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Weekend Wrap Up Edition - Week 24/2025
Good Saturday evening, stream team! Full transparency, I’m writing today’s edition in a jet lagged state post The Stream TV Show in Denver. I’ve still got 5 industry moves you couldn’t afford missing though. Let's dive right in.
🏀 NBA Made In Portugal
America, your upcoming NBA coverage on Peacock is “Made in Portugal”. The Sky team is indeed behind NBCU’s Peacock as the streamer is gearing up for its fall basketball debut. Competition will be fierce this fall with ABC, ESPN, NBC, Peacock and Amazon now each showcasing their rights package. Peacock is banking on a younger, digitally-native crowd to boost engagement and ad spend. On the menu for Peacock streamers, one-click Live-in-Browse, catch-up clips, a bingo-meets-fantasy ScoreCard and even a dedicated celebrity-row court side stream on Mondays.
“Peacock will be the most fun and engaging place to stream NBA games for longtime basketball fans and new ones, too.”
Rick Cordella - President of NBC Sports
For the millennial basketball fan in me, scoring this player is the cherry on top.
🎬 Netflix’s €1 Billion Spanish Content Push
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos just threw down a billion euros in Spain for 2025-2028, turbo-charging local productions out of the Tres Cantos hub, a key European content engine already credited with 20,000 jobs since 2017. Netflix is not just planting flags here, they’re setting the stage for Spain as their premium European production base (meanwhile in France this is happening…).
“Last year alone, Spanish titles generated over 5 billion hours of viewing on Netflix”
Omdia estimates this figure is the best of any non-English production powerhouse in Europe (twice the hours for French and German titles). Yet Netflix “only” has 8.7M subscribers in Spain (a 45% household penetration). Expect Spanish content to fill global screens even faster, intensifying competition with fellow EU5 countries, but will this boost local subscriptions too?
📲 CANAL+’s Everywhere Ambition
CANAL+ just upgraded their app (which is hands on my favourite app to use) with swipe-to-zap and smoother navigation but the real headline? They’re embedding their platform everywhere: Apple's Vision Pro headset (featuring immersive MotoGP docs), dashboards of Renault Alpine and BMW vehicles, and Air France's long-haul flights.
This is a brilliant distribution play to embed their app in everyday consumer tech (beyond TVs which they’ve done already) makes them virtually impossible to dislodge. It shows how much the group is moving away from its traditional MVPD status to go full OTT.
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📦 Prime Video’s Ad Ramp Up
According to a leaked deck, Amazon's Prime Video is said to work on a significant expansion of its contextual ad-targeting capabilities to offer more than genre-level segments with audience segments such as Female Voices, Top Trending, High Income Households, and Coviewing.
The firm has also doubled its ad load from 2-3 minutes to 4-6 minutes per hour, aligning with the streaming industry's mid-tier and allowing them to double the available inventory.
The move isn’t surprising as they have room versus their competitors and viewer’s ad tolerance. If CPMs go down, they will suck up even more demand than they do today.
📺 Addressable TV Strikes Back
RTL and Deutsche Telekom's expanded partnership integrates RTL's linear ad server into Telekom’s Magenta Ad Solution. Launching in 2025, this setup allows fully personalised, programmatic advertising on linear TV once considered untouchable by digital targeting.
This is a watershed moment where Linear TV finally merges digital precision with traditional reach. Deutsche Telekom was strong of 4.6M subscribers at the end of 2024. If every single European telco finds a way to turn Linear TV into Addressable, well CTV you better watch out. Meet your new advertising mastodons.
That’s it for today but before you go 🗳️
Enjoy your day and see you on Tuesday for a Deep Dive edition of Streaming Made Easy Premium.
⚡️ This Week In The Streaming Made Easy Universe:
🎒How Kids Brands Count On Amazon Channels
Kids' screen time is being shaped by a shrinking club of global platforms but when everything is designed for everyone, who’s really designing for children? Profiles, UI/UX and content menus are often identical across ages leaving a clear gap for services built specifically for young viewers and their parents.
Animation Nation: How We Built A Cartoon Empire
Couldn't go to Annecy for the Animation Film Festival? I’m bringing Annecy to you. This week on Streaming Made Easy, I've worked on two pieces for you: