🧗♂️BBC’s Climbing The Hardware Cliff
Should they? Weekend Wrap Up Edition - Week 20/2025
Forget the WBD rebrand chatter, it’s BBC’s device play that really matters. Get my take on Letterboxd’s TVOD gambit and more. Here’s your no-fluff Streaming Made Easy Weekend Wrap Up.
🇺🇸 Lead By Example
Ok let’s get one thing out of the way: WBD’s latest rebranding move. Forget about the name change, this matters x10 more 👇
Yes WBD made a mistake by going for the name Max. They fixed it. Time to move on because while we're all busy criticising them, we overlook the underlying narrative (and hopefully strategy) shift. This quote from Casey Bloys on the podcast The Town with Matthew Belloni blew my mind.
Why? Because few execs and companies make peace with where they fit in today's media landscape. It's refreshing. More companies should centre back instead of running around like headless chicken trying to be everything to everyone.
🔥 DSPs Felt The Heat This Week
Come Feb 28, 2026, Xandr’s DSP goes dark. Microsoft is folding buy-side tools into an AI-and-agent platform, leaving only DV360, The Trade Desk, and Amazon DSP in the heavyweight division. Shame when you read that Xandr was well regarded in the space while agency executives went hard on the world of DSPs during this year’s upfronts.
🎬 Letterboxd’s TVOD Store
Cinephiles rejoice: Letterboxd is adding rentals and purchases in the US/Canada. It makes sense on paper. They own the community, trust, and curation. It’s too little too late to venture in the TVOD and EST space though. Look how the video business has changed in a market like France in the last decade:
Letterboxd, here’s my email, let’s chat strategy when you want. I have a few ideas for you to harness this amazing community of movie lovers you’ve built. Hint on what I would push you to do.
🇫🇷 Ligue 1 On All Fronts
If there’s one job I wouldn’t take even with the biggest package in the world is the Ligue 1’s CEO role (ok no one would offer it to me). Nicolas de Tavernost, former CEO of M6 France, is an amazing exec but talk about climbing the Everest.
In a nutshell: twice in a row your rights’ buyer calls it quit (Mediapro in 2021, DAZN in 2025); you’ve pissed off your historical partner (Canal+ who has close to 10M subs, tier 1 rights like Champions’ league, Top 14 and F1); piracy is out of control. The Ligue 1’s challenges should act as a warning to all sports organisations. We’re in an era where your mistakes are really make or break now. Fans will turn their back on you in a heartbeat if you don’t price your offering right. They’ve been making headlines for weeks and the YouTube and the piracy win won’t be enough to reverse this spirale trend. They need a reboot.
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Still on the edge?
🇬🇧 Four Big Shifts from LG’s 2025 Report
→ Streaming Is Default: 80 % of UK internet users have CTV; 52 % now pick streaming over broadcast.
→ Free Streaming Fiesta: 79 % prefer ad-supported tiers; FAST active accounts on LG TVs are up 260 % since 2023.
→ Discovery Gridlock: It still takes 12 minutes from power-on to play; viewers juggle 6 apps and 50 % lean on the home screen.
→ Ads Move Markets: After CTV ads, 39 % visit sites, 35 % search, 23 % buy, 20 % hit stores.
Heads up: If you’re not front-and-center on that home screen, you’re invisible.
Grab the report here and go listen to smart LG Ad Solutions people on The Media Odyssey Podcast.
🇫🇷 Practice Your High-School French
I’m featured in the newsletter of my fellow countryman and media entrepreneur, Nicolas Jaimes 🤩 for a piece on the French broadcasters.
📺 Devices Needed
To Own the IP Future? The BBC seems to think so as it is eying its own streaming device with Freely built in.
“We think now is the time to confirm an IP switchover in the 2030s, setting out the conditions and providing certainty to ensure success. (…) We want to play our part (…) To help, we want to double down on Freely as a universal free service to deliver live TV over broadband. And we are considering a streaming media device with Freely capabilities built in, with a radically simplified user interface specifically designed to help those yet to benefit from IP services.”
Tim Davie - MD BBC
Reality check: Control of the customer/viewer relationship and the first-screen experience could cement public service TV in the IP era but the hardware business is HARD especially in such a fragmented big screen device ecosystem.
That’s it for today but before you go, tell me 🗳️
Enjoy your day and see you on Tuesday for a Deep Dive edition of Streaming Made Easy Premium. Next up: we’re going to the Cannes Film Festival 👠
Other: You need to find an underserved audience (even global) and cater to their needs, truly master the streaming tech to provide a seamless, top-notch, engaging, and immersive service, and identify new ways to market your service to cut through all the market noise and to make marketing costs more affordable.