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For years, traditional TV looked down on creators, the typical phrase from executives being “It’s just kids with iPhones filming from their bedrooms”.

Now, Big Media and Creator Media are on a collision course. One side has deep pockets, legacy influence and decades of storytelling experience. The other: unfiltered authenticity, a loyal community and an ability to adapt at lightning speed.

The challenge? Building a bridge between the two worlds while protecting what makes creator media so relatable and TV so trusted.

Next week (for MIPCOM 2025), I will interview Justine Ryst (MD YouTube France & Southern Europe), Alexia Laroche-Joubert (CEO Banijay France) and creator SparkDise about their Creator lab initiative (5 creators, 5 Banijay IPs, 5 pilots, 50K€ budget per pilot), a sandbox to test how TV storytelling and creator culture can meet halfway. It will take open minds, bold experiments and a few inevitable misfires to build a space where both worlds thrive.

Speaking of which, Gregg Bywalski, from Webedia Creators, spoke at Streaming Made Easy Live. Here’s what we have learnt:

At a glance:

• One project, four windows, everybody wins

• Co-producing beats managing

• Creators aren’t influencers

• Three generations, three mindsets

• What TV can give back

🎥 Watch Gregg’s fireside chat during Streaming Made Easy Live.

📑 Bonus for Premium subscribers: 📑 Grab our premium edition to download Gregg’s deck on the Creator Economy.

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One project, four windows, everybody wins

Take InoxTag, a 22-year-old French creator who built an audience on Fortnite videos. Last year, he swapped the controller for crampons and decided to climb the Everest. The result: a 2½-hour documentary financed by brands, produced by Webedia.

Beyond the extraordinary achievement of climbing the Everest, let’s dig into the distribution strategy itself:

→ One-day theatrical release: 368K tickets sold.

→ YouTube release the next day: 12 million views in 24 hours (36M in 1 month), with average watch time over an hour.

→ TF1 broadcast two weeks later: another 329K viewers.

→ Disney Plus global rollout, while the full film stayed on YouTube (unfortunately no data for us to chew on).

Every window hit a different audience segment instead of cannibalizing the other. It worked because the creator’s DNA stayed intact and the distribution logic finally caught up with how people actually watch.

Co-producing beats managing

Agencies stopped selling one-off brand deals and started building long-term IP with creators, sharing the risk and the reward.

Bywalski’s team doesn’t just sell sponsorships; they build workflows that adapt one master file for every surface (YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Snapchat, linear TV, SVOD etc.). Long form lives on YouTube. Shorts fuel discovery. Live events drive fandom. It’s the multi-window release perfected.

Creators aren’t influencers

Bywalski was clear on this and it’s a distinction that matters more than most broadcasters realise.

Influencers borrow fame from visibility elsewhere (reality TV, a viral moment, a traditional media push). Their communities follow a persona. Creators build theirs from scratch. No head start, no borrowed spotlight. They earn audiences through formats, consistency and community.

That difference changes everything. Influencers sell moments. Creators build franchises. Influencers monetise reach. Creators monetise relationships. When broadcasters lump both under the same label, they miss the real opportunity. The creator economy isn’t about endorsements, it’s about ownership. Partnerships that treat creators like talent-for-hire collapse fast. Partnerships that treat them like producers last.

Three generations, three mindsets

→ The 1st generation: The YouTube purists, independent to the bone.

→ The 2nd generation: The bridge builders like InoxTag, open to multi-platform deals when authenticity stays intact.

→ The 3rd generation: The live-native crowd. Twitch marathons, charity events, stadium audiences.

Each group needs a different pitch. TV will only win them over by proving it respects community first and control second.

What TV can give back

Creators have scale, not infrastructure. Most don’t archive their rushes, tag metadata, or even keep delivery masters. For years, YouTube was their archive. Now that their content crosses into theatres, linear TV and SVOD, that missing plumbing is slowing them down.

This is where broadcasters can still add massive value. They know delivery standards, file formats, cue sheets, subtitling, rights management and scheduling. They can help creators protect and monetise their back catalogs instead of losing them to the algorithm.

The exchange is clear: creators bring attention, authenticity and data. Broadcasters bring systems, polish and reach. Together they make products that live everywhere, not just on one platform.

TV can definitely teach creators one thing: how to make content last.

🎥 Watch Gregg’s fireside. chat during Streaming Made Easy Live:

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

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

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⚡️ This week in the Streaming Made Easy Universe:

This is a reader-supported publication. If you like what I do, help me keep doing it by upgrading to Streaming Made Easy Premium, we got a free month giveaway code right here 🫶 (ending today!)

Three disruptions reshaped the media landscape (in Europe and beyond) in the last two decades:

→ Social media challenged broadcasters’ gatekeeping role.

→ Streaming ripped up distribution models.

→ Creators rewired attention.

AI is different. It doesn’t just pressure-test business models. It questions what media is.

At Streaming Made Easy Live, Ezra Eeman (Chief Strategy Officer at NPO and founder of Wayfinder) took us on a tour of how AI is rewriting discovery. From the “jagged frontier” of breakthroughs and flaws, to the prospect of agents acting on our behalf, his point was clear: discovery is being rebuilt around AI ecosystems, not media destinations.

At a glance:

• The jagged frontier

• Visible shifts

• From AI in media to media in AI

• Find, Feel, Flow: the new discovery journey

• The intent paradigm and semantic discovery

• Predicting vs answering: the hybrid model

• Agents and the next marketplace

• The stakes: trust, performance, affordability

🎥 Watch Ezra’s keynote during Streaming Made Easy Live.

Bonus for Premium subscribers: 📑 Grab our premium edition to download Ezra’s keynote for Streaming Made Easy Live.

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The jagged frontier

AI development isn’t linear. It’s jagged.

• 2022: ChatGPT launches.

• 2023–24: multimodal models, real-time answers, reasoning.

• 2025: agentic AI enters the scene.

Each leap feels transformational. Each exposes flaws: hallucinations, bias, costly compute, unpredictable “agents” taking actions no one anticipated. Too big to ignore. Too broken to fully rely on. That tension is the media industry’s reality check.

Visible shifts

Adoption isn’t niche anymore.

• ChatGPT now: 700M weekly users, 1B daily queries.

• Dutch youth: 86% of 15–20 year olds use AI, 48% often.

• Average ChatGPT mobile user: 16 minutes a day.

But as usage climbs, traffic falls. Publishers report up to 40% drops from Google since AI overviews rolled out. Scraping wars intensify: models pull content thousands of times for every single user view. The open web is being consumed without clicks in return.

From AI in media to media in AI

The old game: media using AI to optimise workflows.

The new game?

AI becoming the primary interface through which people experience media.

Think Google’s Gemini embedded in Chrome, Android, YouTube. Meta’s AI across WhatsApp, Instagram, Quest. Apple Intelligence across iPhone, Mac, CarPlay. Amazon wrapping Fire TV, Echo, Twitch, Prime into one AI ecosystem.

If you’re not surfaced inside these AI environments, you risk invisibility.

Find, feel, flow

Ezra’s framework for the ambient discovery journey:

• Find: AI surfaces what you need before you ask.

• Feel: Experiences adapt to your mood, context, and device.

• Flow: You move seamlessly from text to audio to video.

Examples: Netflix’s generative search; VRT MAX tailoring its homepage by time of day; Google TV generating reviews and summaries; Samsung auto-translating live TV with AI subtitles.

Discovery no longer begins at a homepage. It happens continuously, everywhere.

The intent paradigm

Traditional search = 1–2 words. AI prompts = 23 words. That shift matters.

AI bots don’t just process your question. They expand it into dozens of related ones, pull sources, and synthesize into one answer. That means discovery is moving from where content sits to what content means.

At NPO, pilots combine video intelligence, transcriptions and topic mapping to build a multimodal database for richer discovery and editorial insights.

Predicting vs answering

Two forces define AI discovery:

• Predictive feeds (TikTok-style “For You”).

• Answer engines (Google AI overviews).

The future is hybrid. Smart TVs are already mixing the two, with predictive recommendations and generative search unified in one interface. Voice buttons and assistant layers still feel gimmicky, but the trajectory is clear: the TV is finally becoming truly smart.

Agents and the next marketplace

Beyond finding, agents act. Shopping, planning, even negotiating.

They also hoover up data—35+ categories from purchase history to location. That data becomes the fuel for a new kind of marketplace: AI assistants negotiating with paywalls, arranging micropayments, bundling content on the fly. Visa already tests AI-ready wallets. The direction of travel is set.

The stakes

Publishers expect productivity gains (80%), but only 43% report them. They hope for revenue, but just 9% see it. Trust, affordability, and performance are still out of sync.

So the choices:

• Feed prediction engines (optimize for engagement).

• Serve answer engines (optimize for authority and citations).

• Build your own AI-powered destination (NL Web, conversational sites).

• Design for personal AI agents (privacy-first, structured formats).

There’s no universal path. What matters is connecting content + context + audience into seamless experiences that hold meaning.

Do you optimise for humans, for machines, or both?

Ignore the machines and risk irrelevance. Serve only the machines and lose the human bond. The winners will be those who manage both.

​That’s it for today but before you go:

🎥 Watch Ezra’s keynote during Streaming Made Easy Live:

Comments, likes or shares come a long way 🙏🏻

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

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⚡️ This week in the Streaming Made Easy Universe:

This is a reader-supported publication. If you like what I do, help me keep doing it by upgrading to Streaming Made Easy Premium, we got a free month giveaway code right here 🫶

We are so grateful to everyone who attended our inaugural Streaming Made Easy Live event last week. It’s not lost on us how many travelled a day before IBC 2025 and took time away from their desks to hang out with us.

And to the readers who couldn’t make it, please know that none of this would be possible without you either. Thank you for your support via DMs and WhatsApp.

What now? The SME team is hard at work in the editing room. We got footage of the sessions and plan on releasing them over the next few weeks. If you are not a premium subscriber, we got a free month of SME Premium right here.

Today, let me share some big picture takeaways from the event and share three special announcements about what’s coming next.

At a glance:

• The vision

• The delivery

• The future

Grab one month for free

The vision

Over 150 executives (from 90 companies) joined us in Amsterdam for an afternoon of talks and networking.

Organising an event on the day before IBC opens was a gamble as executives are about to start a brutal 4-day marathon made of 30’ meetings and parties (that part is not so hard I know but hey we’re not getting any younger) in a venue which this year registered 43 858 visitors.

Our goal was therefore to offer a totally different experience, one where you don’t have FOMO because you couldn’t choose between 3 different sessions taking place at once or had no time to meet all the attendees. We focused on short informative talks & presentations, a balanced audience in the industry constituency represented (attendees were from CTV, broadcasters, streamers, telecom operators and technology companies), a diverse audience both on and off stage (a big challenge for IBC as a technology conference), and finally multiple down time to focus on networking. It’s all about being complimentary.

The delivery

Judging by the immediate feedback we got (and the word of mouth afterwards on the IBC show floor), we delivered on this ambition.

Now let’s get to our amazing speakers and partners and dig into some of the top takeaways.

#1 - The power of collaboration

was the n°1 theme underlying all sessions. In EMEA, Netflix collaborates with 80 partners. Netflix doesn’t win alone, each of these partners can take credit for Netflix being the leading streamer in the region and beyond. YouTube admits it’s bad at producing content and thrives to build the best platform for content creators.

#2 - The ego trap

Partnerships will underdeliver if you don’t leave your ego at the door and keep building siloes around your media businesses. Media Press Group puts the IP at the centre of everything (discoverability, monetisation) with Open ID (a non proprietary ID to cut through the fragmentation of our ecosystem).

#3 - Simplicity as a core value proposition

Stop talking about fragmentation, fix it. Telenet Group has seen a double-digit decrease of the churn rate amongst its bundled customers since launching Bango’s Digital Vending Machine. Why? Simplicity before anything else.

#4 - The new playbook

Channel 4 and Webedia Creators are the new media playbook building flywheels without fearing cannibalisation. French YouTuber Inoxtag is the living proof that you can release a documentary in movie theatres, on TV and on SVOD while it’s up on YouTube (wait until you see the performance number in our recorded session). Different platforms = different viewer behaviours and ultimately incremental audiences. It’s called a windowing strategy. Our industry has done it over and over again and yet YouTube and Social media are a step too far?!

#5 - The big screen

Speaking of audiences, Gen Zers and Millennials aren’t turning their back on the big screen. As they grow up, they grow fond of a TV living room experience but are ready for more (voice controlled conversational interface, integrated vide cameras etc.). The industry has tried but these features never really picked up until now. Proof of concepts with Gemini or ChatGPT in TVs and STBs are coming to market.

#6 - The AI driven media discovery

The media industry is fracturing into four completely distinct worlds, each operating by different rules, optimising for different metrics and built on fundamentally different monetisation models. In his keynote, Ezra mapped the new landscape revealing how content discovery is splitting across two critical dimensions: Architecture (centralised vs. decentralised) and Function (predicting vs. answering). Companies that master this transition will own the next decade of audience engagement.

The future

The 1st edition wasn’t even wrapped that we announced our next events!

→ In November, we’re organising Streaming Made Easy - After Hours for local executives (think one fire side chat + lots of bites & drinks in a cosy location). If you are interested in attending, sign up here.

→ In April, we’re heading to Lisbon. Yes you read that right. We’ve partnered with Stream TV Europe (taking place April 13-15th) to host SME Live on April 13th.

→ Then again in Amsterdam on September 10th ahead of IBC 2026.

If you are interested in partnering around any of these 3 events, respond to this email or ping us at contact@thelocalact.com. Don’t take our word for it, ask any of our partners (Media press Group, Bango, FX Digital and Irdeto) what it’s like to work with the Streaming Made Easy Live team.

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

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

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⚡️ This week in the Streaming Made Easy Universe:

This is a reader-supported publication. If you like what I do, help me keep doing it by upgrading to Streaming Made Easy Premium with this Summer code 🫶

Hi everyone,

​We're now 1 week away from the 1st edition of Streaming Made Easy Live!

Here's what you should know:

​→ 140 confirmed attendees from 85 companies. We’re now FULL!

​→ The afternoon will run as follows:

​​We will record all the sessions (full access for Streaming Made Easy Premium subscribers) and a photographer will be with us so put on your best smiles.

​​Thank you to our stellar partners: Media press Group, Bango, FX Digital and Irdeto, who are working hard with us to make this happen.

​​We can't wait to see you all on September 11th.

​​Marion & the Streaming Made Easy Live team

​https://www.streamingmadeeasy.com/s/streaming-made-easy-live

Subscribe now

This is a reader-supported publication. If you like what I do, help me keep doing it by upgrading to Streaming Made Easy Premium with this Summer code 🫶

While the industry obsesses over bundling, streaming fatigue and who gets the top row of the smart TV UI, piracy has taken a backseat in the race to build the next D2C darling. That’s a mistake. Because in 2025, piracy is more accessible, more seamless and more professional-looking than ever.

According to UK Piracy Measurer Muso, global piracy dropped by 5.7% in 2024 but under the surface, the picture’s more nuanced:

• TV remains the biggest category with 96.8B visits, though it declined 6.8%. Anime is still surging, now making up nearly 28% of TV piracy.

• Publishing piracy is the only sector on the rise, up 4.3% to 66.4B visits. Manga drives over 70% of that, fuelled by fan translations and the global popularity of serialised reading.

• Film piracy fell 18% to 24.3B visits.

• Music and software piracy both dropped sharply (–18.6% and –2.1%, respectively).

• Streaming vs download? It’s a 50/50 split. And 60% of piracy comes from users going direct to sites, search engines are less of a driver now.

The revenue losses are hard to pin down though. In the US (the number one pirate market according to MUSO’s latest report), the US Chamber of Commerce puts the cost of digital piracy to American businesses at nearly $77 billion a year. Meanwhile, a March 2025 report from the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) warns that much of the piracy data out there is inflated.

To get under the skin of this quiet crisis, I spoke to Lau Zuydervelt, Solutions Director: Anti-Piracy & Cybersecurity at Irdeto.

If you still picture pirates as hoodie-clad basement dwellers, you’re missing the plot. Today’s piracy economy is pro-grade. It includes slick UIs, integrated payment options, mobile-first interfaces and live sports offerings with surprisingly decent uptime. There are even “customer support” features for those bootleg IPTV services. Some consumers genuinely don’t realize they’re using an illegal platform.

Zuydervelt also calls out the rise of “hybrid users”, people who do pay for at least one legit service but also dip into piracy to fill the gaps. It’s not always about dodging costs. Sometimes the content just isn’t available legally in their market. Anime fans, for instance, are notorious for turning to pirate platforms when the latest show hasn’t made it to their region yet, despite big investments from the likes of Netflix and Crunchyroll.

So what’s the fix? It’s not a silver bullet. Technical takedowns and anti-piracy measures help. Real impact comes when you combine enforcement with business strategy.

During the 2023 Rugby World Cup, Irdeto didn’t block pirate streams immediately. Instead, they monitored activity, collected intelligence and struck when it would hurt most (i.e. during the high-stakes matches). That kind of enforcement has real-world impact: pirates lose reliability and some users go back to the legal feed simply to avoid disruption.

The good news? AI is already helping scan and identify infringing content faster, making real-time enforcement possible during live events.

The better news? You can dig even deeper into this topic with the help of today’s Streaming Made Easy guest.

See you on Sept. 6th for a new Saturday edition of Streaming Made Easy.

Why attend Streaming Made Easy Live? No panels, expect value-packed presentations (on a range of topics: from AI, the creator economy to content discovery & bundling) and networking opportunities.

This event is for you if you’re a commercial or strategy lead, a product or tech decision-maker, at a broadcaster, streamer, telecom operator or CTV platform.

Submit your registration request via this link: https://lu.ma/w86bc5on

1st companies attending include: A1 Group, all3media, ATP Media, BBC, BBC Studios, BritBox, Channel 4, DTG, Endemol Shine Australia, EO/NPO, Euro News, France 24, Futrhood Media, Google, YouTube, HbbTV, Infosys, KOCOWA, LG Ad Solutions, Liberty Global, Media Distillery, MediaKind, Netflix, NPO, OKAST, Omdia, Orange, Play Anywhere, Inc., Premier League, Proximus, Rakuten TV, Rights Stuff BV, Roku, Sky/Comcast, SkyShowtime, Sling TV, Streamline, StreamTV Show, SVT, Swipefinder, Telenet / Streamz, Testlio, TF1, The Trade Desk, Tivu S.r.l., TVREV, VIDAA, Warner Bros Discovery, Webedia, Whale TV, Xite, Xperi, and Zattoo.

Here’s what the day will look like:

How Discovery went off the rails:

→ Multiplication of entry points to access catalogues: Non exclusive licensing means a single program can live on four different services.

→ Shallow tagging: Genre + release year no longer cuts it. Today’s recommendation engines need mood, theme, dialect and moment metadata to make sense of a title.

→ Engagement‑first algorithms: If you liked “Downtown Abbey” once, your home screen fills with genteel period dramas and stately manor intrigue. Great for short‑term watch hours, terrible for widening horizons.

→ UX and UI have grown dull: Endless rows of near-identical rail of themed sections and thumbnails.

→ Gatekeeper data hoarding: Cross‑service metadata sharing is still minimal.

This is an industry-wide challenge and it will take a village of innovators to find the fix. I went looking for one and spoke to Gijs Davelaar, Chief Revenue Officer, Media  Press Group:

“Discovery has become the bottleneck. Audiences are overwhelmed by choice and underwhelmed by navigation.”

His company, Media Press Group, supplies enriched metadata feeds to more than 50,000 TV channels and streaming catalogues. In other words, they live inside the plumbing most viewers never see.

Gijs’ take is simple: good metadata is “precision tagging.” Cast lists, episode synopses and genre labels are table stakes; the money is in tone, emotion and context markers that let an engine surface exactly the right title at the right moment. Do that and churn drops before you even touch pricing.

The next growth spurt in streaming will not come from adding bigger libraries or cutting prices. It will come from making the existing library findable. Discovery is where subscriber sentiment, ad yield and brand perception collide. Fix it or keep paying the cancellation tax every month.

Gijs Davelaar will be speaking at Streaming Made Easy Live in Amsterdam on September 11th. Until then, watch our interview together 👇🏻

Why attend Streaming Made Easy Live? No panels, expect value-packed presentations (on a range of topics: from AI, the creator economy to content discovery & bundling) and networking opportunities.

This event is for you if you’re a commercial or strategy lead, a product or tech decision-maker, at a broadcaster, streamer, telecom operator or CTV platform.

Submit your registration request via this link: https://lu.ma/w86bc5on

1st companies attending include: Channel 4, Britbox, Premier League, SkyShowtime, Xite, Proximus, Media Distillery, Liberty Global, BBC, Netflix, Media press group, Proximus, Liberty Global, FX Digital, Bango, Sling, A1, Whale TV, Orange, All3Media, Vodafone, SVT, tivù, ATP Media, Irdeto, TiVo, The Trade Desk/Ventura, OKAST, Zattoo, Kokowa, Rakuten, Ziggo, TF1, France 24, Euronews, Webedia, Telenet, NPO, Endemol and many more.

Here’s what the day will look like:

Duhig is co-founder of FX Digital, a London-based app development agency that builds for the big screen only. No mobile, no desktop, “just” CTV. Which, in 2025, means navigating an impossibly fragmented, ever-shifting ecosystem. Roku dominates in the US. Samsung and Sky are stronger bets in the UK. Want to build once and deploy everywhere? Tough luck. Roku uses BrightScript, Apple TV demands Swift. Everyone else is somewhere in between. And that’s before you even deal with annual firmware changes.

"A lot of what we do is just helping clients pick where to start" says Duhig. "What region? What demographic? That determines the stack."

Fragmentation doesn’t just affect developers. It shapes the very architecture of content discovery.

TV used to be about channels. Now it’s about visibility: which apps get a branded button or front-row placement, who pays for a tile on the homepage. Discovery is no longer a meritocracy. It’s a marketplace and increasingly it’s one dominated by ad ambitions. Sponsored tiles, branded remotes and homepage takeovers are the new norm.

Still, it’s not all doom and gloom. Fragmentation also means opportunity. For streamers without blockbuster budgets, regional operators like Magenta or Sky can punch above their weight. They may not match the reach of global players but they bring a powerful lever: prominence. “They actually help you get seen.” Duhig says. “That’s not something every global platform can promise.”

And yes, innovation is happening, just not always in plain sight. From voice-driven interfaces to second-screen gaming and AI-assisted testing, new ideas are reshaping how we engage with the living room screen. Platforms are toying with personalised content suggestions based on who's in the room. Developers are automating the grunt work to spend more time on polish. Slowly but surely, the ecosystem is growing up.

Which brings us back to FX Digital. They don’t pretend to fix the chaos but they do help clients navigate it, prioritising platforms, making smart tech trade-offs, and building apps that work across increasingly unpredictable environments.

Matthew will be speaking at Streaming Made Easy Live in Amsterdam on September 11th, alongside his co-founder Tom Smith. They’ll dig into how innovation is still possible on the most fragmented screen in the house and why it matters more than ever to reach younger audiences.

CTV is messy but at least it’s not boring.

Why attend Streaming Made Easy Live? No panels, expect value-packed presentations (on a range of topics: from AI, the creator economy to content discovery & bundling) and networking opportunities.

This event is for you if you’re a commercial or strategy lead, a product or tech decision-maker, at a broadcaster, streamer, telecom operator or CTV platform.

Submit your registration request via this link: https://lu.ma/w86bc5on

1st companies attending include: Channel 4, Xite, Proximus, Media Distillery, Liberty Global, BBC, Netflix, Media press group, Proximus, Liberty Global, FX Digital, Bango, Sling, A1, Whale TV, Orange, All3Media, Vodafone, SVT, tivù, ATP Media, Irdeto, TiVo, The Trade Desk/Ventura, OKAST, Zattoo, Kokowa, Rakuten, Ziggo, TF1, France 24, Euronews, Webedia, Telenet, NPO, Endemol and many more.

Here’s what the day will look like:

Bango was game right away because we share a passion for bundles, data and bringing value to our peers. Luisa H. B. Muneratti will be on stage to talk about the bundle economy of course.

Today, I’m releasing a full interview with her as a teaser to her September session.

To dig deeper into the bundle economy, grab the latest reports from Bango:

→ Where do specialty streamers fit in the habits of Americans? What are the top Subscription Combos US consumers want? Find out here.

→ The Gravity Shift report: Based on insights from 201 senior decision-makers at subscription brands spanning AI, education, finance, food delivery, SVOD, retail, and more, the report reveals how the industry is evolving: from direct to indirect, and from a subscription economy to a bundle economy.

→ The Subscriptions Assemble report: Their latest research highlights the evolving attitudes and behaviours of American subscribers. Drawing insights from 5,000 US consumers, this report uncovers the key trends shaping the new bundle economy and reveals why collaboration, not just competition, is essential for success.

Why attend Streaming Made Easy Live? No panels, zero fluff, expect value-packed presentations (on a range of topics: from AI, the creator economy to content discovery & bundling) and networking opportunities.

This event is for you if you’re a commercial or strategy lead, a product or tech decision-maker, at a broadcaster, streamer, telecom operator or CTV platform.

Here’s what the day will look like:

Submit your registration request via this link: https://lu.ma/w86bc5on

Ezra is Director of Strategy & Innovation at NPO and founder of the must-read AI newsletter Wayfinder.

During SME Live, he will deliver a keynote on « The 4 futures of AI driven media discovery».

Why this topic?

The media industry is fracturing into four completely distinct worlds, each operating by different rules, optimizing for different metrics, and built on fundamentally different monetization models.

In this keynote, Ezra will map the new landscape revealing how content discovery is splitting across two critical dimensions: Architecture (centralized vs. decentralized) and Function (predicting vs. answering).

Companies that master this transition will own the next decade of audience engagement.

More speaker announcements coming soon. Until then, here’s what the day will look like:

Want in? Submit your registration request via this link: https://lu.ma/w86bc5on

🗓️ Sept. 11th 1-7.30pm
📍Equals (Canals - Amsterdam)
🎟️ Invite-only event

No panels, zero fluff, expect value-packed presentations (on a range of topics: from AI, the creator economy to content discovery & bundling) and networking opportunities.

This event is for you if you’re a commercial or strategy lead, a product or tech decision-maker, at a broadcaster, streamer, telecom operator or CTV platform.

Join fellow M&E executives from companies like: BBC, Netflix, Sling, A1, Whale TV, Orange, All3Media, Vodafone, SVT, tivù, ATP Media, The Trade Desk/Ventura, Zattoo, Rakuten, TF1, France 24, Euronews, Webedia, Telenet, NPO, Endemol, Roku, Sky and more.

Who better than Netflix to kick-off SME Live?

Carmen Garcia and Ludovic Simoens will deliver a keynote entitled: « When Product meets Marketing: Inside Netflix’s Playbook For High-impact Partnerships ».

Why this duo?

To show that it takes the perfect combination of product and marketing minds to delight both viewers and distribution partners.

More speaker announcements coming soon. Until then, here’s what the day will look like:

Want in? Submit your registration request via this link: https://lu.ma/w86bc5on

🗓️ Sept. 11th 1-7.30pm
📍Equals (Canals - Amsterdam)
🎟️ Invite-only event

No panels, zero fluff, expect value-packed presentations (on a range of topics: from AI, the creator economy to content discovery & bundling) and networking opportunities.

This event is for you if you’re a commercial or strategy lead, a product or tech decision-maker, at a broadcaster, streamer, telecom or CTV operator.

Cheers,

Marion

Look no further than Streaming Made Easy Live to ease your way into it.

On September 11th, 2025 (the day before IBC opens), Streaming Made Easy will hold its first one-day event in a beautiful Canal House in Central Amsterdam.

No sales pitches, no panels. Expect value-packed presentations and fireside chats, my debate club in a live format and much more.

Space will be limited as I intend to keep this small to ensure C-level executives operating in Media & Entertainment get quality networking time.

Why another event? I’m sharing my vision in this short video.

Share

To register your interest:

→ As an attendee, head over here.

→ As a speaker, send me your speaking pitch at contact@thelocalact.com.

→ As a sponsor, head over here. There will be opportunities to feature your company brand throughout the day.

See you in Amsterdam in September ❤️

Marion

P.S.: Tell me what you think 👇