🤖 ChatGPT For All

The Right Move By UAE ? Weekend Wrap Up Edition - Week 22/2025

May 31, 2025

Happy weekend, everyone! The BBQ is already grilling on the SME rooftop but I still managed to grab my must-read stories of the week. Let’s dive in.

Why trust Streaming Made Easy Premium to know Europe like the back of your hand?

❌ No copy and paste press releases to inform you or out of touch research.

✅ Only insights and analysis based on 20 years of operational and strategy experience in the region.

Still on the edge? Try it for 1 month and take it from here. It’s like Netflix, you can cancel anytime.

🇪🇺Europe, I Need You

On June 12th, we’re releasing a AMA (Ask Me Anything) session for The Media Odyssey Podcast and we need YOU. Well I need you because we’re building a team Europe vs a team US. I want the best questions, let’s show the yankee what we’re made of!

Share your question here.

P.S.: You don’t need to be in Europe to be in my team, you just have to like me better than Evan Shapiro!

🎁 About Time!

Disney+ has rolled out Perks, a loyalty scheme for U.S. subscribers offering everything from Freakier Friday premiere tickets to 6 months of DoorDash, 20 % off Adidas purchases and free in-game tokens for Monopoly Go. Hulu users get their own curated rewards: event tickets to major pop-culture festivals and shows like Comic-Con®, Lollapalooza; Show-inspired swag; Partner offers.

Disney’s way of sweetening the recent price hike? Partly. It’s also urgent for streamers to reward their loyal subscribers and I’m astonished by the lack of focus put into loyalty programs when all streamers are hit by churn. Yes we expect more than content especially when we’ve been your customers for years.

👋 Disney+, we’re loyal too on this side of the ocean. Start with France & the Netherlands to delight Streaming Made Easy. xoxo 😘

🇫🇷 More Tax Incentives S’il Vous Plaît

The 8th edition of the Choose France Summit in Versailles benefitted from the best timing ever. After Trump’s call for tariffs on movies, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos grabbed the opportunity to ask President Macron to extend the 30% below the line tax rebate on a whole new set of expenses.

I wish I had a sit at that table, what a line up of French and international key media stakeholders with A24, Mediawan.

🔄 A New Name

Mediaset Spain is rebranding Mitele Plus as Mediaset Infinity+, matching its Italian parent. It’s not any rebranding, it’s MFE’s (Media For Europe) way of building the Mediaset brand as a Pan-European one.

After the German recent bump on the road, it’s important to put your money when your mouth is.

🎯 The Best Of Mobile & TV

Across the UK, France, Italy, Spain and Germany, Samsung Ads now blends opt-in insights from 20M Samsung smartphones with 70 million Smart TVs to give advertisers unified targeting, analytics and reporting, all on explicitly consented data.

It’s still a walled garden but at least it’s a cross-device one.

🏉 YouTuber Scores Rugby Rights

The YouTube playbook is getting more insane by the day. They don’t buy any rights upfront (except for YouTube TV) but they have built such a powerful platform that big media & now creator media invest in premium rights to be showcased on the platform. This week, YouTuber Tim Cocker and ex-England star Joe Worsley have secured the UK & Ireland rights to the French Pro D2 to stream full matches and fan-first content for free on YouTube on a new channel “FR-UK Rugby”.

Here’s what my go to source on sports says about the deal.

🧐 Social Publishing: Kezako?

Shout out to Paul Ripart, Prisma Media, for the relentless educational work on advertising. This week, he explained what social publishing is. lt enables brands run sponsored posts on social channels under a trusted media name (Harper’s Bazaar, GEO, etc.) to boost engagement by leveraging editorial credibility instead of traditional paid-social ads. Campaigns live only in targeted feeds, are sold via CPM/CPC/CPL and drive healthy KPIs.

You knew? I didn’t. I learn something new every single day 🔥

🤖 ChatGPT For All

The United Arab Emirates now offers free ChatGPT Plus (GPT-4o) to every resident. This deal is said to be part of a bigger one around project Stargate. As our upcoming episode on The Media Odyssey Podcast is about AI, this news made me wonder.

On one hand, this democratises AI access and learning regardless of your economic and social background. On the other, the unrestricted access to a single, US-built AI tool might stifle homegrown innovation and create overreliance on one provider which sounds overly familiar, doesn’t it?

Thoughts? 🗳️

Enjoy your day and see you on Tuesday for a Deep Dive edition of Streaming Made Easy Premium.