 10 points under even the European norm.

91% of Danes say they have a TV at home and 77% of those are smart TVs. Video projectors aren’t a thing in Denmark at 6% versus 26% in China.

Linear lost 3 points of Danish media time in a year

Nielsen and DR track how Danes split their total media time and Linear TV dropped 3 points year on year. Nothing else on the chart moved by more than 1 point and when it did, it was 1% of YoY growth, not decline.

Split it by age and you can see where those points went. This is becoming the typical chart we see in European markets with younger demos favouring on demand consumption and social media to Linear TV. What you don’t typically see however is increased viewership amongst the 25-31 year old demo.

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“We solve the challenge once and then make it available to everybody. It’s not really rocket science. It’s just a way to get scale and to be able to offer all of this at a fairly reasonable cost versus developing it over and over again.”

Jonas Engwall, CEO, Bedrock Streaming

Bedrock Streaming runs one platform under M6+, RTL+ and Videoland. That’s 10 million subscribers, 45 million users across 6 countries. Each service pulls the roadmap somewhere and the others switch it on when they see fit. M6+ pushes hardest on advertising and came off 54 World Cup matches this summer. RTL+ migrated in April. Music and audiobooks sitting alongside video, which the others don't carry. Videoland's acquisition of Viaplay's Dutch business tilts it towards sport now.

Sky and WOW are next in line. Since the deal closed on 1 June, the group announced that RTL+, Sky and WOW would fold into “an integrated video infrastructure”. We know now who’s gonna be that integrated infrastructure…

Competing with global scale out of a single market is, in Jonas Engwall’s words, “mathematically very, very challenging”. If so, why haven’t we built a pan-European technology stack then? I put it to him that the reason Europe still won’t share a stack is ego and control. Local broadcasters spent five years and a lot of money building their own hubs. Nobody wants to be the one who scraps it. I’m convinced they will have to down the line.

Netflix spent $3.4 billion on technology and development last year and that's before the CDN. DPP has built a benchmark, with Bedrock Streaming's support, for what that spend should look like against revenue. DPP reckons Netflix comes in around $1 in every $10 it takes, based on the 2024 accounts. On 2024 revenue, that's about $3.9 billion of plumbing.

After years of growth at all costs, it’s time to take a look at streaming’s profitability and that’s exactly what we’ll be taking apart on stage during Streaming Made Easy Live with Jonas Engwall (Bedrock), Rowan de Pomerai (DPP) and Bjarne Myklebust (NRK).

We also get into the prediction he got badly wrong five years ago. And what happens to YouTube and Amazon, whose whole job is helping you find something to watch, once an agent does your looking for you.

Watch our full conversation 👇🏻

That’s it for today but before you go:

🗞️ The full program is now live!

Here’s what we’ve been cooking for you guys throughout the summer:

→ Inside the Netflix and TF1 partnership, with Emma Lloyd (Netflix) and Laurence PERA (TF1).

→ The Format Playbook: how The Traitors turns risk into a sure bet, with Taco Rijssemus (3rivers).

→ Six years of FAST, from the two people who built it, with Sidharth Jayant (Rakuten TV) and Chris Gregory (Samsung TV+).

→ The Media Odyssey Podcast recorded live: streaming's path to profitability, with Jonas Engwall (Bedrock Streaming), Bjarne Andre Myklebust (NRK), Rowan de Pomerai (DPP), Evan Shapīro and myself.

→ Capped, frozen and still expected to deliver: the state of European public service media, with Lieven Vermaele (VRT), Serge Schick (France Médias Monde) and Christophe Chantraine (RTBF).

→ AI in Action: three live demos back to back, with Jon Block (Syllepsis), Gilles Domartini and Kübra Güven (Cleeng), Paul McCormick (EPAM).

→ The future of the living room, and whether you're ready to shape it, with new research from Tom Smith (FX Digital).

→ The Subscription Economy, with Giles Tongue (Bango).

Full running order in the image below. Spots are filling up fast, so register now. Readers of SME get 15% off on all passes here. Hope to see you on the 10th!

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"There's so much time, energy and budgets that are spent on personalisation and trying to present the right thing to the user within the television application, when in reality they might have already discovered something to watch before they even switch on their TV."

Matt Duhig, co-founder and CEO, FX Digital

65% of Gen Z decide what to watch on a feed before the TV goes on. 6% of boomers do. That’s year 2 of the study FX Digital runs with research partner Craft: 800 people last year, 1,200 this year, older audiences added because the SME Live audience told them to stop fixating on Gen Z 😁

So the industry keeps paying to personalise a decision that’s already been made. Disney+ is adding a vertical feed to the app this year to meet that traffic further upstream. Matt Duhig thinks the on-platform answer is search and points out YouTube puts it on every page while Netflix doesn’t. Konrad Collao argues the opposite, that you shouldn’t give people what they came for too fast.

Collao also wants us off generational labels. Millennials were the ones who’d supposedly never watch TV again. They now watch more than Gen Z and he’ll put a guarantee on what Gen Z looks like in 15 years.

Then profiles. Most people watching with someone else compromise, millennials most of all, and TV apps still personalise for one. Collao has spent 25 years in other people’s living rooms, “much like a burglar”. At an FX Digital event a few weeks back, a couple in the room explained their own fix: two TVs.

We also get into gaming on the big screen, whether anyone will ever store card details on a television, and whether long-form YouTube counts as TV…

FX Digital’s co-founder Tom Smith will be on stage during SME Live on 10 September in Amsterdam with more of this data. Come find him.

Watch our full conversation 👇🏻

That’s it for today but before you go:

🎤 3 weeks to go and only 45 tickets left for Streaming Made Easy LIVE!

On September 10, the day before IBC kicks off, we're bringing together the people shaping the future of streaming and broadcast in Amsterdam, at Rode Hoed.

Here's why you'll want to be in the room:

Spots are filling up fast, so register now. Readers of SME get 15% off on all passes here.

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You could think it’s just another sports-rights deal but it’s actually the fifteenth deal Disney+ has signed with a European broadcaster, league or distributor in the last twelve months.

You do not sign fifteen deals in a year by accident. Disney+ arrived in Europe in 2020 as a global walled garden, the same Marvel-Pixar-Star Wars box in every market. It is now morphing into something else: a European super aggregator, stacking other people’s content and rights on top of its own.

Is that a winning strategy? Let me weigh in.

Today at a glance:

• Where Disney+ stands today

• So Disney+ went shopping

• What the 15 deals actually do

• What Disney is really building

Where Disney+ stands today

Globally the headline is that subscriber count still climbed but slowed between 2024 and 2025. Disney+ went from 102.9M subscribers at the end of 2022 to 131.6M by the end of Q3 2025, on Disney’s own reporting, before it stopped disclosing subscriber numbers in Q4 2025.

Underneath that dated global number, we don’t know the subscriber count per market. BARB has Disney+ in 7.8 million UK homes in Q1 2026, up from 7.6 million the quarter before, with 2.8 million of those on the ad tier after 68% growth in a year. In Italy, AGCOM puts Disney+ at 3.7 million website and app unique users in December 2025, up 0.9% on the year. In France, the first release of Médiamétrie's cross-media measurement put Disney+ at 9.5 million monthly users in September 2025. Dataxis estimates a market share of 12% in the UK, 10% in France and Germany, 8% in Spain and 7% in Italy.

Now you do not sign 15 local deals in a year if the global Marvel-Pixar-Star Wars box is selling itself. The Disney+ value proposition is too US-centric, too thin on the local stories that keep people paying month after month. Kids and Marvel get you in the door but do not get a European household to stay through the empty months between tentpoles.

So Disney+ went shopping

Since mid-2025 it has struck deals with ITV and Sky in the UK, ARD Plus and ZDF Studios in Germany, Rai in Italy, SIC in Portugal, Atresmedia and RTVE in Spain, Gaumont, ADN and L'Équipe in France, NPO in the Netherlands, and now LALIGA across the Nordics.

Disney+ EMEA boss Karl Holmes is upfront about the logic behind these deals:

Read more

“In a way, fragmentation has killed the TV sports fan. You can’t just be a sports fan anymore.”

Giles Tongue, VP Marketing, Bango

Strong claim but he brought data to back it up. Bango indeed released a survey of 2,500 Americans on how they watch sport. It was the perfect opportunity to study fragmentation live with the three US distributors of the World Cup in the mix.

So what do we learn about Americans & sports streaming:

→ 64% of Americans now pay for sports streaming;

→ 41% of them couldn’t work out where to watch the World Cup (I argue on the interview it could be because they’re new to proper football so didn’t know where to look 😁);

→ Nearly half said they’d missed a match because they couldn’t find where it was streaming, with a chunk deciding piracy was the answer instead.

→ Finally, younger fans would rather watch the highlights than the live game. The clip phenomenon which I suspect actually spread to many demos during this edition given the number of games and the late night programming for the rest of the world.

We couldn’t stay clear of Netflix’s recent move. Six years after killing free trials, they’re testing them again in select markets. Giles reads why the most distributed streamer in the world suddenly wants the trial mechanic back and where he thinks it goes next.

Which brings us to the bit I often care about most. Over 90% of specialist SVOD in the US now sells through indirect channels and Omdia puts telco and non-telco bundling at around 30% of subscriptions. Giles makes the case that loyalty has moved to the IP and to whoever curates it, away from the streamer itself.

That reframes who holds the power in a bundle but still leaves one problem nobody has solved yet: the "what's on and where”.

Giles Tongue will be on stage during SME Live on 10 September in Amsterdam. We’ll be talking about the rise of new kinds of bundlers. Come find us.

Grab more sports stats here and then watch our full conversation 👇🏻

That’s it for today but before you go:

🎤 Session spotlight

“AI is only as good as what it knows” with Jon Block, founder of Syllepsis

Your competitor has the exact same AI models you do. You're also both getting the same generic output from them. Bland copy, no feel for what makes you different, zero clue about your audience or how you actually work.

What’s the fix? During Streaming Made Easy Live 2026, Jon Block (founder of Syllepsis) is going to show us what happens when your institutional knowledge gets structured into something the AI can actually reason over. If you've ever gotten AI output that was technically correct and strategically hollow, come watch this one.

Jon's demo is part of our AI in Action sessions, running from 1pm to 2pm: live looks at what AI can actually do for media and streaming businesses right now.

Early bird has closed but for the next 2 weeks only, buyer badges are €449 excl. VAT (back to €499 after Aug 10). Readers of SME get 15% off on all passes here.

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