Thank you to our amazing line up of speakers and moderators, we couldn’t have done it without you all.

What now?

We hope to see you at our next Streaming Made Easy Live event in Amsterdam on September 10^th, 2026. The tickets are now on sale here. Premium subscribers get 30% off so consider upgrading today.

Save the date for the 2nd edition of the StreamTV Show Europe: April 20-22nd, 2027. With over a thousand attendees on this 1st edition, the show had to move to a new location and we’ll be lucky to be at the Estoril Convention Center next year. It’s a beautiful city near Lisbon, close to the sea with amazing sceneries and social options (from a race track to a hotel where a James Bond movie was shot!).

Now, let me share some big picture takeaways from the event as well as what’s coming next.

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#1 - The living room is still the most social screen in the house.

The RTL AdAlliance & Streaming Made Easy Living Room Study surveyed 15,000+ viewers across 17 countries and the findings should end the lazy habit of transplanting US trends onto European markets. Co-viewing remains a defining habit across the continent, with families and households still gathering around the television in a way that mobile and social consumption simply does not replicate.

The structural differences are just as stark on the advertising side. France still routes 75% of its CTV ad impressions through a set-top box, as Emmanuelle Godard of Canal+ Brand Solutions made clear on our ad panel, while the rest of Europe sits closer to a 70/30 split in favour of smart TVs.

European broadcasters hold a genuine advantage in this environment. 50 years of editorial credibility, cultural trust and shared national moments are not something a global platform can manufacture through a licensing budget. But that advantage should not be a resting position. The broadcasters gaining ground are those embracing creator partnerships as audience acquisition strategies (not just content acquisition ones) and showing up natively on social platforms rather than using them as redirect mechanisms.

For more, download the report here or dig into past articles:

#2 - Commentary personalisation is the most underrated product feature in sports streaming.

MasOrange built the ability to swap the official broadcast commentary for a preferred radio commentator’s audio stream directly into their sports product. Uptake was high enough which means the official broadcast voice was never the draw, the game was. Platforms that understand this will stop treating commentary as a fixed layer and start treating it as a personalisation lever, one that costs almost nothing to implement and measurably deepens the fan relationship.

#3 - Advertising tolerance has done a full reversal.

Two years ago, 78% of subscribers said streaming should never carry ads. Today, 36% say they would accept double the ad load if it meant cheaper bills. The Bango subscriber study also points to ad-free becoming a minority tier by end of 2026. Subscribers are making rational trade-offs and the platforms still treating ad-supported as a second-class tier are misreading where their audience has already moved.

For more, download the report here or dig into past articles:

#4 - Honest consent unlocks CTV advertising.

CTV ad revenues grew 35% in France in 2025 against 18% growth in overall video instream. The growth is real but the infrastructure underneath it remains fragile. Fragmentation across set-top boxes and smart TV operating systems makes programmatic buying, frequency capping and attribution inconsistent across markets. The bigger problem is trust. The industry has relied on vague consent mechanisms to collect viewing data for years. Sharp’s Nick Ruczaj put it plainly: if platforms simply promised users they would not see the same ad more than five times in a given period, most people would opt in without hesitation. Users do not dislike ads, they dislike irrelevant, repeated ones. Honest data exchange, not sleight of hand, is what will unlock the CTV advertising opportunity at scale and SyncMint is on a mission to deliver on that opportunity.

#5 - Convenience is the best anti-piracy strategy in sports.

La Liga estimates it loses 700 million euros a year to piracy. No enforcement mechanism solves alone a problem that is fundamentally about friction. Fans turn to illegal streams because legitimate options are too fragmented, too expensive, or buried behind multiple subscriptions. The platforms winning in sports are the ones making it easier to watch legally than to find a pirate stream, through a stellar video viewing experience, better UX, smarter bundling and features that an illegal stream cannot replicate, including community tools, alternative commentary, multi-view and personalised experiences. MainStreaming degrades rather than blocks ultimately converting pirates into paying subscribers rather than playing whack-a-mole with VPNs and new connections.

#6 - Personalisation at sign-up is a retention lever, not a nice-to-have.

FX Digital and Dyn Media asked users to select their preferred sport at sign-up. Around 63% did and those who made that choice showed a 35% higher customer lifetime value than those who skipped it. One optional question at the start of the journey changed the retention curve measurably. The first 30 days remain the critical window: keep a user engaged through that period and they are far more likely to stay. The broader point applies across every streaming category. Personalisation from day one is not a product flourish, it is a business model decision.

#7 - Quality assurance is a revenue and retention strategy.

Streaming platforms systematically underinvest in testing relative to its impact on what actually matters. In e-commerce, research shows 39% of consumers never return to a retailer after a broken transaction. There is no evidence that streaming audiences are more forgiving. If the payment fails or the app crashes, viewers simply leave. With hundred of devices, market, language and payment combinations to support, no in-house QA team can cover the full surface area alone. That’s where Testlio’s crowd testers come in. The platforms that treat testing as a competitive advantage will pull ahead of those that only address quality problems after viewers have already gone.

#8 - Your metadata is failing your viewers, AI is picking up the slack.

The NLZIET and Media Distillery session showed what AI-powered navigation already looks like in practice: real-time chapter markers, topic segments and preview clips that get a viewer to the right moment in under 30 seconds. Discovery is not just a UX problem, it is a data quality problem and AI is solving it faster than anticipated.

During the Olympics, Media Distillery analysed audio and video in real time, identified sport discipline transitions and generated chapter markers that let viewers jump directly to ice skating, skiing or handball without scrubbing through four hours of broadcast. 15% of Olympic replay viewers used the feature and Sports content drove a 5x uplift in usage compared to the daily baseline.

#9 - AI is not coming for your content strategy but for your front door.

Multiple sessions converged on the same conclusion, approached from different angles. Bango’s subscriber study found that 40% of Gen Z respondents would hand full subscription management, including signing up, cancelling and switching tiers, to an AI agent. The closing panel named AI assistants as the most credible candidate to own the living room entry point within three to five years, not because anyone has built that product yet, but because the consumer behaviour pointing toward it is already measurable. Subscription fatigue, the rise of indirect acquisition channels and the chaos of managing >5 subscriptions across multiple billing relationships all create exactly the conditions that a well-designed AI intermediary would solve.

The threat this poses is specific. A platform that earns a direct relationship with its subscribers, through a great app, frictionless billing and personalised experience, retains that relationship when the AI layer arrives. A platform that brings friction and relies on habit to keep subscribers in place will find that an AI assistant removes both overnight. The question is not whether AI aggregation is coming but whether your product is good enough to survive being recommended rather than defaulted to.

10. Community rules

As always my tell tale (when it comes to measuring the success of an event): how the community engaged and felt throughout the show. I felt a surprisingly optimistic vibe amongst peers. Folks are being challenged but not discouraged.

See for yourself here.

What’s next

Over the next few weeks, The Media Odyssey Podcast will release:

→ a StreamTV Show Europe wrap up where and I got to spend time with Denis Ostir, Editor-in-chief at V (formerly known as Vidaa), who’s dead set on fixing the measurement’s hot mess we’re in by building an open measurement tool.

→ a fascinating conversation with Bogdan Nesvit, co-founder of Holywater Tech, where you’ll see I was spot on when it comes to the irrelevance of the pay as you go business model (see my bets for 2026) but maybe not so right on the quality of content produced.

​That’s it for today but before you go: comment, likes or shares come a long way.

We hope to see you at our next Streaming Made Easy Live event in Amsterdam on September 10^th, 2026. The tickets are now available here. Premium subscribers get 30% off so consider upgrading today.

Get Tickets

Enjoy your week and see you next week for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!

“Over 40% of American & British Millennials and GenZ would double their ad load for lower price points."

Giles Tongue

This week on The Media Odyssey Podcast, and I dig into a brand new report which Bango dropped at Stream TV Europe in Lisbon on Monday. We had a preview before the conference and let’s just say we geeked out on the data so grab the report there and watch this one on YouTube or Spotify.

Bango, for context, powers the backend of many of the bundles you already use without thinking about it. Two services or more, one price point, invisible infrastructure, that is the business. Giles Tongue runs marketing there and co-authored the study which covers subscription attitudes and behaviour across the US and UK.

The numbers open simply enough: 5.2 subscriptions per person in the US, 5.7 in the UK, with British households spending roughly 25% more per month than American ones despite historically cheaper pricing tiers.

What gets interesting is the category that ranked second overall by share of subscribers, beating music by nearly double and what that gap reveals about consumer behaviour that most platform strategies have yet to absorb.

Loyalty is the other thread running through the whole study. When 60% of consumers in both markets say they follow a show more than a service, the serial churner stops being an edge case and starts looking like the base case for almost every platform not named Netflix or Amazon. Evan and I have a clear view on what the only structural response to that actually looks like.

The conversation also gets into who consumers actually expect their bundles to come from (the answer is not who you think), whether agentic AI managing your subscriptions is convenience or a step too far.

Tongue’s read on where telcos specifically sit in the bundling equation was the sharpest moment in the conversation for me, because the risk he describes is not about missing an opportunity so much as waking up one day on the wrong side of someone else’s deal. Bundle or be bundled.

Download the full Subscription Signals 2026 report then LISTEN and/or WATCH in full 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.

Before you go, this Sunday, tickets to attend Streaming Made Easy Live Amsterdam (on September 10th) are going live. Get on the waitlist to make sure you can benefit from our early bird pricing.

Get tickets

That’s it for today but before you go:

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Tom Smith has spent years thinking about this. As Co-Founder and Creative Director of FX Digital, the London-based CTV studio behind streaming and broadcast apps for clients across Europe and North America (incl. Odido, Britbox, Discovery+, Dyn, Eurosport, Channel 4), Smith sits at the intersection of viewer behaviour and product design. When I asked him what’s landing on his desk right now, here’s what he said:

“There’s a lot of hype around AI and conversational search but the biggest request is still discoverability.”

The irony is that social media already cracked this. The format itself is the discovery mechanism: no title card, no genre label, no star rating, just a hook and your gut reaction to it. Could that behavioural logic be migrating from your phone to your television? Let's find out.

Today at a glance:

• The two-way scramble

• The Blockbuster UI problem

• Social is Gen Z’s Home Screen

• What this looks like in a product

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The two-way scramble

Social media platforms want a piece of the big screen. Premium streaming apps are worried that social media is eating their viewing time period. Both sides are building into the other’s territory as a result.

TikTok launched a TV app on Samsung Smart TVs in Europe in December 2020, then expanded to North America in late 2021, though it never gained meaningful traction on the big screen. YouTube Shorts has been on TV since 2022. Last fall, Instagram launched Reels Channels on Amazon Fire TV, organising short-form content into topic-based feeds designed for lean-back co-viewing rather than solo scrolling. The research backing that decision is telling:

“When they (Instagram) were researching the application, users were saying that actually watching Reels is a fun, enjoyable, collective engagement, which you wouldn’t think initially. You’d think it’s quite a private feed.”

On the streaming side, Disney+ has launched vertical content and Netflix is moving toward short-form video. Neither company is trying to become TikTok. What they’re trying to do is solve the same discovery problem their home screens have failed to solve for years, by letting the content speak for itself rather than asking viewers to judge a show by its thumbnail. “TV was first and then video became on mobile,” Smith told me. “Now mobile has invented their new format and TV’s learning from that. The two are kind of feeding into one another.”

Disney uploaded the entire High School Musical film to TikTok as 52 sequential short clips to mark the film's 20th anniversary. The campaign accumulated 34.9 million views across all 52 parts. It was a genuinely terrible way to watch a film (if you ask me but what do I know, I’m the oldest millennial, yep turning 46 in June), deliberately fragmented, black bars on both sides. And yet it worked, because the algorithm rewarded sustained engagement and fed each clip to anyone who watched even one. The lesson is not that people want to watch films in 52 pieces. The lesson is that short-form distribution functions as a discovery engine in a way that a static thumbnail grid simply cannot and that premium streaming services are only beginning to use it deliberately.

The Blockbuster UI problem

Which brings us back to the home screen. “It’s quite boring navigating through a home screen of solid images,” Smith said. “It’s like the Blockbuster of UI.” Walking into a Blockbuster was an overwhelming, often paralysing experience. Too many covers, too little context, not enough signal to make a decision. So you’d grab something familiar or surrender to a genre shelf and pick something at random (or better yet ask the staff). The modern streaming home screen reproduces that exact dynamic with higher resolution thumbnails.

Short-form video rails are one answer to this because they replace the passive artwork with an active hook. Instead of asking a viewer to evaluate a static image, they show a moment from the content itself and let the viewer’s instinctive reaction do the work. That’s not a new idea, Netflix has been doing it for years.

The challenge though? Hardware. A 2022 TV handles those previews differently than a current-generation device. “If you can’t replicate the speed of navigating through the assets, it loses its magic,” Smith said. The hook that works on mobile requires loading speeds and auto-play performance that older connected TV hardware often can’t deliver and that hardware fragmentation is pronounced across the world. Platforms are beginning to deploy AI-driven auto-reframe tools that optimize content simultaneously for mobile and CTV, keeping subjects centered and resolution high across both formats. But the speed problem remains a real constraint for any studio trying to replicate the frictionless feel of a social feed on older devices.

Social is Gen Z's Home Screen

FX Digital’s own research tracked how Gen Z actually finds content: “We found that Gen Z are more likely to use social media posts and discussions to find a TV programme that they want to watch: 68% versus 52% for millennials.”

Nearly seven in ten of the youngest and most commercially attractive viewers are discovering what to watch next through social feeds, before they open a streaming app. The discovery journey doesn’t start on the home screen but on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube and once they open the app, the home screen is essentially just a search confirmation step.

Smith connects that behavioural shift to how short-form content hooks work in practice. “They don’t have short attention spans because we know that they watch 24-hour streams, they’re watching hour-long podcasts. But when they’re in that mode of short form content, the hook has to be there quickly.”

What this looks like in a product

So what does a short-form discovery rail actually look like inside a streaming app on a TV, when it’s done well?

Smith is clear that it shouldn’t be a direct replica of the 9/16 TikTok experience. The goal is not a new format for its own sake but it’s a better answer to the question every streaming viewer asks every night when it’s time to choose something to watch. “I don’t see the big streamers wanting to clone a social media app,” he said, “but I think they’re realizing that short form assets is an incredible way to engage with an audience. So why can’t we take those learnings from social media and apply them to our viewing experience?”

In practice, that starts with editorial decisions at the content level, before you touch the interface at all. The asset itself needs reediting. “It’s the storytelling and the editing that actually makes them most engaging,” Smith told me. “It’s about picking the emotional beats or the hooks from the asset that have those high points.” Reality television works particularly well because the dramatic peaks are short, self-contained and punchy. A confrontation from a competition show can land in two seconds but a scene from a prestige drama generally cannot and trying to force it into that format produces something that serves neither the format nor the show.

The sidebar around a vertical asset becomes useful for actions, watch now, add to list, share, rather than more content. The experience needs to communicate intent immediately because unlike a social feed where users arrive in exploration mode with low commitment, streaming app users often come with something specific in mind. A short-form rail has to earn the right to interrupt that intent by being genuinely useful as a discovery tool, not just visually novel.

There is also a longer-term argument here that goes beyond discovery. “They’re gonna capture far more behavioral data about the user’s experience on the short form content,” Smith said. “What is hooking, what’s engaging, what are they swiping through and that is gonna build up recommendation engines that you’re gonna see on the TV.” The short-form surface is not just a feature, it could be a signal-gathering mechanism that feeds the main recommendation engine and that’s where the real strategic value could compound over time.

Smith is honest about this trend: “We don’t really have enough data on bringing vertical into those apps to know whether it’s going to stick.”

That’s it for today but before you go:

During Streaming Made Easy Live - Lisbon at StreamTV Europe, Tom Smith will present how FX Digital delivered a CTV app for Dyn Media and its 20 Million alternative sports fans.

Join us at StreamTV Europe. Use my code (SME10) to get 10% off here. Our full programming is here. A lot of great content is coming your way.

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That’s it for today. Comments, shares or likes come a long way 🙏🏻

Enjoy your week and see you on Thursday for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!

“I definitely feel FOMO sometimes when I just see like podcast clips going around and ours aren't in the mix. ”

Brian Reed

Disarmingly honest but his FOMO stops here. Brian Reed does not make podcasts the way most people make podcasts. He is the producer behind S-Town, one of the most downloaded audio series in history, and a central figure in the orbit that gave the world Serial at This American Life. He left the New York Times after the acquisition of Serial Productions, co-founded an audio company called Placement Theory and launched a new show called Question Everything, which turns the tools of rigorous investigative journalism onto journalism itself. That is who and I spent an hour with on The Media Odyssey Podcast, tell me how lucky are we?!

We started at the beginning, with a listener email that arrived at This American Life in late 2012 with the subject line “John B. Macklemore lives in shit town, Alabama” and followed Brian through the years of reporting in Bibb County that eventually became S-Town. The show got hundreds of millions of downloads on a story that opens as a murder investigation and becomes something else entirely.

Brian also walks us through how Serial came to exist, why the concept nearly died in a room full of people who did not see the point and what the sale to the New York Times felt like from inside a pandemic.

From there we got into the question on whether audio can sustain itself without chasing video. Brian ran the experiment and stopped, not because the content was weak but because the audience was not there and the video work was pulling resources away from what was actually working.

That argument connects directly to the larger question the episode builds toward, which is what sustainable independent journalism actually looks like when local newsrooms are disappearing, public broadcasting has been defunded and trust between journalists and their audiences is at historic lows. Brian has been reporting on all of it and he is not short of opinions.

Have a listen and come tell me your go to podcasts. Mine? Smartless for my Monday laugh, The Daily for my news, Totemic for my culture shot and On va déguster because of course we, French, listen to pods about food!

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

If you have time for one podcast only, let’s make it The Media Odyssey Podcast, produced with love from Amsterdam & NY.

That’s it for today but before you go:

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That tension sits at the heart of our conversation on our 2nd edition of Off The Record and it is a tension that matters well beyond the music industry.

Today at a glance:

• The content-versus-platform problem

• The buying problem nobody has solved (yet)

• Why this gets harder before it gets easier

• Watch in full and mark your agenda. Our next Off The Record session is on May 7th 5pm CET / 11am EST.

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The content-versus-platform problem

Here is the core argument Brant makes and it is one that every European broadcaster expanding onto third-party platforms pays attention to: YouTube is a distribution platform, not a content category. There are wildly different viewing occasions happening on the same infrastructure. Someone watching a Channel 4 drama on YouTube is in a fundamentally different mindset than someone scrolling through long-tail video to kill time and the advertising receptivity around those two moments is not remotely comparable.

Vevo commissioned research with Amplified Intelligence last year to prove this out. They went into 150 UK households, placed cameras on top of TVs (with consent), collected log-level data from YouTube sessions and measured attention across three tiers of content: premium publisher content (using BARB’s “fit for TV” definition), high-production creator content (think MrBeast-level, studio-worthy but with heavier product placement) and general long-tail video.

The headline finding: a 40% uplift in attention for premium content versus the rest.

But the real kicker was a happy accident. One brand happened to run the same creative across all three tiers during the study period. Same ad, same copy, completely different attention levels depending on the content environment. That is the kind of practical proof that moves a planning conversation forward because percentages are easy to dismiss but seeing the same brand perform differently based purely on content context is hard to argue with.

The buying problem nobody has solved (yet)

Brant is honest about the fact that none of this is easy to act on yet. The industry still boxes inventory by platform: CTV goes in one bucket, YouTube goes in another, Linear TV sits somewhere else entirely. And the viewer, as Brant puts it, has absolutely no concept of any of it, they are just looking for content.

What he is calling for is a framework that defines content quality regardless of where it lives. BARB’s “fit for TV” criteria is one version of that: editorial oversight, studio-level production, broadcast-standard regulation, transparency. But it does not have to be BARB’s version. What matters is that buyers have a way to say: this content ticks these boxes, I want to max it out in my plan and I do not care whether it reaches people via an app, a FAST channel or YouTube.

One market is already doing this and it is not the UK or Germany.

Read more

Late market entry means you cannot afford a quiet launch. You need immediate visibility in the environments where British viewers are already making their daily watch decisions and that makes home screen placement on day one central to your launch strategy.

In our 2nd edition of Above the Fold, in partnership with Looper Insights, we tracked HBO Max’s merchandising tactics and performance on launch day across several UK TV environments focusing on homepage banners, featured rows and promotional integrations.

Today at a glance:

• Sky Q and what dominance actually looks like

• Two platforms, two theories of conversion

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Sky Q and what dominance actually looks like

Sky Q delivered the most valuable placement of launch day according to Looper Insights. HBO Max secured multiple consecutive positions within a high-traffic discovery row on Sky’s homepage, a takeover format designed to cluster placements at the primary entry point. The creative centred on Sky and HBO Max co-branding, anchored by the message “HBO Max is now included” reinforced by clear pricing and recognizable flagship titles. The goal was activation among Sky’s existing pay TV base.

Nothing on Sky’s homepage gets there by accident and nothing gets there for free. That row belongs to Sky. HBO Max either paid to occupy it, traded access as part of the broader commercial arrangement covering Sky subscribers’ ad-supported tier, or, most likely, some combination of both baked into the deal. The Looper data captures what those placements were worth in measurable terms and the full figures are in this report. What the headline picture makes clear is that Sky Q was not simply HBO Max’s best-performing platform on launch day. It was the platform where they concentrated their commercial firepower deliberately.

The logic behind that decision is clear. UK Sky pay TV subscribers get HBO Max's Basic with Ads tier included in their existing subscription as part of a commercial arrangement between the two companies. Both parties have a shared interest in driving activation from day one: HBO Max needed activation among Sky's existing base and Sky needed its subscribers to see value in what their subscription now included.

Two platforms, two theories of conversion

Fire TV and NOW TV both dedicated homepage placements on launch day and the contrast between their approaches is worth understanding.

Fire TV went narrow and deep. The creative used a clean, high-contrast backdrop with bold “HBO Max is right here” messaging, Prime Video co-branding to reinforce accessibility and a selection of recognizable titles to anchor the value proposition with content viewers already knew or were curious about. The underlying argument was simple: if you know what to look for, we are making it impossible to miss.

NOW TV went in the opposite direction. Rather than leading with individual titles, the creative emphasised catalog breadth through a collage-style visual and the message “HBO Max is included with NOW, one app, one price.” The focus was integration and ease of access, positioning HBO Max as a natural extension of the NOW ecosystem rather than a standalone destination requiring a separate decision.

Where Fire TV bet on franchise recognition to drive clicks, NOW TV bet on simplicity and value clarity to reduce friction at the point of entry. These approaches reflect different assumptions about where each platform’s audience sits in the decision process and which argument closes fastest given the existing relationship between that viewer and that platform.

What the Looper Insights data captures is the opening move, three platforms, three different commercial and creative approaches, all measured on the same day against the same objective. March 26 was the “easiest” day. From here, HBO Max has to earn its place on those home screens every single week.

The full picture, including placement values, impression volumes, creative analysis and the complete £MPV and pMPV figures across Sky Q, Fire TV and NOW TV, is in the Looper Insights report, available for download here.

That’s it for today. Comments, shares or likes come a long way 🙏🏻

Catch up on our previous reads:

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Enjoy your weekend and see you next week for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!

“1.5 million. There's no way that humans can scale that kind of editing thing.”

Evan Shapīro

This week on The Media Odyssey Podcast, and I sit down with Olivier Reynaud who helped build Teads into one of the most consequential video advertising platforms in the industry. He solved distribution at scale then he watched that same scale create a problem nobody had a clean answer to so he built Aive, a Creative Intelligence Platform for Brands, Agencies, Broadcasters and Creators.

We get to go deep on what it takes to feed the social video machine without burning your team to the ground. A challenge every company with a video strategy faces. One number Evan pulled frames the whole episode: Netflix created 1.5M different versions of their Stranger Things trailer for YouTube and social media. 20+ social platforms, hundreds of formats, multiple markets & languages, every single day. No human team does that.

Aive’s answer is to transform video into data first. Their proprietary technology runs more than 25 AI models across content, detecting scenes, emotions, framing and structure, then uses that data to automate the versioning work: reframing, format adaptation, subtitling across 70 languages, voice dubbing, all of it. Around 80% of the repetitive production work gets handled automatically. Teams stay in the loop for the decisions that actually require judgment and pure creativity.

We couldn’t resist asking Olivier about Sora shutting down and his answer might surprise you. And yes we ran a live demo of Aive’s platform on our own podcast content and had so much fun turning Evan into a French Canadian speaker and myself as a Spaniard. This one is worth watching on YouTube. Trust us.

The team will be at NAB and Adobe Summit so book a meeting with them to see for yourselves:

Book a demo

Use Aive’s exclusive code (NS015504) for a FREE Show Floor Pass and join them at NAB, the event redefining the future of media and entertainment:

Grab a free pass to NAB

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

If you have time for one podcast only, let’s make it The Media Odyssey Podcast, produced with love from Amsterdam & NY.

That’s it for today but before you go:

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“I came to you because of the name. Streaming Made Easy. But streaming isn't easy.”

Tom Chmielewski, VP EMEA, Testlio

He has a point. The name of this newsletter is aspirational. What it actually takes to deliver a working streaming service, across dozens of countries, hundreds of device combinations and payment methods, is anything but. That is exactly what Tom and I got into this week.

Testlio runs a managed crowd testing service which covers devices, operating systems, languages and payment methods at a scale no in-house QA lab can replicate. SkyShowtime used over 1,500 devices and OS combinations across 22 countries and 18 languages for a single launch. NBC Universal’s global streaming technology team (the same team that runs Peacock, Sky, Showtime, Now TV and more) relies on them across 80 countries.

The insight that stuck with me was what Roku’s localisation lead Nicole Kittle described as the difference between a service that appears “made for their market, not just translated for it.” That is a different bar entirely and most operators are not meeting it yet.

What Tom kept coming back to is a pattern I often see in this industry: operators invest heavily in content and distribution and then lose the consumer in the last meter. The payment method does not work, the interface feels wrong or the app behaves differently on a device that has been on the market for four years and will stay on that wall for four more.

We discuss that and much more in this interview. Watch our full conversation above 👆🏻

Join us on April 14th at 4.20pm during StreamTV Europe (code: PORTUGAL gets you 20% off). We’re bringing Sylviane Lecomte (Bedrock Streaming) and Antonio Vieira (Sky Portugal) to understand how they make sure their platforms make streaming easy.

That’s it for today but before you go:

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Comments, shares or likes come a long way 🙏🏻

Enjoy your week and see you on Thursday for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!

“The ritual’s probably the biggest word I would say around determining success for creators on YouTube. Are you part of someone’s ritual every week, every day?”

Jordan Schwarzenberger, Co-founder, Arcade Media

This week on The Media Odyssey Podcast, and I sit down with Jordan Schwarzenberger, CEO & Founder of Arcade, management company behind The Sidemen, a creator collective with 244 million followers and a business that now runs 55 people deep. Getting him on the pod took me the better part of a year and within the first few minutes you understand why I chased Jordan so bad. He’s a knowledge machine. We spent an hour listening in awe.

Jordan has a way of making things the industry has been arguing about for years suddenly feel very simple and very urgent. He gets into the Netflix deal, the YouTube algorithm, what broadcasters consistently misread when they show up on the platform and a commercial model he just launched that puts Arcade in territory previously occupied only by Sky, ITV and Channel 4. He also makes the case, grounded in a decade of building actual businesses, for why the metric everyone obsesses over is probably the wrong one.

By the end of the conversation you will have a different word in your head when you think about what actually builds a media business that lasts.

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

Comments, shares or likes come a long way 🙏🏻

Enjoy your week and see you on Tuesday for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!

Audiences are splitting across platforms, attention spans are shrinking and long-form content is being carved into clips for feeds that reward speed over substance. Ask anyone in the industry and they will tell you this is the defining condition of the business. That is true everywhere. But it is not the whole truth.

Viewers know the landscape has changed. They just do not think it has changed for the better. The Living Room Study shows that 73.6% of Europeans say social media has lost its capacity to create real social connections, the highest of any region in the study. The US is close behind at 72.2%. The platforms built to bring people together did the opposite. And yet, in one room in the house, people still sit side by side, watch the same thing at the same time, and talk to each other when the ads come on. The living room did not need an algorithm to do what social media promised and failed to deliver.

For five years, the Living Room Study has tracked how Europeans watch video content. Every edition has returned the same core finding: the living room is not losing ground in Europe. It is gaining relevance. 83% of respondents watch video in their living room, compared with 58% in the United States. These are not the habits of a market in decline. They are the habits of a market that values something the rest of the industry is struggling to recreate: deliberate, present, shared attention.

Attention is the word our industry uses most and understands least. We measure it as an individual metric, one person, one screen, one impression. But European viewing does not follow that model. Here, attention is collective. It compounds. That changes what an impression is worth, what a brand encounter produces, and what kind of creative actually lands.

What Europe has built around its main screen has no equivalent anywhere else in the world. There is a reason Netflix, Amazon, Disney, and YouTube are seeking partnerships with European broadcasters. This environment, the trust, the consistency, and the audiences who show up and stay, is not something a platform can manufacture through pure scale or spend. It was built over decades of local broadcasting, free-to-air access, and cultural proximity. It is not a legacy position. It is an asset worth protecting, and the reason these partnerships exist. Broadcasters who are smart about it leverage those partnerships to solve their own challenges too: reaching audiences who expect trusted content to be available everywhere, on demand, without friction.

Stephane Coruble, CEO of RTL AdAlliance, writes about collaboration as Europe’s competitive edge. He is right. But collaboration works because there is something worth collaborating around. That something is an audience that still pays attention, together, on purpose.

The rest of the world is trying to solve the problem of fragmentation. The pages that follow show why Europe never fully bought into it.

The replay of the Living room Club and the 5th edition of the Living Room report are out now. Hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoyed making them for you.

WATCH REPLAY:

DOWNLOAD REPORT: https://rtl-adalliance.com/article/living-room-study

Wanna brush off on past reports beforehand? Dig in: Living Room 2025; Living Room 2024; Living Room 2023; Living Room 2022.

That’s it for today. Comments, shares or likes come a long way 🙏🏻

Enjoy your week and see you this weekend for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!

SyncMint, founded a year ago by Mehmet Eroglu and Pieter Oonk, is trying to close that gap with a technical approach that works at European scale and a privacy by design architecture. I sat down with them to get to the bottom of this.

The problem with the American blueprint

The dominant model for TV advertising data in the US was pioneered around 2010 and built around a very specific set of market conditions. A module on the device captures a sample of what is on screen every few seconds, sends that sample to a central server and matches it against a database of known content covering hundreds of channels, thousands of hours of programming, and every ad creative in active rotation. The match tells you what a household was watching and which ads they were exposed to and that data flows to broadcasters, advertisers and device manufacturers as commercially actionable intelligence.

The problem is that this infrastructure is expensive to run, requiring server capacity and content databases that cost millions to maintain and those costs are only justifiable when you have tens of millions of devices contributing data simultaneously. When your addressable footprint is 400K TVs in the Netherlands or 200K in Belgium, the math falls apart entirely. The vendors who built the US system have shown little interest in adapting their operating model for smaller markets, because there is no version of that model that works at European scale without a fundamental rethink of the architecture.

Why TV manufacturers need this more than ever

To understand why this matters commercially, it helps to understand just how thin the economics of Smart TV manufacturing actually are. The bill of (hardware) materials on a mid-range set is substantial and after accounting for manufacturing, logistics, retail and OS licensing, the margin available to the device maker is narrow enough that the business has always depended on supplementary income streams to stay viable.

For a period, those supplementary streams came from the operating system arrangements that defined the last decade of CTV. When Google was actively building Android TV’s device footprint, it paid bounty fees to manufacturers like Sony and TCL, a fixed payment for every set sold with the OS installed, because it needed their distribution reach. Smaller OS providers without the same financial firepower structured similar arrangements around revenue share, promising manufacturers a cut of the monetisation generated on their hardware.

Now layer in a supply chain disruption that has nothing to do with streaming or software with AI companies purchasing available memory at scale and the downstream effect on consumer electronics manufacturers is genuinely severe.

"A customer told us that their cost was around 1$ for a certain memory type and it's now at $44. That's the immense difference they're facing right now. If you don't have the means to subsidise your brand with other income streams, you’re in for a struggle."

Mehmet Eroglu, co-founder

For a manufacturer without the balance sheet depth of a Samsung or LG, that kind of shock does not get absorbed into the P&L. It threatens the entire unit economics of the business and pushes the question of supplementary revenue from consideration to necessity. Data revenue shared directly with the device manufacturer, generated from advertising intelligence that already exists on the hardware they produce, offers a way to address that pressure without requiring them to build a platform, acquire content rights or compete with the OS providers already running on their devices.

How the detection actually works

SyncMint’s technical approach starts with a deliberate constraint that turns out to be a significant advantage. Rather than trying to identify everything on screen, the module embedded in the device’s chipset is trained to detect one specific type of content: advertising. Not sport, not news, not drama, just the ads.

This is not an arbitrary limitation. Advertising content is structurally distinct from everything else on television precisely because it is designed to be: every piece of ad creative is built to stand out, to be immediately recognisable and to not sound or look like the programming it interrupts. That distinctiveness makes advertising far easier to detect than content. Football matches are notoriously difficult to distinguish from each other because the first five seconds of almost every game feature a whistle and crowd noise. Identifying ad creative A versus ad creative B is a far simpler problem and a far lighter one to run on a small portion of a chip’s processing power.

The local (as in ‘on device’) fingerprinting architecture compounds this efficiency. Rather than sending samples to an external server for matching against a vast catalog, the algorithm runs on the device itself, checking incoming audio against a library it already holds locally. On top of the audio detection layer sits a contextual classification engine powered by machine learning, which adds a second dimension to the data. This engine does not identify specific content, it classifies it. It recognises that what is on screen is football rather than tennis, that a Rolex ad is airing during a sports broadcast with Sinner visible and a sponsor logo on court, that the viewing context is premium sport rather than late-night infomercial. It builds meaningful context around each advertising exposure without attempting to build any kind of profile of the person watching. For most planning purposes, that classification is exactly what advertisers need: confirmation that their message reached a household in a specific viewing context and a record of how many times that week it already had.

Privacy as architecture, not compliance

Systems operating in the US can combine a household’s IP address, device identifiers, screen size and detailed viewing history into a behavioral profile that tells you the address, the hardware specification and what that household was watching at eleven on a Friday night. That is one-to-one profiling of personal behaviour, it has already attracted legal scrutiny in the US including an ongoing case in Texas and it reflects a data philosophy that sits awkwardly with how Europeans think about the relationship between their devices and their private lives.

SyncMint’s architecture makes those profiles structurally impossible to build rather than merely difficult to access. The module detects advertising exposure and nothing else. It does not log what content a household watches, how long a viewing session lasts or any behavioural signal outside of which ads have appeared on screen and in what context. There is no viewing diary being assembled anywhere in the system, no content fingerprint being transmitted to a server and no persistent household identifier linking sessions together into a longitudinal profile. The data that flows out of the device is limited, by design, to what is commercially useful for advertising measurement and excludes everything that would make it useful for surveillance.

“The data harvesting that legacy competitors do always felt uncomfortable, especially coming from a European perspective. So we took the approach of: what if we look at advertising exposure only? No one particularly minds that they drive past a billboard and see it. The advertising is there to support.”

Pieter Oonk, co-founder SyncMint

Oonk’s billboard comparison captures the underlying logic cleanly. Nobody objects to driving past a billboard and being counted as part of the audience measurement for that location. They did not choose to see the ad but they understand the implicit exchange between free content and commercial exposure. The data SyncMint collects is the television equivalent: a record of advertising exposure, measured in aggregate, without any of the behavioural inference that has made US Smart TV data practices a target for regulators.

What advertisers do with the data

The most immediate commercial use case is frequency management and the planning gap it addresses is more significant in Europe than most media buyers will acknowledge.

Every major advertiser has a view on optimal frequency for a given campaign. According to Oonk, for a major retailer, historical data pointed to an optimal frequency of seven impressions per week, roughly one per day, and hitting that target consistently across both linear and streaming was something their current media buy could not verify.​​​​​​​Staying within that range matters both for efficiency and for how the brand is perceived by the audience. What advertisers have consistently lacked is a reliable way to measure whether they are hitting that target, because linear and CTV are planned and bought through separate systems that do not share household-level data with each other. The linear buy gets optimised against panel reach data. The CTV buy gets optimised against digital impression metrics. Nobody reconciles the two at the household level, because until now there was no data that made that reconciliation possible.

The practical result plays out in every major European market: a household ends up seeing the same supermarket ad ten times in three days because the linear team and the streaming team each optimised their buy in isolation, while a competitor’s message reaches that same household zero times because no one had the visibility to identify and fill the gap.

SyncMint provides a single view of advertising exposure across both environments, which closes the loop and makes it possible to plan against reality rather than against assumptions.

The CPM uplift this kind of data enables is well evidenced in the US market. Oonk points to Vizio as the clearest example: household-level targeting and incremental reach measurement delivered three to four times higher CPMs compared to standard run-of-network rates, a difference that reflects the premium buyers will pay when they can verify they are reaching genuinely unduplicated audiences. On the buy side, a planner managing a major consumer brand campaign can use the data to set different bid prices for households already at frequency saturation versus those that are hard to reach because they are predominantly streaming-only viewers and that kind of bid optimisation creates real efficiency at a scale that European CTV has been promising for years without having the underlying data to support it.

Linear inventory, notably, tends to be the underserved channel in these analyses. The industry narrative around CTV targeting has pulled planning attention and budget toward streaming, but most European households remain cord-shavers rather than cord-cutters, spending a meaningful share of their viewing time on linear while also using streaming services. Those two environments live in separate planning silos and the data that would connect them across a single household view has simply been absent. That absence is what SyncMint is building against.

We’ll discuss that in more details during Streaming Made Easy Live as part of Stream TV Europe.

That’s it for today. Enjoy your weekend and see you on Thursday for another edition of Streaming Made Easy.

TF1+ just added a dedicated podcast category to its streaming platform, bringing together 21 brands, 453 episodes and over 220 hours of content spanning true crime, politics, culture, sport and more, all free and accessible from the homepage. The lineup leans on familiar TF1 faces: Jacques Pradel on criminal cases, Audrey Crespo-Mara on long-form celebrity interviews, François Lenglet on economic conversations and Pablo Mira on celebrity daily routines.

The format is video-first podcast (vodcast), designed to work whether you watch or just listen, which turns a streaming app into a companion app, one that follows users beyond the couch and into the commute, the kitchen and the gym. Extending reach beyond the living room has real value for a free ad-supported platform trying to maximise daily touch points.

Two years into its rebirth as TF1+, the broadcaster’s streaming platform is turning more and more into a multi-vertical entertainment destination that happens to be powered by a broadcaster. Throughout 2025, it garnered 38M monthly active users, with a peak at 42M in October, and it’s looking to give more and more reasons to users to come back and stay.

🇪🇸 Movistar Plus+ finds its groove

Movistar Plus+ added 278,000 subscribers in 2025, a 7.9% year-on-year jump that took its total base to 3.8 million across IPTV and OTT. For context, in 2024 the net gain was just 94,000.

Their formula? Premium local originals, stacked sports rights and enough international series to round out the library. On the content side, Movistar Plus+ originals picked up 13 Goya Awards including Best Film and Best Director for Los Domingos. Sirat earned two Oscar nominations. On sports, Champions League renewed until 2031, LALIGA secured through 2031/32, the 2026 FIFA World Cup added through a DAZN deal and a new FIBA basketball agreement on top.

What makes Movistar Plus+ interesting is what it represents structurally. This is a telco-owned platform competing credibly against global streamers in a major European market by doing exactly what the textbook says: invest in local, lock up sports and grow distribution. In a continent where everyone talks about scale, Movistar Plus+ is proof that depth in a single market still works.

📊 Europe is not America (and we’ve got the data to prove it)

Four years of data, 17 countries, 15,000+ respondents. The RTL AdAlliance Living Room report is the largest ongoing study of European viewing behaviour

The 5th edition, which Streaming Made Easy is co-producing with RTL AdAlliance, goes even wider: three continents, and for the first time, data on how Europeans feel about AI-generated video content, long-form content chopped into shorts and more. We are unpacking it live on March 25th. Tune in live at 10am CET. You’ll get a QR code to download the full report afterwards.

Register

🇺🇸 What US audiences actually want

Tubi’s annual audience study The Stream (produced with The Harris Poll) is out and it’s one of the few reports that tells you what US audiences actually do, not what the industry assumes they do. One stat that stood out: 77% of respondents prefer on-demand over scheduled linear streaming. Three to one. Another: three quarters of viewers say streaming together is now household quality time. Co-viewing is back, well it never really left.

and I got an advanced copy and broke it down on this week’s Media Odyssey Podcast. We also dug into the Paramount investor deck making the rounds and let’s just say there’s a lot of money talk and very little strategy in those slides.

The Stream is free. Go download it. The podcast is wherever you listen to podcasts: APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE.

🐾 PAW Patrol runs Netflix Kids

PAW Patrol claimed the number one spot in Netflix Kids by hours viewed in H2 2025, powered by its US debut on the platform. That’s the headline from the fifth edition of ’s Netflix Kids Content Performance Report and it’s packed with signals worth tracking.

The preschool category is now the most competitive space in Netflix Kids. Gabby’s Dollhouse still dominates across the full year with over 600 million hours viewed. Ms. Rachel jumped from number six to number four within her first year on the platform. CoComelon’s decline is now a multi-year trend that new seasons can’t reverse. And Sesame Street’s much-hyped Netflix arrival? Landed on the lower end of performance benchmarks.

Two patterns stand out. First, creator-led content is no longer a curiosity. Ms. Rachel, CrunchLabs (Mark Rober), Little Angel: YouTube-native brands are building real scale on Netflix. Second, legacy IP refuses to get out of style. SpongeBob pulled 143 million hours viewed, 40% ahead of its nearest comedy competitor, without even being on Netflix in the US. That catalogue power matters enormously as the Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery merger speculation continues. Where those franchises end up will reshape the kids streaming map for years.

Emily Horgan’s report is the closest thing this space has to an industry standard. If you work in kids content, licensing or distribution, you gotta grab it here.

📣 SME Live Amsterdam is back!

Our programming for SME Live Lisbon during Stream TV Europe is a wrap (we start at 9am sharp on April 13th!) so it’s time to get started on SME Live Amsterdam now.

Last September, 118 executives from Netflix, YouTube, BBC, Sky, Canal+, Paramount and 90+ other companies flew into Amsterdam a day before IBC for a half day of talks and networking. They rated the experience 4.7 out of 5.

On September 10th 2026, SME Live returns at a new location, Rode Hoed, expanding to a full day and ready to welcome 200+ executives around the theme of The Long Game. Five years of reactive mode, quarterly pressure and short-term pivots have left the industry good at firefighting and less good at building. This edition is designed to create space for the conversations that don't fit in a 45-minute panel: where European content investment actually goes from here, what the talent equation looks like when AI is in the room, which distribution models are built to last and who owns the audience relationship when the platform wars settle.

Talks, case studies and structured networking in a single-track room where Media meets Tech as equals. No overlapping sessions, no FOMO.

The waitlist is now open, priority access and early bird pricing go to waitlist subscribers first before tickets go on sale April 19th. Last year, the event sold out and 63 people were left on the outside looking in.

Join the waitlist

🗳️ Poll time

That’s it for today. Enjoy your weekend and see you on Tuesday for a Deep Dive edition of Streaming Made Easy Premium.

“It’s not you. It’s not me. It’s your playlist.”

Evan Shapiro, co-host, The Media Odyssey Podcast

This week on The Media Odyssey Podcast, and I dig into two reports that together paint a sharp picture of where the streaming industry stands right now. One is full of insights to build a strategy while the other makes you question whether there is one.

First: Tubi‘s The Stream (in partnership with The Harris Poll), their annual study on audience behaviour in the US. They gave us an advanced copy and we found real gems.

If you work in streaming, this report should be required reading. It’s packed with data and some of the findings will challenge a few assumptions the industry has been holding onto for a while.

The Stream is out now. Go download the report for free here.

Then Evan Shapīro got his hands on the Paramount investor deck making the rounds. We looked into the numbers, ran the analysis and found a whole lot of money talk and very little strategy.

Here's what jumped out:

→ Combined revenues went from $71B to $66B between 2023 and 2025 but the deck projects a climb to $84B by 2030.
→ EBITDA has been flat or down for three years and somehow growth magically kicks in this year.
→ $8B in tech cuts, $6B in business services cuts, $4B in real estate sales, all while promising "no massive layoffs."
→ Bank of America apparently agrees with us, downgrading Paramount stock from a buy at $13 to a sell at $11.

And that's just the US side of things. We also looked at Europe where the added complexity lives.

Grab our slides and 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

Comments, shares or likes come a long way 🙏🏻

Enjoy your week and see you on Sunday for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!

We’re going live on March 18th (5pm CET / 11am EST) right here on Substack. No need for Riverside this time. You can click the link below to join or simply open your Substack app on the day and you’ll see me live at the top of your homepage.

Read more

New research from Bango, surveying 4,000 consumers across the US and UK in January 2026, puts hard numbers behind this shift. 61% of Brits now expect streaming services to be included within their internet, TV or phone package, not as a bonus but as a baseline expectation. 31% of Americans say they are done with standalone subscriptions entirely, a figure that rises to 48% among Gen Z. And 71% of British consumers say they are more loyal to telcos that help them save money on subscriptions.

The consumer verdict is in: whoever simplifies the subscription mess wins. The open question is who that “whoever” turns out to be because the candidates are not limited to the usual suspects. Retailers, neobanks, publishers and even creator-led brands are all making moves.

Today at a glance:

• The squeeze

• Those who bundle

• Those who get bundled

• The new wildcards

Download the report

The squeeze

The pressure to bundle is hitting every part of the European media and telecom ecosystem at once.

On the streaming side, fragmentation has reached its natural limit. European households juggle an average of 3.2 subscriptions (vs 4.5 in the US and 3.5 in LATAM) and after years of price hikes, consumers are consolidating rather than adding blindly. Smaller SVOD services have already become add-on channels inside aggregators. For streamers who lack the scale of a Netflix or Disney+, the question is no longer “how do I grow directly” but “which bundle do I need to be inside to grow the most.”

On the telecom side, Europe is consolidating toward three operators per country. According to Analysys Mason, 56% of Europeans live in a three-MNO market by end of 2025, up from 46% a decade earlier. When connectivity commoditises, differentiation moves upstream to whoever controls the bundle, the billing and the discovery layer.

European broadcasters feel it too. Partnerships with former rivals (Netflix with TF1, France Televisions with Amazon, Disney+ with ITV, Atresmedia and ZDF, RTL with Sky) are multiplying because doing it alone is no longer viable. These deals are bundling strategies in disguise: exclusivity traded for distribution reach.

And here is the demand signal that should worry everyone: Bango’s earlier European research found that 19% of subscribers across the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy use pirate streaming as their only way to get content in one place.

Those who bundle

The companies winning this race share one trait: they control the interface (and underneath the billing relationship) between the consumer and the content.

Sky’s February 2026 move is the clearest example. Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max and Hayu packaged into a single TV subscription from 24 pounds a month, with genuine Sky OS integration: unified recommendations, cross-app Continue Watching and voice search that spans every service.

Canal+ runs a similar play in France with Apple TV and Paramount+ included for all subscribers. Deutsche Telekom is scaling operator-led Disney+ bundles across its European footprint starting with Hungary.

CTV platforms are playing the same game from a slightly different angle. Samsung, LG and others control the home screen (but often lag behind on the payment layer), which in a bundle economy is arguably the most valuable real estate in streaming. These platforms now operate their own FAST channels, ad sales and subscription storefronts. For any streamer without Netflix-level scale, home screen visibility is an existential question.

Those who get bundled

Paul Larbey, CEO of Bango, puts it bluntly: “if telcos do not move quickly to become the orchestrators of subscription access, they risk being reduced to a product inside someone else’s experience.”

That warning extends beyond telcos. For content providers, getting included in a Sky or Deutsche Telekom bundle delivers scaled distribution and lower acquisition costs. But someone else owns the customer relationship and in some cases the product fades in the background leaving only content as the driver (often without the appropriate service brand attribution). Bango’s research found that 30% of US SVOD subscriptions were sold through indirect channels. The services that optimise for indirect distribution will reach more subscribers. Those that insist on owning every customer relationship directly will watch their addressable market shrink.

The new wildcards

What makes this moment different is the range of players entering from outside media and telecom.

• Neobanks like Revolut, which launched a mobile network in the UK in January 2026 offering unlimited 5G for 12.50 pounds a month, could bundle subscriptions next.

• Retailers have been testing similar plays. In France, Carrefour piloted a bundle in early 2024 offering customers Netflix Standard with Ads alongside a 10% discount on own-brand products for 5.99 euros a month in Bordeaux and Rouen (but no national roll out ensued). In the US, Walmart+ includes Paramount+ and Peacock and Kroger Boost offers Disney+ Basic.

• Publishers are testing the logic too. In France, Le Monde and Telerama launched a bundle with WBD’s HBO Max in April 2025, folding streaming inside a journalism subscription. The logic works because it serves the same consumer need: consolidate, simplify, reduce.

• Then prominent creators like MrBeast, with 471 million followers, who is planning to launch Beast Mobile and acquired fintech app Step, positioning himself as the GenZ bundler.

The direction is clear: any company with a recurring billing relationship and/or a large customer base or following can position itself as a bundler. The boundaries are dissolving and the only question that matters is who the customer trusts the most to be their default subscription hub.

That’s it for today.

During Streaming Made Easy Live - Lisbon, Giles Tongue, Bango’s Chief Marketing Officer, will join our panel ‘The Living Room in 2030: Super Aggregation or Super Fragmentation?’ where we will discuss what happens by 2030? Will one player own the living room or will we still be switching between apps, juggling subscriptions and forgetting passwords?

Join us at StreamTV Europe. Use my code (SME10) to get 10% off here. We just released our programming here. A lot of great content is coming your way.

🗳️ Poll time

That’s it for today. Comments, shares or likes come a long way 🙏🏻

Enjoy your week and see you on Thursday for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!

On April 13th, I am running a half-day workshop at StreamTV Europe titled “Who Owns the First Click in the Living Room?” Three hours, five sessions, no filler.

The morning opens with data. Côme Fradetal from RTL AdAlliance and I will present the findings from the largest annual study of European viewing behaviour, this year co-produced with Streaming Made Easy. Then Tom Smith from FX Digital opens up their project files to show which product features actually moved the metrics on apps built for Discovery+, BritBox and Dyn Media.

After the break, three panels. One on monetising the big screen without invasive tracking, with Canal+ Brand Solutions, Sharp and SyncMint. One on who is actually winning the sports fan’s living room, with Orange Spain, YouTube and MainStreaming. And a closing debate on whether 2030 looks like super aggregation or super fragmentation, with TF1, Samsung TV Plus, Telenet and Bango on stage.

→ Full programme and registration at StreamTV Europe here, use my code SME10 for a 10% discount.

🤖 Great idea, inconvenient timing

CANAL+ is bringing OpenAI to 42.3M subscribers. I wanted to cheer then I remembered the Gracenote lawsuit.

Starting this June, the CANAL+ App will let subscribers search for content in plain language. Type “something comforting and romantic” and OpenAI’s frontier models return tailored suggestions based on your mood, preferences and context. It could be a real UX leap for content discovery but here is the context the press release did not mention.

Axios reported this week that Nielsen’s Gracenote is suing OpenAI for copyright infringement. The allegation: OpenAI scraped Gracenote’s proprietary media metadata without permission. That includes the structured content data (titles, genres, cast, descriptions) that powers content discovery at scale. Gracenote argues this threatens its core business, as content media distributors could use that data to build competing metadata products and platforms.

That is the irony here. CANAL+ is deploying OpenAI to power content discovery, at the exact moment OpenAI is being accused of appropriating the metadata infrastructure that content discovery runs on.

None of this makes the CANAL+ partnership a bad idea (unless OpenAI is found guilty). But zoom out for a second. If OpenAI can power content discovery at scale directly inside a platform like CANAL+, companies whose entire business is built on structured media metadata, like Gracenote, but also the broader ecosystem of EPG providers, recommendation engines and content intelligence platforms, are looking at a direct threat to their core value proposition. Why license a metadata layer when a frontier model does the job inside the app? This also shows how the industry needs to start asking harder questions about what these models were trained on and whether data rights were properly cleared before signing. Worth watching closely.

→ More here about the Gracenote OpenAI lawsuit here.

🇨🇭 Switzerland backs public media

On March 8, Swiss voters rejected the “200 Francs Is Enough!” initiative by a clear 60% majority. The proposal would have slashed the annual household licence fee from 335 CHF to 200 CHF and scrapped the fee for businesses entirely. Swiss citizens said no. SRG SSR, the public broadcaster serving German, French, Italian and Romansh-speaking regions, keeps its funding model intact.

This matters beyond Switzerland. Public broadcasters across Europe are fighting the same battle on different fronts: defunding proposals, political pressure, platform competition. Switzerland just gave them a rare win but the Swiss broadcaster will still need to operate on a reduced budget by 2029, as decided by The Federal Council.

→ Read the full EBU statement here.

🎯 What Premium actually buys you on CTV

That’s exactly what we’re getting into on our next Off The Record session with Richard Brant, Senior Director Advanced TV at Vevo.

Vevo partnered with Amplified to run one of the most rigorous attention studies ever done on YouTube CTV: 150 households, 19,000+ ad views, 5,000+ YouTube channels and 240+ brands measured. The findings will make you rethink how you value premium inventory on the biggest screen in the home.

Vevo mastered YouTube then went big on CTV so bring your questions to benefit from their experience.

We’re going live on March 18th (5pm CET / 11am EST) right here on Substack. No need for Riverside this time. You can click the link below to join or simply open your Substack app on the day and you’ll see me live at the top of your homepage.

→ If you’re not a premium subscriber yet, consider upgrading to attend and decide if we are a keeper.

Subscribe now

📕 5th edition out on March 25th

Four years of data, 17 countries, 15,000+ respondents. The RTL AdAlliance Living Room report is the largest ongoing study of European viewing behaviour and last week I went through every edition since 2022 to pull out what has actually shifted and what the industry keeps getting wrong.

The 5th edition, which Streaming Made Easy is co-producing with RTL AdAlliance, goes wider still: three continents, and for the first time, data on how Europeans feel about AI-generated video content, long-form content chopped into shorts and more. We are unpacking it live on March 25th. Don’t miss it.

Register to attend

🇪🇸 Spain’s free streaming map: who’s winning

Spain is running one of Europe’s most active free streaming experiments and most markets are not paying attention. In this week’s Deep Dive, I mapped the full competitive landscape using GECA’s FAST Barometer (three waves, 1,000 Spanish users per wave) and Omdia data to show who is leading, who is growing and what the numbers actually mean for platforms fighting for the home screen.

→ If you want the full picture, including the ad tolerance data, the SVOD cannibalisation signal and what Prime Video’s move means for the rest of the field, this one is worth upgrading for.

📊 Earnings season, no PR spin

👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here or catch the replay here (we start at the 2’49” mark!).

🇸🇪 Sweden kicks Meta out of the club

Sweden did what no one else had the nerve to do. On March 11, IAB Sweden formally expelled Meta, citing insufficient action against deceptive advertising. The decision came after Bonnier News and Schibsted, two of the biggest Nordic publishers, initiated the case. A first vote on March 10 was thrown out on procedural grounds. The board reconvened the next day and finished the job.

The numbers behind the decision are not in dispute. Reuters reported that Meta internally projected earning $16 billion in 2024 from ads for scams and banned goods, roughly 10% of its annual revenue. Meta has since filed lawsuits against fraudulent advertisers in Brazil, China and Vietnam, removed 134 million scam ads and deployed facial recognition to catch impersonation fraud. IAB Sweden concluded it was not enough. Meta has until April 15 to appeal. IAB UK responded the same week by confirming Meta remains a member in good standing. Worse, Meta received the IAB Gold Standard certification in 2025, while all of this was already known. The Swedish publishers pushed hard and got results. Their counterparts elsewhere, so far, have not. Go Swedes 🙌🏻

Thanks to Justin Lebbon for putting this on my radar.

🗳️ Poll time

That’s it for today. Enjoy your weekend and see you on Tuesday for a Deep Dive edition of Streaming Made Easy Premium.

Photo: Mattias de Frumerie / TT Nyhetsbyrån (Montage)

“If there was a real strategy here, you’d spin Bravo out with this and make it kind of the main hook of their new streaming business.”

Evan Shapiro, co-host, The Media Odyssey Podcast

Earnings season is, among other things, a lie detector test. You can dress up a press release but the numbers tell you what the business actually is, where it is heading and most usefully what the people running it are not saying out loud.

This week on The Media Odyssey Podcast, and I went live to run four of those tests at once. Four companies, all in the middle of some kind of structural shift, whether through a spinout, an acquisition in progress or a full reinvention of their revenue model. One American, three European. All of them revealing, for different reasons.

Plus a quick 2’ lesson to improve Evan’s French skills (or lack thereof) 😁

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

That's exactly what we're getting into on our next Off The Record session. I'm bringing Richard Brant, Senior Director Advanced TV at Vevo, to discuss "What Premium actually buys you on CTV."

Vevo partnered with Amplified to run one of the most rigorous attention …

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Today at a glance:

• Why Spain matters right now

• The Free Streaming map

• How Spaniards feel about ads

• The SVOD cannibalisation signal

• The latest entrant: Prime Video goes free in Spain

• What this means for the platforms that own the home screen

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Why Spain matters right now

Hard data on European markets is still surprisingly scarce. Spain could become the exception thanks to recent Omdia findings and GECA’s FAST Barometer, now in its third wave in under a year.

According to Omdia, monthly FAST usage in Spain sits at 35% of adults and FAST revenues are forecasted to reach $32 million in 2025 and nearly double to $65 million by 2030.

“That Spain leads Europe in FAST consumption is no coincidence. According to Omdia’s data and our own analysis at GECA, the Spanish market possesses a uniquely favourable architecture for this model: high penetration of free platforms, a robust presence of national broadcasters and a highly active connected TV ecosystem. These elements have converged to create an environment where free, ad-supported content is no longer just a supplement to subscription streaming, but a structural pillar of the broader audiovisual landscape.”

Rafael Herrera, Barometer OTT & FAST Director, GECA.

GECA goes further tracking penetration across 20+ individual platforms. Their FAST Barometer consists of quarterly surveys of 1,000 Spanish free platform users (aged 18+) to understand how they consume free video content and on which platforms.

The Free Streaming map

The competitive landscape splits into four segments, each operating on a different logic.

The local broadcasters:

→ RTVE Play (the public broadcaster) sits at 52.2% penetration and has held the number two position across all three waves, confirming that Spain’s public broadcaster has successfully extended its brand and catalogue into the streaming era.

→ Atresplayer (33.8%) remains a significant force with 17 million registered users and 20 million hours of video consumed monthly, even as its penetration has drifted slightly downward since Wave 1.

→ Mediaset Infinity (16.8%) had the most interesting Wave 2 story, jumping 3.8% from October to December in 2025. The start to 2026 was more challenging for the platform as it dropped 1.1%, but that is still a net +2.7%, higher than any other platform.

The international pure players:

→ YouTube dominates the Free Streaming market although YouTube’s performance fluctuates on a quarterly basis. From October to December of 2025, YouTube dropped 2.3% to 68.8%. But by February of 2026, YouTube was back up at 71.2%. It’s too soon to tell if YouTube hit a ceiling or growth is slowing down.

→ Pluto TV has become the third-largest free platform in Spain at 37.8%, gaining 2.3% in Wave 3 and now sits firmly above Atresplayer in the rankings. With 22.7% of respondents watching DAZN, it stands leaps and bounds above other sports-exclusive platforms LaLiga Sports and FIFA+. It is impressive because sports and sport content still perform well on linear television, making grabbing attention for sports content all the more competitive. DAZN had a rough December to February period, however, dropping -4.2% from its 26.9% penetration in December. Rakuten TV (19.8%) and Twitch (16.6%) round out a second tier of international platforms.

The CTV and device manufacturers: Samsung TV Plus recorded the largest point gain of any platform in Wave 3, jumping 5.2% to 22.4%, making it the biggest mover in the entire field over that period. But because the previous period was slower (leaving Samsung at only 17.2% penetration), Samsung only saw a net +1.3%. LG Channels grabs the 11th spot, Xiaomi TV+ 14th, TCL Channel 16th and Whale TV+ 18th.

One segment sits outside the GECA data but deserves a mention.

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For the past four years, RTL AdAlliance’s The New Life of the Living Room report has tracked how Europeans actually watch, pay for and feel about video content. The 2022 edition started with 8,500+ respondents across 10 countries. By 2025, that had grown to 12,500+ respondents, 15 European markets, with the US added as a benchmark (back in 2024). The study earned its authority over time.

I went through all four editions to identify a few key trends (but do grab the reports for more) ahead of the release of the Th edition, which Streaming Made Easy is co-producing with RTL AdAlliance. It goes further than any previous iteration: 15,000+ respondents, 17 countries in 3 continents. Before we get there, here is what four years of data already tell us.

Today at a glance:

→ The US comparison trap

→ Broadcast still owns the first click

→ The ad-tier migration is speeding up

→ Trust is moving in one direction

→ What’s in store for 2026?

The US comparison trap

The 2024 edition introduced the US as a benchmark for the first time. Smart move and not because the markets are similar but because the data proved they are not.

Start with advertising: In the US, 22% of viewers said they actively pay attention to ads. In Europe, that number was 8%. Americans were almost three times more receptive. US viewers also showed far greater tolerance across every platform: ad annoyance on YouTube sat at 38% in the US versus 57% in Europe. On AVOD, 30% versus 41%.

The gap goes beyond attitudes toward ads. It showed up in which platforms people actually use. In the 2025 study, 38% of US respondents watched FAST content on their TV set daily. In Europe, that figure is 10%. YouTube on the TV set hit 53% daily usage in the US versus 30% in Europe.

Churn tells the same story. 53% of US respondents admitted to churning SVOD subscriptions (subscribing for a show, then cancelling). In Europe, that dropped to 37%. Americans treat subscriptions like rentals while Europeans treat them more like utilities. The 2023 edition showed what happens when Europeans do face budget pressure: 48% preferred dropping a subscription entirely rather than switching to a cheaper ad-supported plan (28%). They cancel, they do not downgrade. That is a fundamentally different churn dynamic than the US subscribe-watch-cancel cycle and it has been consistent across multiple editions.

Content preferences diverge too. In 2024, the most-watched genre on European linear TV was news (30% of viewing). In the US, it is sport (22%). This shapes programming strategy, scheduling and ad placement for anyone operating across both regions.

42% of US households were willing to increase their video budget during 2024. In Europe, only 17% said the same.

The takeaway is simple: US trends are directionally interesting. They are operationally misleading for anyone planning a European launch, campaign or content strategy.

Broadcast still owns the 1st click

The 2025 report asked: “when you turn on your TV, where do you go first?”

59% of European viewers go to broadcast content first when they turn on their TV. That is linear TV (51%) plus BVOD (8%), ahead of SVOD (29%), YouTube (10%) and FAST (2%).

The same study mapped genre preferences by platform. Linear TV led for news (59% of viewers watched it there), sport (44%) and entertainment (44%). SVOD dominated only one category: movies and series, at 63%. The genres that drove daily habit, the ones people build their evenings around, still belonged to broadcast (which explains partnerships like the Netflix / TF1 one or Netflix’s content investment into daily soaps like Valle Salvaje with RTVE or Tout pour la lumiere with TF1 and Newen Studios).

When asked to define what counts as “watching TV”, the study shows that the lines of the definition are blurring for viewers, as their opinions differ widely. What stands out is that “watching TV” is perceived as a mix of device, platform and content type. While half of European respondents consider watching long-form content on YouTube via their TV set as “watching TV”, only 22% feel the same about user-generated content (UGC).

The discovery problem that needs fixing

The 2025 study measured how long it takes European viewers to decide what to watch. The results were not flattering for on-demand platforms. 24% of SVOD users spend more than 10 minutes choosing a programme. On YouTube, that drops to 19%. On linear TV, just 15%. Flip it around: 40% of linear TV viewers decide in under a minute. On SVOD, only 22% do.

The reasons matter because SVOD viewers have high expectations for their evening. They are paying for the service and they do not want to waste their time on the wrong pick, which creates a kind of paralysis that linear TV sidesteps entirely by removing the choice. You turn it on and something is already playing.

YouTube has a different problem. 32% of viewers who watch YouTube on their TV admit the content hooks them but they often regret the time spent. That is not a discovery issue but a satisfaction issue: the algorithm is too good at keeping you watching and not good enough at making you feel like the time was well spent.

For platforms and content owners, this is more than a UX complaint. Discovery friction drives churn and decreasing engagement. If subscribers spend 10 minutes browsing and still feel unsure, that frustration compounds over time. The next wave of competitive advantage in streaming will not come from who has the biggest library but from who helps viewers find what they want before the mood passes.

The ad-tier migration

In 2023, the Living Room study captured Europeans at a crossroads. 58% said they preferred to pay for ad-free viewing. 56% said they did not mind ads if it meant free or cheaper access to premium content and 52% agreed with both statements at the same time. That contradiction is the European ad-tier market in one number. Viewers want premium content without ads but they will accept ads if the price is right. The question was always which instinct would win as budgets tightened.

By the 2024 edition, the compromise was gaining ground. 23% of Europeans were switching to cheaper or ad-supported services. Awareness of Netflix’s ad tier (launched late 2022) reached 62% across the five largest European markets. Disney+ trailed at 48%, partly because its ad tier launched a year later. But intent remained low: only 9% of European respondents said they would “definitely” subscribe to Netflix with ads. 56% said they were not bothered by advertising if it meant cheaper access to premium content, well below the 78% in the US.

Then came 2025 where the switch rate jumped to 29%, up 6 points in a single year. That is faster than any prior shift in this study.

What changed? Budget pressure, yes but also normalisation. The 2023 data showed that only 14% of Europeans were “definitely” interested in Netflix with ads. In 2025, 22% of European respondents use Netflix’s ad-supported tier, while 41% pay for the ad-free option. Intent underestimated reality. Once the option existed and the price gap became visible, viewers moved.

📆 Sign up to attend the upcoming RTL AdAlliance & Streaming Made Easy webinar taking place in March 23rd, 2026, where we will unpack the 5th edition of The Living Room report.

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The trust gap keeps widening

Between 2024 and 2025, every legacy media format gained 5 to 6 trust points when Europeans were asked whether they would trust a brand they did not know after seeing or hearing an ad. Radio now leads at 67% (+6pts); Linear TV follows at 66% (+6pts); Cinema at 65% (+5pts); Magazines and newspapers at 64% (+6pts).

The 2025 edition is the first to measure trust across this full spectrum, from legacy media down to individual social platforms: TikTok sits at 23%, Facebook at 31%, Instagram at 34% and YouTube at 41%.

In a world where disinformation erodes audience confidence daily, where brands place their ads is becoming a brand equity decision, not just a reach calculation. Affordable impressions on low-trust platforms are not affordable if they damage how your audience perceives you. European viewers are telling us, clearly and consistently, that they trust professional content environments over social feeds.

The data also reinforces something European broadcasters should shout louder about their ad environments being premium. 57% of European viewers expect ads on linear TV to be fun, 54% expect them to be moving and 67% expect them to be informative. No other platform comes close to those expectations. Viewers are not just tolerating ads on linear TV, they hold them to a higher standard because they value the environment they appear in.

What’s in store for 2026?

The 5th edition goes wider. China and Hungary join the study bringing the total to 17 countries and 15,000+ respondents. That matters because benchmarking European ad tolerance and media trust against markets with fundamentally different media environments, state involvement in broadcasting and social platform landscapes will sharpen arguments that currently rely on the US as the only external reference point.

For the first time, the study also examines how Europeans feel about being exposed to AI-generated video content, whether watching long-form through small clips is a trend and what Europeans like to watch on YouTube. These are not abstract themes, they connect directly to how you plan distribution, allocate ad spend and position your platform in 2026 and beyond.

RTL AdAlliance and Streaming Made Easy will be bringing a report for you to download, a live webinar to attend where Aurélie Brunet de Courssou and I will highlight what caught our attention the most. This is your opportunity to be in the know, don’t waste it.

Sign up to attend our upcoming webinar taking place in March 23rd, 2026.

Register

Wanna brush off on past reports beforehand? Dig in: Living Room 2025; Living Room 2024; Living Room 2023; Living Room 2022.

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Enjoy your week and see you on Thursday for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!