Hungry French
On A Shopping Spree - Weekend Wrap Up Edition - Week 9/2025
Why isn’t Max getting a piece of FIFA’s Club World Cup action? What’s driving Apple to rethink its once-exclusive strategy? Who’s France’s quiet but powerful production giant? Another eventful week in Media & Entertainment.
⚽️ No Soccer For Max
You may have wondered why WBD signed a deal with DAZN to broadcast 24 matches from the upcoming FIFA Club World Cup for TNT, TBS, truth but not for Max? DAZN bought global rights for a whooping 1B$ and carved out the ability to sub-license rights to linear channels (not SVOD it seems). The thinking behind this WBD deal? Despite headlines on streaming taking over the world, DAZN simply doesn’t have the reach (nor the local production facilities) football demands, linear TV does. DAZN will drive subscribers to its global SVOD offering, its localised SVOD offerings (particularly strong in Europe), sign with a key broadcast player or two in each market and who knows launch global FAST & YouTube channels?
N.B: If you were wondering, no it’s not THE World Cup which is set to take place in 2026, here’s an explainer on what this Club World Cup is.
🍏 Tables Are Turning
If you had told me 5 years ago that Apple would be in the business of selling its programming to 3rd-party platforms, I wouldn’t have believed you. Pre-2019, Apple was a fortress. Everything was done to have Apple devices and services be the centre of a user’s universe. Thing is, producing content is expensive and even with 2.35B devices in market, exclusivity doesn’t make sense. Hence why Apple TV+ dropped the fortress strategy 5 years ago to embrace ubiquitous distribution.
🇪🇸 Rakuten x FAST x Telcos
I’ve been bullish about why European Telecom Operators should be embracing Free Streaming. It’s been slower than I thought though. Orange Spain, Virgin Media, Zattoo, Waipu and Netgem / TalkTalk are amongst the happy few who made the jump to build FAST Hubs. No new launches since. Rakuten aims to fix that as announced during the 2025 Mobile World Congress.
💬 A New Kind Of Bundle
I don’t like to say I told you so but I guess Evan Shapiro rubs off on me after 10 podcast episodes 😅
After Free x Le Chat by Mistral AI, this week brought news confirming that LLM models are the hot new thing for telcos with Deutsche Telekom/Magenta launching an “AI phone” with Perplexity, on the back of Telefonica partnering with Perplexity too this time to bundle the LLM subscription for its Spanish mobile subs. Even Meta is rumoured to be going against its ad-supported DNA and could be up for bundling grabs.
🇫🇷 Hungry French
Not for food but for talented production companies across the globe. Meet Mediawan (founded in 2015) who bought 11 companies in the last 5 years (they now have 80 production labels in their portfolio). Their latest get is the team behind one of my favourite shows. French roots but global ambitions.
Mediawan by the numbers:
📺 Old Recipes
Never go out of style. Amazon Prime Video Germany is not the 1st, nor the last streamer to launch a linear channel. For the upcoming Tuesday Deep Dive, I’ll break down the why and the how behind streamers making move in linear territory. Spoiler? Linear TV is not dead yet especially in Europe.
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.
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