“You have this thing in the US where you have to personify the companies. We’ve been talking about Zaslav. We’ve been talking about Ellison. I’m in European media, and I don’t know if I can name the CEO of Sky or RTL.”

This week’s quote is my own for once. As Evan Shapiro and I welcomed Roben Farzad from NPR’s podcast Full Disclosure on the podcast, I couldn’t help but notice how in Europe, the operator is the organisation while in the US, the operator is the brand on the CEO.

RTL closed its 12.3 million subscriber combination with Sky Deutschland and rolled out a Management Board built from both companies: Stephan Schmitter leads the combined business; Sky’s Elke Walthelm comes in as CHRO; Sky’s Michael Radelsberger takes Chief Consumer Officer; Julia Kloke arrives from Riverty as CFO. Don’t know any of these names? That’s the point.

Compare notes with the other side of the Atlantic: Warner Bros Discovery and Paramount are racing the clock, the FCC and the calendar, with David Zaslav and David Ellison cast as the lead actors.

RTL plus Sky Germany makes sense because the two businesses are genuinely complementary, one free, one pay, with limited audience overlap and a clear plan to integrate streaming, free-to-air and pay-TV under a single management team. Paramount plus Warner? Two studios with the assets to claim a top 3 spot and a real opportunity to build something that neither could build alone, if the org design follows the ambition.

Let’s mark calendars. By June 2027, RTL will have a full year of Sky Deutschland on its books, will the €250 million synergy promise within 3 years be on track? Will Stephan Schmitter’s combined team be past third place in the DACH market and into Netflix and Amazon territory?

By then, the Paramount and Warner combination, if it closes on the timeline Ellison wants, will have its own nine to twelve months of receipts to compare against a very different operating model, with the same underlying question. Did the org produce an incremental and stronger business or simply a combined entity?

That’s the comparison worth running, not the deal announcements, the synergy slides or the CEO interviews. The actual operating results, the jobs kept or cut and the subscriber growth are what we’ll come back to in a year’s time.

Until then, go listen 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 keynote walks through what needs to change fast in our organisations, why fandom matters, what is happening right now (no we’re not standing still) and what is expected of us next.

Here’s the link to access the keynote:

Read more

Happy reading. Happy sleeping for me after this legendary Saturday 30th 2026. Happy Mother’s Day.

🇬🇧 Off to The Shard

Building a streaming business in Europe on your own can be expensive, slow and even risky, particularly in markets you don’t know well. Partnerships change the economics, which is why I’m moderating two sessions at Rakuten TV Enterprise LIVE London on June 9th.

→ A conversation with Ryan Donovan (Sony Pictures Entertainment) and Marcos Milanez (Rakuten TV Enterprise) on how a major studio like Sony leans into FAST and what that opens up for advertisers wanting to align with high-quality, lean-back viewing.

→ A session with Chris Gregory (Samsung TV Plus), Natalie Boot (Media Choice), James Meyer (Radial Entertainment) and Chris Edwards (Rakuten TV Enterprise) on OEM alliances, strategic data sharing between platforms and operators and where the real revenue opportunities are landing right now.

Plenty more across the morning, including Maria Chacon Brito‘s “Under the hood” session revealing what Rakuten TV viewers actually watch.

Fancy joining? We start at 9.30am, June 9th at Shangri-La, The Shard. Reach out at rtv-events-team@mail.rakuten.com to get in.

📲 France Télévisions commissions its first vertical format

Webedia-Elephant unveiled “Shortcut” at its annual After Show this week, a new in-house unit dedicated to vertical fiction in 9/16 format, working across all its production labels.

First project out the door: Le Magasin, a 23-episode scripted series produced by Elephant International for France TV, launching on France Télévisions’ social networks by the end of summer. Two and a half minutes per episode, two leads (Zoé Pinelli and Siméon Ruff) and a long list of French creators playing themselves in the audiovisual storeroom of a fictional production company.

Webedia-Elephant CEO Christian Bombrun doesn’t want to miss the boat on the vertical video boom but unlike other players like RoseBerry and HOLYWATER (who are betting on AI-assisted production of licensed or repurposed IP), Webedia’s bet pairs a production powerhouse with a public broadcaster and the creator economy.

Three questions remain:

→ Scalability: Can Shortcut produce at the volume and cadence vertical formats require, with the right economics without using AI?

→ Distribution: Le Magasin launches on France Télévisions’ social networks. Can the show break out beyond their social accounts?

→ The creator question: The launch buys attention by putting creators on screen. Whether the format holds without that creator-economy crutch is the test of vertical fiction as a real format rather than a one off stunt.

🎥 Build it right, beat Amazon

For episode 4 of Inside the Bundle: The Interviews, Joan Cruells, VP Partnership & Growth at Viaplay, makes a bold call. Aggregation isn’t won by category. It comes down to the platform itself. A broadcaster running on free-to-air logic will never get there. A broadcaster building a real streaming product can stand alongside Amazon, no reason why not.

We also get into why Viaplay is leaning harder into bundles in international markets (great content, smaller marketing machine, crowded shelves), what Bango’s data on indirect subscriptions tells us (over a third of sign-ups now happen through aggregators) and why one-click in is only half the story. One-click out matters just as much because the serial churners always come back.

Watch the full episode here:

Previous episodes: David Bouchier, Kenechi Amobi Belusevic, Vincent Stevens.

Coming next: Ana Lopez from Orange.

🎙️ Skip the 18 months

Most studios spend 18 months developing a pilot. ToonStar drops new episodes every week, adjusts runtime based on what viewers actually do and just crossed 10 billion lifetime views on its breakout show StEvEn & Parker.

This week, Evan Shapiro and I spent time with co-founders John Attanasio and Luisa Huang to get into how. The short version: two in-house tools, Ink & Pixel (AI-driven production speed) and Spot (audience signals feeding the writers’ room), turn every episode into a live test. Cadence, length, character arcs all flex on data. On the traditional studio deal, Luisa’s line lands hard: “They hold your time hostage.”

If Evan’s recent kids ecosystem report made you think the genre was struggling, think again, ToonStar is crushing it.

👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.

👶 Kids YouTube grows up

LUMEE, the ad sales joint venture between Hasbro Entertainment and Animaj that launched in February, just landed its first third-party client and not any client: Disney Advertising 🔥

The deal puts LUMEE in charge of Disney’s Made-for-Kids YouTube inventory in the US, covering 65 channels. The combined LUMEE inventory now spans Peppa Pig, Pocoyo, Transformers, Power Rangers, Maya the Bee, Star Wars Kids, Marvel HQ and more, generating over 100 billion YouTube views in 2025.

Since 2020, targeted advertising on Made-for-Kids content has been disabled in the US under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which gutted the economics of kids YouTube overnight.

LUMEE’s pitch to advertisers: contextual COPPA-compliant placement with video-by-video visibility, in-video signals (a toy truck in the scene triggers a toy truck ad) and a reservation media model similar to YouTube Select.

Let’s not forget to note the Disney posture shift behind this deal. For years, the major studios treated YouTube as either a marketing channel or a competitor. Handing a Hasbro-led JV the right to sell against Star Wars Kids and Marvel HQ inventory is a clear sign that Disney is prepared to do more on YouTube provided the economics are there.

Read the full announcement on lumee.io.

📺 Roku revamps the home screen

When I was at Roku, the home screen was sacred. App tiles in a grid, a few shortcuts on the left nav bar and that was it (despite partners telling us it was so ugly 😬). Roku was staying clear of the content first approach fellow CTV platforms embraced. Through the years, Roku added multiple entry points like Sports Zone but nothing substantial on the overarching look and feel.

This week, that decade-old layout got its biggest overhaul yet but it’s not so much about the look and feel (although seeing a content first rail is a big change for them) but more about how the Home Screen is adapting to viewers.

What’s actually new: a content-first “Top Picks for You” row up top with AI-driven recommendations, a “Quick Access” rail that learns which apps you actually use, “Destinations” hubs that bundle content by genre and mood across the platform (including a Subscriptions destination that surfaces content from every paid app you have), a real-time “Daily Scoop” row tied to cultural moments (premieres, viral hits, celebrity beats), a collapsed navigation menu (that’s a big change, the left nav bar was again sacred) and an interactive Roku City tile.

A few threads worth pulling. The biggest shift is content-first, not only app-first. Roku’s grid of app tiles defined the CTV home screen for a decade. The Subscriptions destination does similar work on the other side: it puts every paid app, including Howdy and the 70+ partners on Roku’s Premium Subscriptions roster, one row away from the watcher who already pays for them.

The question is whether intelligence can do what simplicity used to. Roku doubled its base from 50M to 100M households on the back of being the easy answer. The next 50M will not be that easy and ARPU is still stuck around $40, $10 below the original 50$ goal. The home screen is the highest-traffic inventory in streaming. If this redesign moves ARPU even $2-3 over the next 18 months, it pays for itself many times over. If it doesn’t, the Home Screen overhaul story gets much harder to tell.

Read the full Roku announcement.

That’s it for today but before you go:

🗳️ Poll time

Most studios spend 18 months developing a pilot before it sees an audience. The founders, on this week’s episode of The Media Odyssey Podcast, push new episodes weekly, adjust runtime based on what viewers do and just crossed 10 billion lifetime views on their breakout show.

Evan Shapiro and I hung out with John Attanasio and Luisa Huang, the co-founders of ToonStar. Both came out of the Warner Bros digital team that handled Time Warner’s early investment in Maker Studios, before leaving to build a studio designed for YouTube and social as the next home for animation.

Their breakout show, StEvEn & Parker, started life with a TikToker called Parker James who had close to 9 million followers and a voice filter which made for a compelling character. It now runs in 5 languages, is 200+ episodes deep, has a Random House graphic novel already on shelves and a streamer deal incoming.

The how (did they get there) matters here. ToonStar built two pieces of technology in-house: Ink and Pixel (machine learning and generative AI driving production speed) and Spot (audience signals that flow back into the writers’ room). They call the combination an agile production loop. Episode length, cadence and character arcs flex weekly based on what the data says viewers are doing, which is the opposite of how television has worked for decades.

“They hold your time hostage.”

Luisa Huang, co-founder, ToonStar

Money is the obvious price of a traditional development deal, but time is the invisible one and it often costs more. ToonStar’s pitch to creators is that you do not have to surrender either.

We also get into what linking production to performance looks like in practice, how the AI conversation plays out when artists stay in charge of the story and their fresh Harper Collins partnership.

If Evan’s recent kids ecosystem report convinced you the genre was struggling, this episode is the rebuttal. ToonStar’s mix of in-house tooling, weekly cadence and live audience signal is one of the more grounded answers to the kids economics problem I have seen this year.

Go listen or watch in full 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.

That’s it for today but before you go:

🗳️ Poll time

For our newest edition of Above the Fold with Looper Insights, we collected data for the first half of the playoff window, from 14 to 30 April across US CTV environments (Fire TV, Apple TV, PS5, Samsung TV (2022), Xfinity, PS4, Xumo Comcast, Sony TV (2019), Apple iPhone, Xumo Charter), to capture how the three streamers promoted the games they had, who showed up loudest, who chose which tactic and what else they could have done.

Today at a glance

• Peacock made the comeback hard to miss

• Prime Video bet on marquee

• ESPN took the flexible route

• The tactic everyone left on the table

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Peacock made the comeback hard to miss

NBC last carried the NBA in 2002. How did they do this year? They’re happy and call it a triumph. NBC Sports will present up to 41 games of live coverage throughout the First Round and Conference Semifinals, as well as exclusive coverage of the entire Western Conference Finals.

Peacock chose to have presence across multiple environments rather than depend on a single hero unit. The result is the broadest sustained CTV footprint ($MPV™) of any streamer in the window we studied.

Now the focus on bundles was an interesting move and reads as a broadcaster reasserting itself in a category it has not held in a while. Within Prime Video, Peacock surfaced inside a co-branded placement that paired its NBA Playoffs coverage with Apple TV’s Friday Night Baseball under a single Bundle and Save offer. The placement traded scale for context, reaching users already in a live sports mindset and giving them a value proposition tied to two live rights properties at once.

Prime Video bet on marquee

Amazon has never carried NBA games before this season. The new deal gives Prime Video 66 regular-season games and a share of the playoff games. Their home screen approach is about specificity.

The representative Prime Video placement anchors the playoff window around a named matchup and an “It’s on Prime” lockup. The Watch Now CTA sits directly under the matchup card. There is no abstract bracket motif and no generic “the playoffs are here” framing.

With multiple games happening every week across all broadcasters, this is the tactic to adopt to grab viewers’ attention and take action right away on the games you own. The placement also promotes frictionless access with the “It’s on Prime”. The route to the live game is direct.

ESPN took the flexible route

ABC and ESPN are entering their 24th consecutive season as NBA rights holders. The renewal also keeps the NBA Finals on ESPN as an exclusive during ten of the eleven years of the deal.

The tactical home screen choice reflects that position. The representative ESPN placement surfaces through Sling with high-energy basketball imagery, a “Flex with the Playoffs” headline and a $4.99 per day access price baked into the creative. The CTA reads Watch Live. The framing centres on flexibility and access, with the exclusivity messaging held in reserve for the part of the post season ESPN does not have to share.

The access angle introduces some friction at the entry point because the daily price tag sits inside the placement itself.

The tactic everyone left on the table

Three positions in the deal produced three tactical answers. Prime Video built its creative around specific matchups and named players. ESPN built its creative around daily pricing and flexibility. Peacock layered both and added a third play the other two did not run: the bundle.

One tactical move from a comparable live sports window did not show up in the first half of the NBA Playoffs. March Madness creative across leading streamers led with bold NOW STREAMING treatments at the point of entry, prominent LIVE flags and explicit date callouts inside the placement itself. The placements were built to communicate live availability before the viewer registered anything else.

NBA Playoffs creative carried Watch Now and Watch Live CTAs but they sat smaller and were out-shouted by matchup naming, access pricing and bundle messaging. The live cue became one element in the placement rather than the headline of the placement. It is the easiest creative fix available to any of the three streamers for the remainder of this season and for the upcoming ten seasons the trio will share.

Get the full picture 👇🏻

The Top 3 streamer rankings by $MPV™: where NBC/Peacock, Prime Video and ESPN landed on dollar value, total visibility and impressions during the opening weeks of the playoff window sits inside the Looper Insights report.

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

Catch up on our previous reads:

🗳️ Poll Time:

France Télévisions co-produced six awarded films at Cannes this week, including Fjord by Cristian Mungiu, which took the Palme d’Or, Mungiu’s second after 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days in 2007.

This is the same institution running a €140M savings plan with 212 fewer staff than last year. It is simultaneously cutting costs, launching a YouTube partnership and co-producing Palme d’Or winners.

That combination is only possible with a public service funding model. Before Europe redesigns how it funds public broadcasters, it should look hard at what the current model produces.

🏆 FAST gets its first standing ovation

13% of viewers voted on a FAST platform with nothing but their TV remote.

Samsung TV Plus just picked up four awards across the Shorty and Telly Awards including a Gold in CTV/OTT for its Jonas Brothers FanVote. During an exclusive Jonas Brothers concert on Samsung TV Plus, fans voted in real time for the song performed live on stage. The winning song got played.

FAST has always been passive and underplaying its streaming nature with little on screen innovation. Well deserved.

🎥 Words matter

For the latest episode of Inside the Bundle: The Interviews, David Bouchier, Chief TV and Entertainment Officer at Virgin Media O2, made one thing clear within the first two minutes: he doesn’t use the word aggregator, he uses the word curator. His argument is that aggregation is a commodity, heavy lifting of content that doesn’t actually help viewers make better choices. Curation is something else entirely.

Virgin Media sits on cable infrastructure, two major brands, a loyalty scheme competitors envy and a FAST bouquet. He covers how Virgin Media made that bet, where it’s paying off and where the pressure is coming from.

Watch the full episode here:

Previous episodes: Kenechi Amobi Belusevic, Vincent Stevens.

Coming next: Joan Cruells from Viaplay.

🗓️ SME Live Tickets: Early bird tickets to attend our next Streaming Made Easy Live event in Amsterdam on September 10^th, 2026, are now on sale here. Premium subscribers get 30% off. Early bird pricing ends June 19th.

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📊 Total Video just lost one of its own

Realytics shut down last week. Founded in 2014, acquired by RTL’s Smartclip in 2022, it spent a decade solving the question every TV advertiser asks: how do I measure the performance of my campaign?

I had no background on the reason behind this shutdown so turned to Frank Liwecka (RTL AdAlliance) for clarity: “a market that constantly demanded better, more neutral TV measurement but never committed to actually paying for it”.

Their final white paper, “Totally Video”, pulls together FranceTV Publicité, M6 Unlimited, TF1 PUB, Magnite, Meta, Publicis Media and more. A decade of market intelligence, free to download. A lot of great talent now looking for their next move, go check them out.

🎙️ Big tech now runs the upfront

We caught Mike Shields just after the upfront wrapped. We wanted his take on what actually changed this year, what is real and what is PR jargon. Spoiler: the upfront is alive and well but it has a new centre of gravity.

👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.

📺 “This is so telly”

Brilliant opener from Matt Brittin as he’s being interviewed on his 1st day as CEO of the BBC after eighteen years running Google’s EMEA operations.

His first memo to staff was pragmatic right out of the gate. Brittin warned that “tough choices are unavoidable” as the BBC works through its savings programme. Welcome to public broadcasting, Matt.

He was picked, according to BBC chairman Samir Shah, for his “deep experience of leading a high-profile and highly-complex organisation through transformation.”Translation: the BBC’s board didn’t want another broadcaster. They wanted someone who had watched big tech eat the media industry from the inside for two decades and knows how that machine works.

Brittin is the headline but he’s not the exception. Priya Dogra (Channel 4), Clement Schwebig (RTL Group), Reemah Sakaan (Channel 5) and Sam Tewungwa (UKTV): every one of these appointments puts someone from a digital, streaming or platform background at the top of a European broadcaster.

Strategy, content investment, platform partnerships: all of it gets filtered through a different lens from here. The charter renewal question, the iPlayer transformation, the YouTube deal announced last month, these are no longer tension points between a legacy mindset and a digital one. The digital mindset just moved into the corner office.

Whether that’s enough is a different question. Brittin has no editorial experience and a workforce watching the headcount shrink. But the BBC’s problem has never been creative talent, it’s been the inability to move at platform speed without the platform economics. That's the job. That's why he's here.

The Telegraph’s diary of his first week makes for a good read: My first week as head of the BBC, by Matt Brittin.

That’s it for today but before you go:

🗳️ Poll time

“For Amazon, advertising is like the world’s greatest side hustle.”

Mike Shields, Next in Media

A small confession: I have a voice crush on Mike Shields, there I’ve said it. He runs Next in Media and happens to be one of the few writers who can take ad tech, agency politics and measurement and make any of it readable for the rest of us. So when upfront week 2026 wrapped, he was the only guest Evan Shapiro and I really wanted on the pod.

We caught him just after Disney closed out and before the marketplace itself opens. We wanted his take on what actually changed this year, what is real and what is PR jargon. Spoiler: the upfront is alive and well and its new center of gravity is big tech.

Big tech now runs the calendar. Shields explains why the trad media calendar now bends around big tech instead of the other way around.

Shields then takes us through why the sports rights math is breaking, his honest read on Thursday Night Football’s “add to cart” experiment and more.

Go listen or watch in full 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.

That’s it for today but before you go:

🗳️ Poll time

🗓️ SME Live Tickets

Early bird tickets to attend our next Streaming Made Easy Live event in Amsterdam on September 10^th, 2026, are now on sale here. Premium subscribers get 30% off so consider upgrading today.

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Cineville is a different beast in the landscape of subscription businesses we usually discuss here. The economics, the ownership structure and the relationship with the cinemas and the film distributors operate on a whole different level. After 16 years in operation, expansion across 5 markets, 158,000 members, more than 3.3 million annual visits, it has earned a proper look from Streaming Made Easy. The numbers behind its 16-year run tell a fascinating subscription story: retention through a pandemic, frequency that beats national averages and a demographic shift that any media business would die for.

Today at a glance:

• Where Cineville comes from

• The track record across five markets and counting

• What the model has done to cinema in Europe

• The role Cineville plays with movie distributors, not just exhibitors

• What streaming can learn from Cineville

Shout out to Guillaume Branders who taught me all things Cineville in record time!

Not a premium subscriber yet? This is a good one to upgrade for. Premium subscriptions make this level of research and writing possible.

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Where Cineville comes from

The story most people tell about Cineville (me included until I wrote today’s piece) is that it is a Dutch arthouse subscription card. The architecture underneath is what actually makes them stand out from the usual movie subscription pack.

In 2009, four students at Amsterdam’s Kriterion, a student-run cinema, walked into a near-empty arthouse screening and asked the question every European cinema operator has been asking for two decades: where are the young audiences? Their answer became Cineville, an unlimited card built specifically for independent and arthouse cinemas, launched the same year with a handful of Amsterdam cinemas.

The card is the visible part. Cineville BV actually operates as the platform layer, owning the technology stack, the brand framework, the expansion playbook and the advisory function for new markets. Each local Cineville is a separate legal entity, structured in some cases as a cooperative or an association, owned by the participating cinemas themselves. Cinemas vote on pricing, payout terms, marketing direction and expansion strategy, in coordination with Cineville BV.

Corporate cinema subscription cards (UGC Illimité in France, AMC Stubs A-List in the US, Cineworld Unlimited in the UK, Pathé in the Netherlands) are owned end-to-end by a single chain. The chain captures the subscription revenue, sets the pricing and owns the customer relationship. Cineville inverts that logic. The platform entity captures an operating share to fund expansion, infrastructure and editorial work then redistributes roughly 90% per visit back to member cinemas.

The track record across five markets and counting

Cineville now operates across five markets and is preparing two more European launches. Each market has stress-tested a different part of the structure and so far the structure has held. Across the five live markets, Cineville now has 158,000 members.

→ Cineville Netherlands got 117,000 subscribers which generated 2.5 million admissions last year (9% of total Dutch national cinema attendance according to a Cineville spokesperson). Two things stand out in the Dutch data.

Read more

Dhar Mann Studios is producing Samsung TV Plus’ first original scripted series, Unlikely Romances, a four-part anthology premiering June 5 in the US and 12 international markets (Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland).

Look at how the sequence has unfolded: Dhar Mann Studios launched its own FAST channel on Samsung TV Plus last autumn, used the platform to build audience on the biggest screen in the home and is now layering originals on top to stand out from the catalogue noise. Every major studio with a FAST footprint had this same option sitting in front of them since Samsung TV Plus could use more exclusive premium content to differentiate from competitors.

How come this deal happens: The reason may come down to economics. When Mann was on The Media Odyssey Podcast last year, he told us he invested roughly $1,000 per minute for scripted content, which works out to around $22,000 for a single 22-minute episode. Dhar Mann Studios produces 5 hours of premium scripted output every week and was set to double that by the end of 2025, runs a 30-day production cycle against the 1 to 3 years Hollywood routinely takes, owns 100% of its IP worldwide and in perpetuity. Mann operates in a different universe of unit economics entirely.

So the open question for Hollywood producers and traditional studios: should they rebuild a creator-grade cost base from scratch or partner with the creators who already run one?

Read Samsung’s full announcement here and listen to the full conversation with Dhar on The Media Odyssey.

Watch the trailer 👇🏻

🏟️ Sports fandom's new gravity

The sports industry has been running on the assumption that the next generation of fans renews itself. A 17-year-old in 2026 supports Al-Nassr because of Ronaldo, follows volleyball in Asia and catches Saturday's goals on TikTok. Family ties, the local team, the Sunday match: those drivers are losing their grip.

So who wins the next sports fan and how? 5 years ago, this conversation would have lived on rights. Today, it lives on distribution, fan experience and the infrastructure underneath. Four voices, four sharp angles:

→ João Diogo Ferreira, DAZN Portugal, on building the global home of sports beyond the live broadcast.
→ Andrea David Rizzi, YouTube, on community, creators and why younger fans expect a two-way relationship.
→ Ana López Zamarreño, MasOrange, on serving a 55-year-old and an 18-year-old inside the same household.
→ Ian Franklyn, MainStreaming, on the unglamorous railway tracks that decide whether the viewing experience holds up or not.

With the brilliant Jo Redfern orchestrating the whole session.

A few of the moments worth pressing play for:

→ Why piracy costs La Liga €700 million a year in Spain alone and why the educated middle class is the main culprit.

→ The capacity wall heading our way as the UK switches off linear and the 20 to 50x infrastructure demand coming with it.

→ The creator rights shift, from CazéTV in Brazil to LiveMode in Portugal.

If you sit anywhere in sports distribution, fandom or content delivery, this session earns 38 minutes of your weekend.

🎥 You've signed the deal, the press release is out. Now what?

For the latest episode of Inside the Bundle: The Interviews, Kenechi Amobi Belusevic, Head of Distribution and Business Development at Warner Bros Discovery, details how a global content brand moves through the fragmented reality of European and global streaming markets, why everyone wants content and what it takes to build strong local partnerships.

Watch the full episode here:

Previous episode: Vincent Stevens, VP Entertainment at Telenet.

Coming next: David Bouchier, Chief TV & Entertainment Officer at Virgin Media.

🗓️ SME Live Tickets: Early bird tickets to attend our next Streaming Made Easy Live event in Amsterdam on September 10^th, 2026, are now on sale here. Premium subscribers get 30% off so consider upgrading today.

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🎙️Fans with skin in the game

We’re in the midst of the 79th edition of the Cannes Film Festival so it was only fitting to bring a film finance entrepreneur on The Media Odyssey Podcast this week but not just any film finance entrepreneur. Evan Shapiro and I spent time talking with Marc Iserlis who runs Republic Films where fans have skin in the game.

This is what the next decade of independent film financing looks like and if you haven’t looked at this model yet, you’re already behind. Iserlis is at Cannes this week making the case, go meet him in the flesh.

👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.

📺 How Dyn shipped a CTV app at speed

How do you build a connected TV app for 5 sports, 5 devices and a 6-month deadline?

During StreamTV Europe, Tom Smith, co-founder and CPO of FX Digital, walked us through how they built the Dyn streaming platform, a niche sports streaming service targeting Germany's underserved sports fans across volleyball, handball, table tennis, hockey and basketball.

Tom breaks down the real decisions behind launching a connected TV product at speed: how to pick the right devices for a regional market, why they chose Lightning JS over native code and the certification-first strategy that kept their launch on track. Plus, the data behind which platform drove the most viewership in DACH and how a single personalisation question at sign-up can increase customer lifetime by 35%.

⚽️ Eating my “podcasts on Netflix” words 😬

I’ve been on the record: podcasts on Netflix will be a bust. My premise was a 2016 move on Netflix’s part by lifting a show off YouTube to drop it on Netflix. The new Netflix x Goalhanger deal forces me to revise. Partly.

Here’s what’s happening: The Rest Is Football, hosted by Gary Lineker, Alan Shearer and Micah Richards, will host a daily show for Netflix during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, anchored from a New York studio. Match analysis, special guests plus two roving reporters following the England team across North America. 40 days of programming wrapped around the biggest sporting event of the year.

Four things make this work:

→ First, Netflix doesn’t hold World Cup rights. Fox has the US, BBC and ITV share the UK. So Netflix isn’t competing for live games and is building a companion product around an event it has no way of covering otherwise. In one word: smart.

→ Second, this is daily live TV with talent that already pulls 7 million monthly streams. Fully produced format, built-in audience, zero acquisition cost. In two words: Turnkey TV 👋🏻.

→ Third, it’s finite. Netflix isn’t betting on always-on podcast appointment viewing, the part I remain sceptical about. It’s renting tentpole credibility for 40 days from a brand that already has it, then walking away. In three words: cool pop-up.

→ Fourth, the schedule itself does part of the work. 104 matches in 39 days across North America means kick-offs land late at night for European viewers. Netflix has built a morning UK-time recap show precisely for the European fan who slept through the 2am kick-off. Daily highlights, analysis and reporter dial-ins become the only realistic way for European audiences to keep up with the tournament. In four words: shoulder content will win.

If this works, every major sports tentpole on the calendar just became a Netflix vodcast opportunity.

That’s it for today but before you go:

🗳️ Poll time

🗓️ SME Live Tickets

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"We're cutting the audience in. We're giving a seat at the equity table to the fans. It also helps the movie do better when the audience is a stakeholder."

Marc Iserlis, Republic

We're in the midst of the 79th edition of the Cannes Film Festival. For two weeks every May, the entire global film industry descends on the French Riviera. They come for the premieres and the prestige, but mostly they come to do business. Cannes is one of the largest film markets on the planet with 40,000 professionals attending the Festival de Cannes including 16,000 registered participants at the Marché du Film from more than 140 countries.

“The Marché du Film is first and foremost a place of action, structured around three essential pillars: the global marketplace for film sales, a platform where projects are created and financed and a hub for sharing knowledge and expertise where the industry collectively shapes its future.”

Guillaume Esmiol - Marché du Film Executive Director

It was only fitting to bring a film finance entrepreneur on The Media Odyssey Podcast this week but not just any film finance entrepreneur. and I spent time talking with Marc Iserlis who runs Republic Films.

For decades, independent film has had two real paths to capital according to Iserlis. Yacht money from high net worth EPs or a Hollywood pickup that often strips your back end and shelves your project. Iserlis walks us through a third path that’s already paid out investors on a film sale. The thesis is simple. Artist equity has dominated the post-strike conversation and Iserlis wants you to think about its parallel: Audience equity. Fans on the cap table with skin in the upside.

In this episode, Iserlis explains how a regulatory shift opened private investing to people who aren’t millionaires and which specific films have already proven the model (Republic accepts international investors, which makes this relevant for European producers and fans too). Robert Rodriguez ran a fan-owned action slate where every investor got to pitch him a film. Eli Roth opened a horror studio with his audience. Some fan communities have even started naming themselves after the slates they back.

Republic also partnered with the Future Vision XPRIZE, a $3.5 million sci-fi competition built to inspire the next Star Trek. Filmmakers pitch three-minute visions of the future and fans invest in the ones they want to see win.

This is what the next decade of independent film financing looks like and if you haven't looked at this model yet, you're already behind. Iserlis is at Cannes this week making the case, go meet him in the flesh.

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“We don’t dictate what our customers watch. Our customers dictate us what they wanna watch.” - Vincent Stevens, Telenet

When I interviewed Vincent Stevens, VP Entertainment at Telenet, he alluded to a major commercial reset about to take place at Telenet. Little did I know that it would mean rewiring the traditional bundle from the ground up.

On April 27th, Telenet unbundled itself.

The mandatory digital TV subscription is gone. Streamz, Play Sports, Disney+, Netflix and YouTube Premium are now sold standalone through Telenet, with a 30-day minimum and cancel-any-time billing after that. A customer who wants Netflix without a single linear channel can now buy it from Telenet, with app integration, billing aggregation and a small price advantage layered on top. Until April 27, that customer had to leave.

Every product is priced individually. Internet, mobile, fixed telephony, TV and entertainment are sold à la carte and recombined per customer. The bundle survives as the outcome of customer choice, built up product by product.

The platform now leads with personalised guidance. Telenet pushes a tailored proposal through the My Telenet app, the TV interface, in store and on the phone, drawing on existing usage and product mix. The aggregator role is migrating from “we picked your bundle” toward “we’ll help you pick and the choice stays with you.”

What a bold move, one driven by customer needs with 8 in 10 Telenet customers asking for exactly this according to the operator’s own IPSOS research.

Stevens walked me through the strategic thinking behind all of this on tape; why he’s still backing the set-top box and we closed on the bigger question hanging over the whole industry: what happens to the bundle when the next aggregator is an AI assistant living inside the TV?

WATCH IN FULL 👇🏻

To go deeper on the bundle economy:

This series runs in partnership with Bango, who publish some of the most rigorous research on subscriber behaviour and the economics of bundling. Worth reading alongside the interviews.

To get under the skin of the TBWA Belgium campaign (dubbed “There is now a Telenet for everyone”) and its fictional creatures called Bingefoot (a Bigfoot who binges a little too hard), Zeemeerzakenman (a businessman merman, Merbusinessman in English) and Unifluencers (half unicorn, half influencer), brought to life through costumes, prosthetics, face painting, wigs, CGI, rabbits and dressage horses.

Coming up next (on May 17th): Kenechi Amobi Belusevic, VP Business Development and Distribution at Warner Bros Discovery.

🗳️ 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!

Damn, someone I love and respect is getting into vertical video 😬 Meet RoseBerry, the latest kid on the vertical video block.

Where I’m in: repurposing existing IP (so far the company broke deals with A+E Global Media, All3Media International, Banijay Rights, Cineflix Rights and Fremantle) into vertical video formats for a mobile-first consumption.

“By combining decades of television experience with advanced AI‑driven workflows, we’re building a scalable model that delivers brand‑safe, advertiser‑ready content which we believe will represent real value globally for our industry partners and our direct-to-consumer customers when we launch our App this summer.”

Guy Hameiri for Deadline

Where I have my doubts: again the pay as you go business model might work as the app launches but no doubt the company will go back to basics (subscriptions and ads) just like HOLYWATER TECH did.

Regardless, I’m keen to get my hands on the app to test this live.

🎥 Introducing “Inside the Bundle”

I’ve been writing about super aggregation for years now, watching the telcos bundle OTT apps, the broadcasters build their own aggregation layers and the streamers work out going direct and leaning into operators. So when Bango asked me to build a video series around it, I said yes immediately.

The series kicks off May 12th and runs through late June, covering 8 conversations with people doing this for real, at companies you know, in markets that matter. The line-up spans both sides of the bundle equation: operators who aggregate (Telenet, Virgin Media, Liberty Global, MasOrange), streamers navigating the choice of how to play it (Viaplay, Britbox, HBO Max, Stringray).

The first episode drops Tuesday with Vincent Stevens, VP Entertainment at Telenet.

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🎙️Kids are not alright and we should all play our part now

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💸 Four years in, where is YouTube Primetime at?

Since launch, YouTube Primetime doesn’t seem to have taken off. On the contrary, reporting in 2025 from The Information, Pocket-lint confirmed YouTube paused adding new services because it could not solve how to merge paid third-party catalogs with its free creator feed and a long-promised TV-app redesign meant to fix that problem launched in pieces only at the end of 2025.

“The vision is that when you come to our [TV] app and you’re looking for a show, it’ll just blend away whether that show is from a Primetime Channel or that show is from a [YouTube] creator.”

Kurt Wilms, YouTube senior director of product management

Tubefilter framed discoverability as “the resilient boogeyman.” They’re right, I’m in this business and half the time I don’t know where to find YouTube Primetime.

Meanwhile, Amazon Prime Video Channels has now sold roughly 46 million cumulative subscriptions according to Antenna and Roku’s Premium Subscriptions business already generates $519 million in quarterly revenue, growing 30% year over year.

On paper, YouTube does not need Primetime Channels at all. It already dominates the television screen. Nielsen’s Gauge has placed YouTube at number one every month from February 2024 onward and its full-year 2025 revenue crossed $60 billion, overtaking Netflix. Watch time, attention and habit are already YouTube’s. The transaction layer that cable once owned, the billing relationship that sat between viewers and premium content, is exactly what YouTube does not yet control at scale.

The takeaway for the European and U.S. operator audience is that Primetime Channels is currently the weakest of the three CTV channel-store options for distribution scale, but is still likely, as Tubefilter puts it, “to be YouTube’s next big thing — it just needs to make sure its users know that its subscription hub exists.”

BONUS: a LOT of data visuals for you to grab and use in your next premium strategy deck!

📺 Telcos strike back!

Orange Advertising (part of Orange France) keeps enriching its advertising playbook to monetise the big screen like CTV does:

→ with in stream video advertising on linear TV and addressable TV (the latter since 2022);

Announced this week:

→ the launch of a dedicated TV channel (channel 29 in their EPG) dedicated to branded content, a space they describe as a place for brands to tell their stories, immerse their audiences and create truly editorial experiences;

“Because today, it’s no longer just about being seen. It’s about being watched.”

→ the introduction of new formats “Cover” and “Footer”:

• Cover: a premium display format, available exclusively for 24 hours to players in the entertainment industry.

• Footer: a sponsored button integrated into the service feed, designed to drive traffic to content consumption.

According to ARCOM, 84% of French people own a smart TV, 82% watch TV via a provider’s set-top box and 100% of users of provider set-top boxes access the home screen. Orange Advertising pitches campaigns reaching over 10M households every day.

Operators kept the eyeballs all along. The home button, the EPG, the STB, the billing relationship. CTV platforms spent 5 years convincing the market that the smart TV OS owned the future of TV advertising. Telcos are coming for that ad budget.

Once they productise their inventory the way CTV platforms did, with named formats, dedicated channels and self-serve buying, the line between operator and media owner blurs. The European CTV ad pitch deck is about to get a new logo on the cover.

That’s it for today but before you go:

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The timing is pointed. France is a year from a presidential election with no political centre left standing, just competing extremes on both sides and the broadcaster best equipped to cover that election objectively is the one now being asked to cut deep.

France Télévisions isn’t sitting still. Their BVOD platform has been number 1 for 11 months in 2025, 4 months so far in 2026 with 43.2M monthly streamers. They launched on Amazon Channels last summer. A YouTube deal is taking shape, including nightly news going up same-day and we get into what this can actually deliver given that France TV’s commercial structure makes it a different animal from the BBC and given how resource intensive this deal will be.

The list (of essential moves made the group) goes on and yet the commission’s goal is to find 1B€ in annual savings and redirect the money toward clearing national debt and restoring historic buildings. To get there, France Télévisions would have to cut the things that actually justify its existence, nay its importance to French people: its ability to fight disinformation in an election year, reach younger viewers by shutting down France 4 (which reaches 3.3 million children every month) or Slash TV (aimed at GenZ viewers), reducing by 1/3rd its sports rights budget which threatens its free-to-air coverage of Roland Garros and the Tour de France, events that would move behind a paywall the moment France TV can no longer fund the rights.

That context is exactly what makes ’s kids content report with Common Sense Media land so hard with me. When he asked a dozen industry experts to describe the state of kids content production today, there was a word, a sentiment that kept coming up. The streamers have pulled back commissions sharply since 2022 and YouTube’s economics for kids producers are broken. Public broadcasters worldwide now carry more than half the weight of quality kids content production globally. They still step up because someone has to but pull that funding and the streamers and YouTube have already shown they won’t cover it when we are talking about the next generations of viewers for Pete’s sake.

If you’re reading this from outside France, don’t file it under someone else’s problem. France isn't the first, nor the last country to be threatened like this. Check what happened recently to public media in the US, Hungary or Slovakia.

I’ll be going deeper on this topic in the coming weeks but for now, this episode of The Media Odyssey Podcast is the place to start. If you care about public service media or work in public service media, don’t hesitate to reply to share your thoughts, I read and response to every email.

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Over one billion hours of YouTube are already watched on TV every day, which makes the pitch for YouTube Primetime sound almost self-evident. Subscribing to HBO Max, through the YouTube app you already have open, removes the friction of platform-switching, kills the password memory problem and collapses multiple billing lines into one. For streamers, the appeal is real too: instant access to one of the largest audiences on the planet without building the acquisition funnel from scratch. Like with any marketplace, the catch is that what streamers gain in reach, they give up in return, handing YouTube control over billing relationships and viewing data that would otherwise sit inside their own platforms.

In this edition, I'm mapping every subscription available on YouTube Primetime across all five markets, the content mix, the pricing logic and who the biggest players are in this small corner of the world’s biggest platform. More importantly, I'm looking at whether any of it is actually working.

Today at a glance:

• The footprint

• The content mix

• The streaming operators behind the channels

• The pricing picture

• Four years in, where is YouTube Primetime at?

BONUS: a LOT of data visuals for you to grab and use in your next premium strategy deck!

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The footprint

YouTube users can purchase and watch Primetime subscriptions in five markets (US, Germany, France, UK and Australia) but looking at volume alone shows it is still primarily a US service and other markets are still in their development phase.

There are 47 available subscriptions in the US ranging from legacy channels HBO Max and Starz, to sports giants NFL and NBA, and even niche, genre-specific services like Crunchyroll, Acorn TV, and Shudder.

Germany, launched in 2023, has the next largest offering, but only 19 subscriptions, less than half the number available in the US. Even though the selection in Germany is smaller, the subscriptions are very local with 12 channels (63.2%) featuring German content and brands. The German subscriptions include very traditional television operators like ARD Plus and ProSieben FUN as well as smaller, specific linear channels turned streaming services like documentary channel Bergblick and hunting/fishing channel Waidwerk.

France has a much more limited selection with only 9 available channels. The French options for YouTube Primetime include 3 local content channels, 33% of the total, all operated by Mediawan: Kitchen Mania, Insomnia and Explore. Sooner, a European arthouse film channel by ContentScope GmbH, is also only available on YouTube Primetime France.

Read more

Kinda cool to see the 1st two video players confirming one of my 2026 predictions, that is to figure out to exist and be discovered in the era of GEO and LLMs.

Similarweb’s 2025 Generative AI report found that AI platforms generated over 1.1 billion referral visits in June 2025, up 357% year over year. Consumers now start their journeys inside AI assistants, asking questions and shaping preferences before they ever reach a streaming app. A recent Adobe Express survey reports that 77% of Americans who use ChatGPT treat it as a search engine, with 24% choosing it before Google. The next generation of viewers may never type “what should I watch” into Netflix or others. They will ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini and go wherever the answer sends them.

Streamers should design their GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) strategy now. The new must have App Store may be nested in ChatGPT and its peers. When ChatGPT first launched its App Store, video players were MIA. Now, Tubi and M6+ (the streaming platform of commercial broadcaster M6) have launched their own native apps.

What does it do? It’s a content discovery companion.

Is it perfect? No as evidenced below with the M6+ native app which suggests titles that aren’t movies when I asked for a specific movie recommendation.

Or with Tubi where I was downgraded to a lower model due to lack of credits and the query ultimately went nowhere (could be that it’s because I’m not in a Tubi market).

Regardless, it’s a step in the right direction versus the movie recommendation prompt that takes you nowhere. Expect every major streamer to have its own app by year end.

🤠 Howdy surpasses the 1M mark

No one understood this move when Roku launched Howdy in August 2025: $2.99 a month, ad-free movies and TV, available only through The Roku Channel. The content felt like a repackage of what was already sitting in Roku’s AVOD library, hard to see the logic.

Eight months later, Antenna estimates Howdy has surpassed 1M subscribers. It added nearly 300K in its first month alone, then held above 100K new subscribers every month after that.

Among people who signed up in August and September 2025, 51% were still subscribed 6 months later. That sits ahead of the Premium SVOD average of 47% and well ahead of the Specialty SVOD average of 38%. The $2.99 price point does a lot of work here: low monthly commitment means less friction at the moment churn decisions get made.

The distribution strategy matters too. Howdy accounted for 23% of all SVOD sign-ups via The Roku Channel since launch. When you're the number one platform in the US with 44% of all connected-TV streaming hours you know how to convert free users into paying subscribers, a $2.99 product is is the “easiest” upsell in streaming.

In March, Howdy launched on Amazon Prime Video Channels, the one distribution platform with comparable scale and arguably superior billing infrastructure. If Howdy holds its retention numbers on Amazon’s platform, Roku will have proven something important: that its content library has standalone value beyond its own ecosystem.

For more on Roku’s premium strategy 👇🏻

N.B: Antenna’s methodology: Antenna tracks “data from a variety of data collection partners which contribute millions of permission-based, consumer opt-in, raw transaction records. These are derived from digital purchase and cancellation receipts, consumer subscription signals, credit, debit and banking data. Antenna cleans and models this raw data, and then subsequently weighs the panel to correct for demographic and behavioural skews”. The words permission and opt-in matters as this means Howdy could have even more subscribers (since consumers can refuse to share their transaction information).

🇪🇸 Spain's creator economy means business

Spain has 285,000 active influencers on Instagram and TikTok alone. Of those, 15,000 have over 100,000 followers and 13,600 work as creators full-time. Advertisers are following: influencer marketing investment in Spain hit 158 million euros in 2025, up 25.9% year on year and double what it was in 2023.

Those numbers come from a new report by 2btube and Favikon. Gaming and streaming creators dominate by audience size. TikTok grew sponsored content volume 73% year on year, outpacing Instagram’s 45% and the average professional creator now pulls from 4.6 income streams, which looks a lot less like a side hustle and more like a small media company.

Fascinating to see that Spain has created a mandatory registry for creators earning over 300,000 euros annually with at least a million followers.

A mandatory registry, double-digit ad growth, creators running 4.6 income streams, it’s time you go discover Spain's creator economy ecosystem here.

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🎙️Half an hour with the micro drama guru

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💸 Amazon, the money you spend on originals belongs in your product

Amazon reported spending $22.4 billion on video and music content in 2025, up 10% year on year, according to its annual 10-K filing. That figure includes music licensing, which matters for context, since Netflix’s $18 billion covers video only. Strip music out and Amazon’s video-specific commitment sits lower, though it still represents an enormous number at a time when placement data keeps telling the same story: Prime Video dominates the shelf but its originals rarely dominate the chart.

In every market Looper Insights measured, Prime Video’s app visibility was built on distribution scale and platform presence, not on the promotional momentum of its own titles. If Amazon’s originals strategy were firing as intended, you would expect to see more of its own titles converting that shelf space into title-level placement.

None of this means Amazon should abandon original content. Tentpole titles still serve real membership acquisition and retention functions and the flywheel argument cuts both ways: a platform with nothing worth watching on its own loses credibility as an aggregator over time. But there is a reasonable case that the balance has tilted too far toward competing with Netflix on prestige drama ground, when Prime Video’s real competitive position is not as a content studio but as the world’s most powerful aggregator.

Get the full picture 👇🏻

The full top ten app and title rankings across the US, UK, Germany and Australia, including placement values are available in the Streamer of the Month reports for March 2026. Download them below:

⚽️ Canal+ swoops into Belgium

Back in November 2025, Canal+ renewed exclusive French broadcast rights to all UEFA club competitions (Champions League, Europa League, Conference League) through 2031, extending beyond their current deal through 2027.

This week, Canal+ went one step further and acquired rights across multiple European markets including Poland, Austria, Switzerland and Belgium, solidifying its position as “the largest broadcaster of UEFA Men’s Club Competitions in Europe” with rights in over 50 countries.

The most surprising move was Belgium, a country where Canal+ hasn’t operated in since they left it back in 2004. According to local sources, this was a complete left field move local operators didn’t expect, even Disney+ (initially announced as the bid winner) saw Canal+ barging in. Belgium shifts from a multi-broadcaster model to Canal+ holding 100% exclusive rights across all three UEFA competitions for 2027-2031.

Earlier this year, Canal+ made several nominations at Canal+ Benelux & Central Europe. No doubt that team has been hard at work to win these rights in Belgium and will now work towards a market launch in 2027. I believe Canal+ will use the 2023 relaunch in the Netherlands as the blue print for this Belgian market entry. It’s a streaming first approach mixing live TV channels, sport, movies & series (incl. all the Canal+ original content).

In order to compete with local Pay TV & SVOD players, Canal+ opted for much lower subscription prices (than what we typically see on the French market). Now premium football rights could justify the introduction of a higher priced tier in Belgium.

Now Belgium is not the Netherlands though: two language communities, two media markets. Proximus and Telenet will be must have partners for Canal+. The 2027 launch gives Canal+ roughly one year to build distribution, sign operator deals and localise. That’s tight for a market they haven’t touched in 20 years.

At the European level, Canal+ is attempting what Sky tried and couldn’t pull off: becoming a pan-European Pay TV & SVOD champion. The Champion’s League is definitely the right way to achieve that.

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"The retention of our audience is about two times higher with subscription versus in-app purchases."

Bogdan Nesvit, Founder, Holywater Tech and My Drama

If you follow me, you know where I stand on micro drama. I published my skepticism in full: the unit economics, the content fatigue, the 200-plus apps fighting over the same audience with rising acquisition costs. I wasn’t convinced the hype matched the business.

So when Bogdan Nesvit, founder of Holywater Tech and My Drama, sat down with and me live at StreamTV Europe, I went in with specific doubts. Some of what he said confirmed what I expected, some of it didn’t.

Holywater Tech is 6 years old and turns out to be built differently from the players I pulled apart in my prediction. The pipeline runs from a books platform with over a million monthly users, through an AI production engine that generates a series in 2 weeks, into My Drama, the live action platform at close to 7 million monthly active users. 90+ percent of those users are now on subscription. Nesvit shares why that’s more profitable than micro transactions. This the part where I can say: told YA! Of course the business model of micro transactions isn’t sustainable and is really just viewers being hooked like gamblers on slot machines.

The Fox Entertainment partnership comes up and it's doing two things at once. Fox wants access to the audience data and the social distribution machine. Holywater Tech wants the genre credibility, the talent relationships and Fox's ad sales infrastructure. Nesvit is direct about why ad monetisation matters: subscription captures one audience segment, ads open the door to everyone else. Right now, micro drama runs on 5 recycled tropes and Nesvit knows it. Getting it to mainstream means testing thriller, detective, sports, fantasy, all the formats that haven’t been proven yet in vertical.

Nesvit finally lays out where this goes next. It's further from vertical video than you'd expect.

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Today at a glance:

• HBO Max owned the title charts

• The home screen still has room for homegrown content

• The notable absents

• When the home screen becomes a shop window

• Amazon, the money you spend on originals belongs in your product

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HBO Max owned the title charts

HBO Max placed multiple titles in the top 10 promoted titles chart in every market Looper Insights measured in March (except the UK as HBO Max only launched on March 26). A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, The Pitt, One Battle After Another and Sinners appeared repeatedly across country rankings. No other content brand came close to that cross-market promotional footprint at the title level during the month.

Young Sherlock, a Prime Video original, was the one title to cut across multiple geographies in a comparable way, appearing in the top five in Australia, the UK and Germany.

Title-level placement reflects what platforms and device partners are willing to feature prominently on their home screens, which means it captures not just what a streamer is pushing but what the broader distribution ecosystem believes audiences will respond to. HBO Max content kept clearing that bar in market after market.

The home screen still has room for homegrown content

In the UK, BBC iPlayer topped the app visibility chart outright, ahead of Prime Video, Netflix and every global streamer in the ranking. Public service broadcasters claimed four of the top ten title slots across iPlayer and ITVX. In Germany, five of the top ten apps by €MPV were local or German-owned services (RTL+, Joyn, ZDFmediathek, ARD Mediathek and MagentaTV), making it the most locally competitive market in the dataset. In Australia, Married at First Sight on 9Now topped the promoted titles chart for the entire month. In Germany, ZDFmediathek placed a long-running domestic drama in the top ten. None of this looks like a market where local broadcasters are being squeezed out.

Two forces are driving this:

→ The first is the appeal of local content. Australian viewers chose a reality format on a free catch-up service over prestige HBO Max drama in March. CTV platforms are not blind to that pull. Device manufacturers and OS providers are commercial businesses and when local content demonstrably drives engagement and time spent on their platforms, they have every incentive to give it prominent placement without anyone forcing them to. The home screen position that broadcasters hold in their respective markets reflects both editorial deals and the hard commercial logic that local content keeps viewers on the platform longer and coming back more often.

→ The second is regulatory and it matters most in markets where that editorial & commercial logic alone has not been sufficient to protect local visibility. In the UK, the Media Act 2024 requires connected TV platforms to give public service broadcasters prominent, accessible placement within their interfaces and Ofcom has since published a code of practice to enforce it. PSBs submitted evidence during the process showing measurable drops in viewership when removed from visible app menu positions. Germany introduced a public value label to guarantee prominent placement for designated German services on CTV platforms, though implementation has been uneven and, as I covered previously, the result has been described as a public value corner rather than genuine integration. France created a General Interest Service status covering public broadcasters and commercial free-to-air players with a similar intent.

The notable absents

Two of the most-used platforms on any CTV device barely register in Looper Insights’ placement data across all four markets. Netflix holds a solid position in the app charts, sitting third in Australia and sixth in the UK but places almost no titles in the promoted titles charts in the US or Germany and only two in the UK. YouTube does not appear in either chart. For platforms that between them account for an enormous share of daily screen time globally, that may leave you wondering but it reflects how both platforms approach prominence.

Both Netflix and YouTube have invested heavily in a different kind of placement entirely. Netflix has for years required device makers to include (for free) a dedicated button in order to get access to its app. It demands the 1st app slot on every UI which turns opening Netflix into a reflex. Same for YouTube.

The consequence of that model is that neither platform needs to promote individual titles or invest in promotional assets for CTV home screens the way Prime Video or HBO Max do. Netflix routes discovery through its own algorithm, with research consistently suggesting that the vast majority of what people watch on the platform is found through Netflix’s own recommendation engine rather than through any external surface. YouTube operates on an even more habitual basis: viewers open it with intent to search or scroll, not because a specific video was promoted on a Samsung home screen. The content comes after the behaviour, not before it.

When the home screen becomes a shop window

March threw up another tactic, even if it only showed up in one market. In the US, Paramount+, Disney+ and AMC+ all used prominent home screen placement not to promote content but to sell subscriptions, pushing discounted offers and free trials directly on Vizio and Samsung device home screens. Paramount+ ran a $2.99 introductory offer; Disney+ and Hulu bundled together at $4.99; AMC+ offered 90 days at no cost. The home screen, traditionally the territory of content marketing, became a direct acquisition tool.

None of the European or Australian markets in the March data showed anything comparable. Home screen placement in the UK, Germany and Australia remained focused on title promotion, with price and subscription mechanics kept off the glass entirely.

Streamers in Europe navigate the same subscriber acquisition costs, the same churn dynamics and the same crowded attention economy. The US data suggests that device partners are open to that kind of promotional real estate. What remains unproven is whether a price promotion on a passive, lean-back screen drives subscription conversion the way it does on a phone or laptop, where the path from offer to checkout is a matter of seconds.

Amazon, the money you spend on originals belongs in your product

Amazon reported spending $22.4 billion on video and music content in 2025, up 10% year on year, according to its annual 10-K filing. That figure includes music licensing, which matters for context, since Netflix's $18 billion covers video only. Strip music out of Amazon’s number and the video-specific estimate may sit lower, though it still represents an enormous commitment to content at a time when the placement data keeps telling the same story: Prime Video dominates the shelf but its originals rarely dominate the chart.

Amazon can afford to spend on original content but Prime Video’s real competitive position in the streaming market is not as a content studio. It is as the world’s most powerful aggregator. Prime Video Channels earns Amazon a commission on every third-party subscription sold through its platform, housing HBO Max, Paramount+ and dozens of others behind a single login and a single bill. The more services Prime Video distributes, the more indispensable the platform becomes, regardless of whether Amazon’s own originals are winning awards or placement charts.

The sports rights strategy points in the same direction. Amazon pays approximately $1 billion per year to the NFL for Thursday Night Football and holds a share of the NBA's 11-year, $76 billion media rights deal. Live sport drives the kind of appointment viewing that makes a platform non-negotiable for a specific audience segment and generates advertising inventory that a prestige drama simply cannot match at scale. Reuters reported that Amazon has been shifting its strategic emphasis toward live sports and away from dependence on original content as its primary growth lever, with its entertainment team commissioning fewer film and TV projects since 2022.

In every market Looper Insights measured, Prime Video’s app visibility was built on distribution scale and platform presence, not on the promotional momentum of its own titles. If Amazon’s originals strategy were firing as intended, you would expect to see more of its own titles converting that shelf space into title-level placement.

None of this means Amazon should abandon original content. Tentpole titles still serve real membership acquisition and retention functions and the flywheel argument cuts both ways: a platform with nothing worth watching on its own loses credibility as an aggregator over time. But there is a reasonable case that the balance has tilted too far toward competing with Netflix on prestige drama ground, when the aggregator and sports rights model represents a structurally more defensible and differentiated position that no one else in the market is positioned to match.

Get the full picture 👇🏻

The full top ten app and title rankings across the US, UK, Germany and Australia, including placement values are available in the Looper Insights Streamer of the Month reports for March 2026. Download them below:

→ Streamer of the month USA

→ Streamer of the month UK

→ Streamer of the month Germany

→ Streamer of the month Australia

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

Catch up on our previous reads:

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I was at Roku when company walls were showcasing the 50M goal we had set for ourselves (I got a mug and cool socks when we did in 2021!). That goal was actually 50/50: 50M active accounts and 50$ ARPU.

Roku just announced it reached the 100M mark (based on active accounts over a 30-day period) so 5 years later, they’ve doubled the base but where is the ARPU at?

It seems stuck at 40$ or so, perhaps the reason why Roku stopped reporting active accounts and ARPU figures in Q1 2025 (except for the occasional milestone announcement like this one).

The question for the next five years is not just whether Roku reaches 150M or 200M households but whether it can extract more revenue from the base it has already built. Advertising alone is not closing that 10$ gap, which is exactly why Roku is pushing hard into subscriptions: Premium Subscriptions hit a record for net adds in Q4 2025, Apple TV+ joined a roster of 70-plus partners, bundles are coming in 2026 and Howdy, its own $2.99 SVOD, is expanding beyond the Roku ecosystem onto Amazon Prime Video.

📺 Can FAST speak creator?

“Mom, we’ve linearised creators” says Olivier Levard, CEO of Full Joy Media, as he announced the launch of “House of Creators”, the latest addition to the Samsung TV Plus France line up.

Food, true crime, science, lifestyle, talk, entertainment from 11 YouTube channels and 13 content creators (L’Atelier de Roxane, Morgan VS, Louis-San, Noa, Claire, Liv, DrFeelgood, Tartin, Adem & Bilal, Les Gens d’Internet, Poisson Fécond).

”In short, it’s not an alternative to YouTube, it’s a new way to discover these talents. No algorithms. No subscriptions. No downloads. Right from your remote control, on millions of Samsung Smart TVs in France. And soon, absolutely everywhere!”

Olivier Levard, CEO of Full Joy Media

It is a premise many platforms and creators have tested over the past 3 years, platforms chasing younger viewers and creators chasing audiences beyond their existing subscriber base.

Is the bet paying off? More channels doesn’t equal success. I would argue we’re still in the test and learn phase and I tend to agree with , from , in his latest piece, and see a brighter future for creators inside on demand platforms like Tubi and Netflix.

☎️ The race to three

France could be on the verge of becoming a 3-player market again. Ever since Free entered the market in 2012 (with a very disruptive pricing strategy incl. a 2€ per month mobile subscription), the French telecom market has been competing heavily on price.

Yet French operators still managed to keep investing but current pricing dynamics are unsustainable for funding network investments, particularly as 5G adoption accelerates and data consumption grows.

Hence why Orange, Free and Bouygues have upped their bid to buy SFR (from 17B to 20.35B€) and now have an exclusive window (until May 15) to close the deal.

This is the latest consolidation trend we’re seeing in the region. The UK already went from four to three operators following the Vodafone / Three merger in 2025 (which took two years to get approved!). France, Spain, Germany and Italy still have four-player mobile markets.

European competition authorities seem to be more open to consolidation (despite the potential risk on consumer pricing) suggesting large-scale investment in networks to support digital transformation and improve coverage is a must have.

What will the French market look like post-purchase?

→ B2B segment: Bouygues Telecom takes the entire enterprise business and customer base.

→ B2C segment: Consumer customers will be shared between all three operators. The how isn’t known yet.

→ Mobile network in less dense areas: Bouygues Telecom acquires SFR’s rural/non-dense mobile network exclusively. This gives Bouygues significant rural coverage advantages.

→ Other infrastructure and spectrum: Shared between all three operators, including fiber infrastructure and frequency licenses.

France is not a special case, the European telco map is being redrawn, one merger at a time.

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🇩🇪 Germany's new video giant

It took less than a year for the RTL / Sky merger to get regulatory approval, sign that European regulators are conscious of the extreme competition local players face from global players and that there’s no time to waste.

What happens next? One big unknown is whether RTL will eventually fold Sky, WOW and RTL+ into a single master brand or keep them separate under one corporate roof and then orchestrate upsell / cross-selling strategies amongst them. I wouldn’t want to be the marketer who will be selling today’s existing 12 distinct packages…

My best guess is that WOW will be folded into RTL+ to become the most premium tier. Sky will remain as a standalone but the tiering structure will need to be simplified and again RTL+ could be the entry point offers while Sky keeps the high-end subscriptions.

Can RTL’s mass-market instincts coexist (and thrive) with Sky’s premium ethos? If they pull it off, they’ll have the most complete video business in German-speaking Europe: news, soaps, prestige dramas, live sports, all under one roof and able to flex between Free, Pay and hybrid. If they mismanage it, they risk eroding Sky’s premium edge and unsettling subscribers giving rivals fresh ground to poach viewers.

Either way, the hard work starts now.

→ More here about the new leadership changes here.

🎙️StreamTV Europe Unplugged

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🇫🇷 The broadcaster who learned to love YouTube

In July 2025, Delphine Ernotte, President of France Télévisions, signalled a change of tactic. Seven years after publicly dismissing YouTube as a threat, she announced plans to invest fully in the platform across all content types, from documentaries and magazines to drama, with a priority on reaching viewers under 25.

Now, the group didn’t start on YouTube in 2025 given how extensive their YouTube portfolio already is.

The partnership announced this week covers news content exclusively, meaning the full slate of national and local bulletins, daily and weekly magazines and investigation programming from France 2, France 3, France 5 and France Info. Around 20,000 hours of content per year, available on YouTube shortly after broadcast. For context, CMA Média signed a similar deal earlier this year covering roughly 1,000 hours annually.

News as the entry point makes sense. It is already the dominant genre in FTV’s existing YouTube footprint by channel count, subscriber numbers and views. Going bigger on news is the logical extension of the “streaming first” strategy and with the French presidential election approaching, the stated disinformation angle gives the partnership a public service wrapper that is hard to argue with, whatever you think of YouTube’s actual track record on the subject.

The ad model deserves attention. Unlike a standard YouTube partner arrangement, France TV Publicité retains direct control of its inventory on the platform, commercialising it independently rather than ceding revenue to Google. That is a win, though how much it yields at scale remains to be seen.

The harder question is execution. Getting 20,000 hours of existing content onto YouTube annually, organised into coherent thematic and IP-based channels rather than a bulk dump, is an operational commitment for a group running a €140M savings plan with 212 fewer staff than a year ago.

YouTube is also a hands-off major platform. It provides tools like Likeness ID (included in this deal to protect journalists and presenters from AI-generated impersonation) but the idea that a public broadcaster can meaningfully fight disinformation from inside a platform that runs on algorithmic amplification, without structural commitments from YouTube beyond tooling, is a bet that will need proving.

As we've seen from the six-month parliamentary commission led by Charles Alloncle, every move FTV makes is being scrutinised for either bias or wastefulness, often both at once. A high-profile YouTube partnership that fails to reach younger audiences, gets entangled in a disinformation incident or hands the algorithm editorial control in practice will give critics who need very little encouragement exactly what they are looking for.

That’s it for today but before you go:

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“We’re measuring the same eyeballs on the same device at the same time, two different ways.”

Denis Ostir, Editor in Chief, V (formerly VIDAA)

We recorded this one behind closed doors just as StreamTV Europe wrapped, our way of capturing thoughts while they were still hot off the press.

loves to say these conferences have a habit of turning into group therapy. Everyone agrees on the diagnosis, nobody moves toward the cure. He’s not wrong but Lisbon felt different. The tone was optimistic without being naive and more people were talking about what they were actually building than what they had already lost. Evan and I both felt it and we’ve been to enough of these events to know when a room has turned a corner.

Denis Ostir was a big part of why that feeling held up. He’s Editor in Chief at V, the smart TV platform formerly known as VIDAA, now on 50 million connected TVs. He comes from 20 years in broadcast journalism, which means he reads content the way most platform people don’t and he sits on data most of the industry can only speculate about (what I would give to get my hands on some of his data …). He also has a talent for naming problems the industry would rather leave unnamed.

The advertising system that funds most of television runs on a measurement framework that was never designed for the world we now operate in. The gap Ostir put a specific number on, between how the same viewer, on the same screen, at the same moment, gets valued depending on how the signal arrives, is structural. V is now doing something about it, with V Index, an open initiative V first announced at CES and road-tested in Lisbon, with an explicit invitation to every OEM, broadcaster and measurement body that wants in.

Whether they show up is the industry’s next real test. The episode also moves through what happened when V made a counterintuitive call on its FAST offering, a debate about vertical video on the big screen and what streaming data from Africa and Southeast Asia reveals about where the next wave of growth is actually coming from.

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That’s it for today but before you go:

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🗳️ Poll time

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!