Sweden drew the line on Meta
Not every week has a trade body expulsion, an AI metadata lawsuit and a Swiss referendum. This one did.
🇵🇹Who owns the first click? Find out in Lisbon
On April 13th, I am running a half-day workshop at StreamTV Europe titled “Who Owns the First Click in the Living Room?” Three hours, five sessions, no filler.
The morning opens with data. Côme Fradetal from RTL AdAlliance and I will present the findings from the largest annual study of European viewing behaviour, this year co-produced with Streaming Made Easy. Then Tom Smith from FX Digital opens up their project files to show which product features actually moved the metrics on apps built for Discovery+, BritBox and Dyn Media.
After the break, three panels. One on monetising the big screen without invasive tracking, with Canal+ Brand Solutions, Sharp and SyncMint. One on who is actually winning the sports fan’s living room, with Orange Spain, YouTube and MainStreaming. And a closing debate on whether 2030 looks like super aggregation or super fragmentation, with TF1, Samsung TV Plus, Telenet and Bango on stage.
→ Full programme and registration at StreamTV Europe here, use my code SME10 for a 10% discount.
🤖 Great idea, inconvenient timing
CANAL+ is bringing OpenAI to 42.3M subscribers. I wanted to cheer then I remembered the Gracenote lawsuit.
Starting this June, the CANAL+ App will let subscribers search for content in plain language. Type “something comforting and romantic” and OpenAI’s frontier models return tailored suggestions based on your mood, preferences and context. It could be a real UX leap for content discovery but here is the context the press release did not mention.
Axios reported this week that Nielsen’s Gracenote is suing OpenAI for copyright infringement. The allegation: OpenAI scraped Gracenote’s proprietary media metadata without permission. That includes the structured content data (titles, genres, cast, descriptions) that powers content discovery at scale. Gracenote argues this threatens its core business, as content media distributors could use that data to build competing metadata products and platforms.
That is the irony here. CANAL+ is deploying OpenAI to power content discovery, at the exact moment OpenAI is being accused of appropriating the metadata infrastructure that content discovery runs on.
None of this makes the CANAL+ partnership a bad idea (unless OpenAI is found guilty). But zoom out for a second. If OpenAI can power content discovery at scale directly inside a platform like CANAL+, companies whose entire business is built on structured media metadata, like Gracenote, but also the broader ecosystem of EPG providers, recommendation engines and content intelligence platforms, are looking at a direct threat to their core value proposition. Why license a metadata layer when a frontier model does the job inside the app? This also shows how the industry needs to start asking harder questions about what these models were trained on and whether data rights were properly cleared before signing. Worth watching closely.
→ More here about the Gracenote OpenAI lawsuit here.
🇨🇭 Switzerland backs public media
On March 8, Swiss voters rejected the “200 Francs Is Enough!” initiative by a clear 60% majority. The proposal would have slashed the annual household licence fee from 335 CHF to 200 CHF and scrapped the fee for businesses entirely. Swiss citizens said no. SRG SSR, the public broadcaster serving German, French, Italian and Romansh-speaking regions, keeps its funding model intact.
This matters beyond Switzerland. Public broadcasters across Europe are fighting the same battle on different fronts: defunding proposals, political pressure, platform competition. Switzerland just gave them a rare win but the Swiss broadcaster will still need to operate on a reduced budget by 2029, as decided by The Federal Council.
→ Read the full EBU statement here.
🎯 What Premium actually buys you on CTV
That’s exactly what we’re getting into on our next Off The Record session with Richard Brant, Senior Director Advanced TV at Vevo.
Vevo partnered with Amplified to run one of the most rigorous attention studies ever done on YouTube CTV: 150 households, 19,000+ ad views, 5,000+ YouTube channels and 240+ brands measured. The findings will make you rethink how you value premium inventory on the biggest screen in the home.
Vevo mastered YouTube then went big on CTV so bring your questions to benefit from their experience.
We’re going live on March 18th (5pm CET / 11am EST) right here on Substack. No need for Riverside this time. You can click the link below to join or simply open your Substack app on the day and you’ll see me live at the top of your homepage.
→ If you’re not a premium subscriber yet, consider upgrading to attend and decide if we are a keeper.
📕 5th edition out on March 25th
Four years of data, 17 countries, 15,000+ respondents. The RTL AdAlliance Living Room report is the largest ongoing study of European viewing behaviour and last week I went through every edition since 2022 to pull out what has actually shifted and what the industry keeps getting wrong.
The 5th edition, which Streaming Made Easy is co-producing with RTL AdAlliance, goes wider still: three continents, and for the first time, data on how Europeans feel about AI-generated video content, long-form content chopped into shorts and more. We are unpacking it live on March 25th. Don’t miss it.
🇪🇸 Spain’s free streaming map: who’s winning
Spain is running one of Europe’s most active free streaming experiments and most markets are not paying attention. In this week’s Deep Dive, I mapped the full competitive landscape using GECA’s FAST Barometer (three waves, 1,000 Spanish users per wave) and Omdia data to show who is leading, who is growing and what the numbers actually mean for platforms fighting for the home screen.
→ If you want the full picture, including the ad tolerance data, the SVOD cannibalisation signal and what Prime Video’s move means for the rest of the field, this one is worth upgrading for.
📊 Earnings season, no PR spin
👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here or catch the replay here (we start at the 2’49” mark!).
🇸🇪 Sweden kicks Meta out of the club
Sweden did what no one else had the nerve to do. On March 11, IAB Sweden formally expelled Meta, citing insufficient action against deceptive advertising. The decision came after Bonnier News and Schibsted, two of the biggest Nordic publishers, initiated the case. A first vote on March 10 was thrown out on procedural grounds. The board reconvened the next day and finished the job.
The numbers behind the decision are not in dispute. Reuters reported that Meta internally projected earning $16 billion in 2024 from ads for scams and banned goods, roughly 10% of its annual revenue. Meta has since filed lawsuits against fraudulent advertisers in Brazil, China and Vietnam, removed 134 million scam ads and deployed facial recognition to catch impersonation fraud. IAB Sweden concluded it was not enough. Meta has until April 15 to appeal. IAB UK responded the same week by confirming Meta remains a member in good standing. Worse, Meta received the IAB Gold Standard certification in 2025, while all of this was already known. The Swedish publishers pushed hard and got results. Their counterparts elsewhere, so far, have not. Go Swedes 🙌🏻
Thanks to Justin Lebbon for putting this on my radar.
🗳️ Poll time
That’s it for today. Enjoy your weekend and see you on Tuesday for a Deep Dive edition of Streaming Made Easy Premium.
Photo: Mattias de Frumerie / TT Nyhetsbyrån (Montage)