"There's so much time, energy and budgets that are spent on personalisation and trying to present the right thing to the user within the television application, when in reality they might have already discovered something to watch before they even switch on their TV."

Matt Duhig, co-founder and CEO, FX Digital

65% of Gen Z decide what to watch on a feed before the TV goes on. 6% of boomers do. That’s year 2 of the study FX Digital runs with research partner Craft: 800 people last year, 1,200 this year, older audiences added because the SME Live audience told them to stop fixating on Gen Z 😁

So the industry keeps paying to personalise a decision that’s already been made. Disney+ is adding a vertical feed to the app this year to meet that traffic further upstream. Matt Duhig thinks the on-platform answer is search and points out YouTube puts it on every page while Netflix doesn’t. Konrad Collao argues the opposite, that you shouldn’t give people what they came for too fast.

Collao also wants us off generational labels. Millennials were the ones who’d supposedly never watch TV again. They now watch more than Gen Z and he’ll put a guarantee on what Gen Z looks like in 15 years.

Then profiles. Most people watching with someone else compromise, millennials most of all, and TV apps still personalise for one. Collao has spent 25 years in other people’s living rooms, “much like a burglar”. At an FX Digital event a few weeks back, a couple in the room explained their own fix: two TVs.

We also get into gaming on the big screen, whether anyone will ever store card details on a television, and whether long-form YouTube counts as TV…

FX Digital’s co-founder Tom Smith will be on stage during SME Live on 10 September in Amsterdam with more of this data. Come find him.

Watch our full conversation 👇🏻

That’s it for today but before you go:

🎤 3 weeks to go and only 45 tickets left for Streaming Made Easy LIVE!

On September 10, the day before IBC kicks off, we're bringing together the people shaping the future of streaming and broadcast in Amsterdam, at Rode Hoed.

Here's why you'll want to be in the room:

Spots are filling up fast, so register now. Readers of SME get 15% off on all passes here.

🗳️ Poll time

You could think it’s just another sports-rights deal but it’s actually the fifteenth deal Disney+ has signed with a European broadcaster, league or distributor in the last twelve months.

You do not sign fifteen deals in a year by accident. Disney+ arrived in Europe in 2020 as a global walled garden, the same Marvel-Pixar-Star Wars box in every market. It is now morphing into something else: a European super aggregator, stacking other people’s content and rights on top of its own.

Is that a winning strategy? Let me weigh in.

Today at a glance:

• Where Disney+ stands today

• So Disney+ went shopping

• What the 15 deals actually do

• What Disney is really building

Where Disney+ stands today

Globally the headline is that subscriber count still climbed but slowed between 2024 and 2025. Disney+ went from 102.9M subscribers at the end of 2022 to 131.6M by the end of Q3 2025, on Disney’s own reporting, before it stopped disclosing subscriber numbers in Q4 2025.

Underneath that dated global number, we don’t know the subscriber count per market. BARB has Disney+ in 7.8 million UK homes in Q1 2026, up from 7.6 million the quarter before, with 2.8 million of those on the ad tier after 68% growth in a year. In Italy, AGCOM puts Disney+ at 3.7 million website and app unique users in December 2025, up 0.9% on the year. In France, the first release of Médiamétrie's cross-media measurement put Disney+ at 9.5 million monthly users in September 2025. Dataxis estimates a market share of 12% in the UK, 10% in France and Germany, 8% in Spain and 7% in Italy.

Now you do not sign 15 local deals in a year if the global Marvel-Pixar-Star Wars box is selling itself. The Disney+ value proposition is too US-centric, too thin on the local stories that keep people paying month after month. Kids and Marvel get you in the door but do not get a European household to stay through the empty months between tentpoles.

So Disney+ went shopping

Since mid-2025 it has struck deals with ITV and Sky in the UK, ARD Plus and ZDF Studios in Germany, Rai in Italy, SIC in Portugal, Atresmedia and RTVE in Spain, Gaumont, ADN and L'Équipe in France, NPO in the Netherlands, and now LALIGA across the Nordics.

Disney+ EMEA boss Karl Holmes is upfront about the logic behind these deals:

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“In a way, fragmentation has killed the TV sports fan. You can’t just be a sports fan anymore.”

Giles Tongue, VP Marketing, Bango

Strong claim but he brought data to back it up. Bango indeed released a survey of 2,500 Americans on how they watch sport. It was the perfect opportunity to study fragmentation live with the three US distributors of the World Cup in the mix.

So what do we learn about Americans & sports streaming:

→ 64% of Americans now pay for sports streaming;

→ 41% of them couldn’t work out where to watch the World Cup (I argue on the interview it could be because they’re new to proper football so didn’t know where to look 😁);

→ Nearly half said they’d missed a match because they couldn’t find where it was streaming, with a chunk deciding piracy was the answer instead.

→ Finally, younger fans would rather watch the highlights than the live game. The clip phenomenon which I suspect actually spread to many demos during this edition given the number of games and the late night programming for the rest of the world.

We couldn’t stay clear of Netflix’s recent move. Six years after killing free trials, they’re testing them again in select markets. Giles reads why the most distributed streamer in the world suddenly wants the trial mechanic back and where he thinks it goes next.

Which brings us to the bit I often care about most. Over 90% of specialist SVOD in the US now sells through indirect channels and Omdia puts telco and non-telco bundling at around 30% of subscriptions. Giles makes the case that loyalty has moved to the IP and to whoever curates it, away from the streamer itself.

That reframes who holds the power in a bundle but still leaves one problem nobody has solved yet: the "what's on and where”.

Giles Tongue will be on stage during SME Live on 10 September in Amsterdam. We’ll be talking about the rise of new kinds of bundlers. Come find us.

Grab more sports stats here and then watch our full conversation 👇🏻

That’s it for today but before you go:

🎤 Session spotlight

“AI is only as good as what it knows” with Jon Block, founder of Syllepsis

Your competitor has the exact same AI models you do. You're also both getting the same generic output from them. Bland copy, no feel for what makes you different, zero clue about your audience or how you actually work.

What’s the fix? During Streaming Made Easy Live 2026, Jon Block (founder of Syllepsis) is going to show us what happens when your institutional knowledge gets structured into something the AI can actually reason over. If you've ever gotten AI output that was technically correct and strategically hollow, come watch this one.

Jon's demo is part of our AI in Action sessions, running from 1pm to 2pm: live looks at what AI can actually do for media and streaming businesses right now.

Early bird has closed but for the next 2 weeks only, buyer badges are €449 excl. VAT (back to €499 after Aug 10). Readers of SME get 15% off on all passes here.

🗳️ Poll time

For our latest edition of Above the Fold, Looper Insights captured 23,330 storefront placements across 19 platforms, from Roku and Fire TV to Apple TV and PlayStation 5, spanning 28 interface areas, every one scored on their single comparable currency for home-screen prominence ($MPV). Three distributors carried the Final: Fox with its English-language rights, NBCU’s Peacock /Telemundo Spanish-language rights and Tubi, Fox’s Free Streaming sibling and each played the storefront differently.

Today at a glance:

• The job to be done

• The home screen as a sign-up funnel

• Prominence has a gatekeeper

Subscribe now

The job to be done

In the final window, the three rights distributors generated 156 World Cup placements worth $4.27M in $MPV. On final day, Fox ran 73 of those placements, Tubi 70, Peacock 20. Fox topping the table tracks with its English-language rights (across FOX One, FoxNation, the Fox and FX1 networks) but Tubi is the one that surprised me sitting three and a half times ahead of Peacock.

→ Fox’s presence ran wide and free. It commanded row 1 hero placements, built a dedicated “World Cup Best Moments” destination.

→ Peacock ran a precision play: 20 placements, all premium, one of which pushed the Final onto Apple TV’s native home screen.

→ Tubi’s job was to reach for casual viewers with the opening ceremony plus 2 live games, everything else was highlights, cutdowns, select replays, best-goal recaps and a 24/7 feed of FOX Sports digital originals, for those who wanted a taste of World Cup without the full time commitment.

Tubi also played the master hub card brilliantly with:

• Tubi Originals: Destination World Cup 2026 (docuseries on Weston McKennie, Marc Cucurella, Harry Wilson) and The Other Football, a weekly comedy vodcast with Rob Gronkowski and Jameis Winston.

• Creator content: Deestroying the Pitch (1v1 fan matchups across host cities), Jesser's Ultimate Kick Off (Tubi exclusive) and talkSPORT's How to Win the World Cup hosted by Matt Forde.

• Premium sports entertainment: BBC comedy Twenty Twenty Six with Hugh Bonneville, FOX doc Summer of '94, Alexi Lalas' State of the Union match analysis and three FOX Sports preview roundtables.

The home screen as a sign-up funnel

Rights holders work the storefront this hard because the home screen is where attention turns into viewership and account creation.

The 156 placements can be sorted into four funnel stages:

The payoff shows up in the subscriber data.

Fox One added 2.8 million subscribers in June, 2.5 times its previous monthly record, and 93% were first-time customers. According to Antenna, the top 3 sources of subscriber acquisition were: direct distribution of FOX One at 40%, Amazon Channels 19% and YouTube Primetime 15%. Peacock added 3.75 million US sign-ups. The World Cup was the most efficient acquisition machine either had ever run.

Prominence has a gatekeeper

Of those 156 placements, 87 ran on Roku. Tubi had 47 of its 67 tiles on Roku, FOX One 33 of its 49.

There’s a reason the Final piled onto Roku. It’s the biggest streaming platform in the US, with 44% of all Connected TV viewing time to Fire TV’s 14% and Samsung’s 12%, and it reaches nearly half of US broadband households.

Fox can build the best World Cup hub on the internet, but whether it lands in row 1 or row 9 is not up to them. Home-screen placement is a negotiation with Roku, Amazon and Samsung, all of whom control their own shelf.

The next US rights are up for grabs with Netflix, Disney and YouTube said to be interested parties. If Fox keeps the World Cup and the deal to buy Roku for $22 billion goes through, then Fox will promote the 2030 tournament on the biggest home screen in the US, this time one it owns.

Grab the report to see the full $MPV by distributor, the platform breakdown and pMPV impression estimates.

That’s it for today. Comments, shares or likes come a long way 🙏🏻

Catch up on our previous reads:

🗳️ Poll Time:

“You have that big brush Pollock kind of way and I’m more like pointillism, a light touch approach.”

Guess who’s who? 😁

Evan Shapiro and I recorded this one long, so we cut it in two. Part 1 is our step-back on the H1 trends we’re still chewing over. Part 2 is his new attention index and the debate that ensued.

We start with three trends (many more were covered in recent episodes). On the AI bubble, Evan wants to call the top. I'm less interested in the crash date than in what Europe does with the reset, whether we finally build something of our own instead of renting big tech's rails, yet again. On creators, I'll plant my flag again: the corporate creator is the real move, companies and their own people acting as the brand and I think only a handful of the trad-media-meets-creator deals will actually work long-term. On kids media I'm torn, depressed by the commissioning freeze, genuinely hopeful watching ToonStar, Lumee and SuperAwesome making moves.

Then we dig into the Eshap cross-screen attention index measuring all video attention across screens in 8 markets at once. Evan is convinced it settles where the world’s attention has gone. I still need some convincing. I don’t think anyone is really measuring the quality of our attention rather than the minutes. And I won’t let the platforms off the hook, because they keep pushing the risk onto the broadcasters, the public service media and the streamers, everyone who actually pays to make the content.

That’s season 2. I’m off to do gloriously little. We’ll see you on Sept. 10th for the 3rd season of The Media Odyssey Podcast!

Listen or watch and tell us where you land on these topics 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.

That’s it for today but before you go:

🗳️ Poll time

🎙️ Live Pod Alert

On September 10th, during Streaming Made Easy Live, we will record a live episode of The Media Odyssey Podcast. Come see us live! TMO listeners get 15% off tickets here. Early bird pricing ends July 26th.

“It’s been one of those newer parts of the industries where people were complaining that it was a black box. For an ecosystem that is based on advertising, I’m surprised that you are, to my knowledge, the first one to actually make that move.”

That's me, to Marcos Milanez.

FAST grew up fast. We got thrown numbers for years without ever agreeing on what counted as a view, a session or an active user. In May, Rakuten TV signed up to Barb, the same body that measures Netflix and ITVX in the UK.

The platform runs in 43 markets with around 170 owned and operated FAST channels. Marcos Milanez, Chief Content Officer at Rakuten TV, took me through why Barb was worth chasing and what it buys them that programmatic sales didn't.

Rakuten TV Enterprise is the other half of this story. The same platform now sells its own plumbing to everyone else: build the channel, schedule it, push it through the distribution network, sell the ads. Barbie and Pingu launched at the start of July, built, scheduled and monetised by Rakuten TV. Five years ago, Mattel could have done that alone and found a slot. I put it to Marcos that the shelves are full now and carriage is harder by the month.

Then there’s where he’d bet next, including one category they’ve already tried and mostly missed.

We’re on stage together for the 2nd edition of SME Live on 10 September in Amsterdam so consider this the warm-up.

WATCH the full conversation 👉🏻 here

That’s it for today but before you go:

🎤 Speaker Announcement

We’re thrilled to confirm TF1 and Netflix as headline speakers to discuss their recent partnership launch. In the morning, we will lead “AI in action” sessions where we stop talking about AI but start showing what it can do:

→ How to build a knowledge foundation in AI;

→ How to do subscription management with an AI agent;

→ How to use synthetic personas to test at scale.

The afternoon will continue with a diverse set of sessions on formats (with the record smashing program “The Traitors”), bundling, CTV, the state of European Public Service Media and a live episode of The Media Odyssey Podcast.

We’ve extended our early bird pricing until July 26th. At this link, grab 15% off on passes.

🗳️ Poll time

“So I’m gonna be the party pooper for once.”

Me on Fox buying Roku

No guest this week. Just Evan Shapiro and me plus four media mergers.

Let’s start with the money to set the scene. Comcast paid $39B for Sky in 2018, then took an $8.6B write down on it. Fox is buying Roku for $22B, well below what Roku was worth at its 2021 peak. Paramount is still chasing Warner Bros Discovery at $111B for a company worth a fraction of that.

Comcast breaks itself up. The week before we recorded, Comcast confirmed it would spin off NBCUniversal and Sky from its connectivity business, six months after cutting Versant loose in January. Management says it’s not a prelude to more M&A. Evan doesn’t buy that for a second and he named the buyer he thinks this is really being dressed up for.

Sky buys ITV. Confirmed the day we recorded: Sky is taking ITV’s broadcast and streaming arm for up to £1.6bn, leaving ITV Studios on its own with a content deal running to 2032. With Banijay and All3 now an $8bn super-indie, ITV Studios won’t stay orphaned for long.

Fox buys Roku. Here Evan and I split. He thinks Lachlan Murdoch’s $22bn move is the smartest thing a traditional media CEO has done in years. I don’t. We argue it out live.

Paramount and WBD hit the wall. The Justice Department cleared it. Everyone else is circling: a coalition of state attorneys general led by California’s Rob Bonta has sued to block it, the Writers Guild too and the UK Secretary's Lisa Nandy is minded to intervene. Evan has a firm call on whether this $111bn deal ever closes.

Listen or watch and tell us which side you’re on these 4 M&A operations 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.

That’s it for today but before you go:

🗳️ Poll time

🎙️ Live Pod Alert

On September 10th, during Streaming Made Easy Live, we will record a live episode of The Media Odyssey Podcast. Come see us live! TMO listeners get 15% off tickets here.

A month on, I still have questions. So I’m doing something about it. On September 10 at Streaming Made Easy Live in Amsterdam, the day before IBC opens, Laurence Pera (Groupe TF1) and Emma Lloyd (Netflix) will sit with me on stage and we will take those questions live. They’re the first confirmed speakers of this 2nd edition. I could not have picked a bigger story to open with.

Quick refresher on why this deal matters. TF1 is now live inside Netflix in France. 5 broadcast channels running 24 hours a day, live sport, breaking news and up to 40,000 titles from TF1+’s catalogue, all sitting inside an interface built for on-demand browsing.

Netflix has never embedded a broadcast partner before. Not at this scale, not anywhere.

And the deal rewrites more than the home screen. TF1 PUB sells all advertising within TF1 content on Netflix, with Médiamétrie ratings counting towards TF1. Even ad-free Netflix subscribers will see ads when watching TF1 content.

On stage, we’ll unpack how the partnership came together, what the integration really took to build and what it means for everyone who thought they owned the aggregation game in France.

Now it’s your turn. What would you ask TF1 and Netflix if you had them in the same room? Hit reply or drop it in the comments, I read everything and the best questions are coming on stage with me.

Join us in person on September 10 at Rode Hoed, Amsterdam. Get your ticket here with a 15% discount on all tickets. Early bird pricing on Buyer passes runs until July 19, so move fast.

That’s it for today. See you tomorrow for another episode of The Media Odyssey Podcast.

Marion

Here’s what the word hides. Being the aggregator means controlling four layers at once. Most of the contenders have two, maybe three.

So in the keynote I built a scoreboard and I ran five player types through the four layers: TV manufacturers, Big Tech, telcos, broadcasters and streamers now trying to aggregate each other and the new OS entrants. Besides Big Tech, none of them holds all four yet. Who’s closest, who’s building their missing layer and who’s about to find out they’re a tenant, that’s the talk in this video I made for you.

Watch or listen to the video and grab the link to access the deck 👇🏻

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"They're getting a very high calorie, low taste experience from the vertical landscape today."

Lior Friedman

Netflix, Disney+, Paramount+ and Peacock all bolted a vertical feed onto their apps this year. Quibi got to premium mobile video first, burned through a reported $100,000 a minute and lasted six months. The phone won the attention war years ago. The premium content to fill it still isn’t there.

This week on The Media Odyssey Podcast, Evan Shapiro and I bring Guy Hameiri and Lior Friedman, co-founders of RoseBerry, a vertical premium television studio. It picks up where our Lisbon episode with Bogdan Nesvit of My Drama left off, when he told us that the five telenovela arcs of micro drama can’t sustain the format on their own. Guy and Lior are the two people who took that seriously.

These are TV people first. Hameiri sold Abot Hameiri, the Israeli studio behind local Survivor, X Factor and Netflix’s Shtisel, to Fremantle and ran it as chairman until the end of 2024. Friedman comes out of Amagi and started his career as a TV anchor. Their thesis is that micro drama was only the first wave and the rest of television, true crime, dating reality, soap, scripted, is heading to the phone next.

How though? The engine underneath their operation is an AI tool they’ve named Red Snapper. The deals are in place: Fremantle, Banijay, A&E, All3Media and Cineflix, with a pipeline they put in the hundreds of titles by year-end.

For proof, they handed us an 18-year-old episode of Neighbours, the Australian soap, recut vertical for Fremantle with a paywall dropped at a plot cliffhanger. They explain what they pulled out of the frame and what they deliberately left in.

Then came the news and this was the part I’d been waiting for. Three months ago they had a real question mark over whether anyone would watch non-micro-drama on a phone. Now their own app, epis, has the first-party data to settle that discussion and the conversion and session numbers are strong.

When the launch first crossed my desk, I wrote that I might finally have to change my mind on micro dramas. I’m still not all the way there. But these are TV people mixing content, tech and AI and that is a different animal from what we’ve seen so far.

LISTEN and/or WATCH in full 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.

That’s it for today but before you go:

🎙️ Live Pod Alert

On September 10th, during Streaming Made Easy Live, we will record a live episode of The Media Odyssey Podcast. Come see us live! TMO listeners get 15% off tickets here.

🗳️ Poll time

That company is SuperAwesome. I met Nicholas Walters years ago and we were due a catch up following the partnership announcement. I wanted to understand why a firm few people have heard of just became one of the sole gatekeepers for one of the largest audiences on the internet (over-13 users are PubMatic’s and Google Ad Manager’s purview). Roblox counts 144.5 million daily active users and among those who have verified their age on the platform: 35% are under 13, a scale that makes the segment too large to leave unmonetised and too sensitive to monetise carelessly.

Walters runs the business day to day and the case he makes is simple. Kids and family content is enormous and underfunded, the money that should flow to the people making it keeps getting blocked by exactly the compliance questions SuperAwesome exists to solve.

Today at a glance:

• Proudly commercial

• The contextual bet

• Inside Awesome Intelligence

• YouTube 2016, all over again

Proudly commercial

Walters is direct about what SuperAwesome is for. The internet, he argues, was never built with anyone under 18 in mind and fixing that means solving privacy and safety at the same time as solving money.

“We are proudly commercial. If you can’t get money flowing into the people who make good content, there will be no good content.”

Nicholas Walters, SuperAwesome

That is the same flywheel argument Gregory Dray made to me about YouTube kids content a few weeks back. Advertising, influencer partnerships, gaming and now Roblox all serve the same function for SuperAwesome. Give brands the confidence to spend against under-18 audiences and the money moves from brand budgets to the creators actually making the content those kids watch.

The scale of the problem this is meant to solve is not small. On YouTube alone, Walters reckons there are maybe 125 million people who could call themselves a creator of some kind. Finding the right ones and proving they are safe enough to fund is the entire business.

The contextual bet

SuperAwesome’s answer to the targeting question is to not target individuals at all.

“We have no interest in targeting individual users. We don’t use cookies, we don’t collect email trackers. We are solely about building the smartest contextual data platform we can.”

Nicholas Walters, SuperAwesome

Contextual advertising places ads by what is on screen, not who is watching. What is contextually relevant to a 16 year old is nothing like what is relevant to a 26 year old and getting that granularity right across every age band under 18 is hard.

Co-viewing complicates the picture, since a huge amount of youth-directed content gets watched by the whole household. SuperAwesome’s answer was to acquire the world’s largest youth-directed podcast network at the start of this year, betting that co-listening / co-watching families are worth reaching through kids’ content.

Inside Awesome Intelligence

Awesome Intelligence is the data layer under everything SuperAwesome does, built to fix what it calls youth data scarcity. Privacy law bans tracking anyone under 18, so brands have been targeting kids based on age and gender, nothing else.

SuperAwesome swaps that for values, passions, fandoms, trends thanks to 13 years of campaign data, 9 million-plus research inputs, 150-plus studies.

On YouTube it runs two checks at once. One classifies 125,000 channels for brand safety and audience fit. The other watches channels daily, AI plus humans, so the list doesn’t go stale.

The real test is off YouTube: Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, the “unstructured, UGC-driven” chaos where under-18s actually live and where age and gender explain nothing. SuperAwesome’s bet is that the same audience profile travels with a brand from YouTube into a game.

Nickelodeon is one proof point. In Germany, for the launch of The Thundermans: Undercover, SuperAwesome ran an audience-based strategy against a standard age and gender control group, split across two segments: Pop-Culturists (41% core passion for entertainment) and Classics (49% define themselves through their digital identity). Both segments named The Thundermans as a fandom before the campaign even launched.

The lift was real. Video completion rose 27 pts, click-through 16 pts and interstitial engagement 14 pts.

YouTube 2016, all over again

“Roblox is the breakout digital platform for this decade. I have very strong YouTube 2016 vibes on this platform. The usage is undeniable, users have made their choice, they have escape velocity in terms of engagement. This is what escape velocity looks like.”

Nicholas Walters, SuperAwesome

The numbers back the comparison. SuperAwesome puts weekly gaming activity among Roblox’s under-13 users at 98%, which makes Roblox less a platform for kids than the default environment they live in. The structural problem is identical to the one SuperAwesome already solved once on YouTube. Roblox now permits advertising to all ages across hundreds of thousands of user-built experiences, spanning fashion games, sports games, driving games, creation tools and role-play, with new experiences launching daily. A brand faces the same question it faced on YouTube in 2016: which of these environments is safe, and which one actually reaches the audience I want?

SuperAwesome says its team manually plays every title and scores it against 11 brand suitability flags, catching realistic weapons or graphic violence that metadata alone would miss. That's a genuinely large ask given 15,000 new games launch on Roblox daily and it's why Awesome Intelligence layers on 80-plus contextual categories on top, so a brand can target a specific interest instead of a blunt age band.

Kids content is YouTube's lowest-earning category and the plumbing to sell premium kids inventory still isn't built. SuperAwesome's classification engine has run on YouTube the whole time, which tells you the bottleneck was never safety data. It was a platform willing to build a selling machine around it. So will Roblox do what YouTube didn't?

That’s it for today. See you on Thursday for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!

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“For us, that is about proving out the model. Anyone can be successful once. It’s about that repetition, and that shows us that the model is not only working for us, but can be repeatable and hopefully scale.”

Jasmine Dawson, SVP of Digital, BBC Studios

Cannes Lions makes a lot of people perform optimism they don’t feel. Not Jasmine Dawson. This week on The Media Odyssey Podcast , and I talked with the BBC Studios SVP of Digital live from Cannes, for a second year running.

Last year she told us BBC Studios was betting on fandom over reach. This year the numbers backed her up. Anyone can have a good year once.

Jasmine Dawson also came with news. Three stories, all breaking first on this episode of the podcast.

BBC Studios is launching a new global advertising network called “Affinity” built around fandom rather than the reach metrics the industry still defaults to. 5 content verticals, each anchored in IP that already carries a proven, passionate audience.

The 2nd piece of news dismantles a wall that’s sat inside the BBC for years, the one separating BBC Studios from the BBC’s own public service channels. Dan McGolpin runs iPlayer and Channels. For the first time, the pair is coordinating their YouTube strategy as a single unit. The consequence is 50-plus new channels launching this year, each built around a specific community rather than a broad content area.

Then Anna Rafferty, SVP Digital Consumer Engagement at the LEGO Group, walked in. She didn’t come on to license a toy line and call it a day. She came on as a genuine co-creator, building new content with BBC Studios to delight families with LEGO brick recreations of beloved Bluey moments (Queens, Sleepytime, The Beach, etc.).

The first episode premieres today on The Bluey Channel, the official LEGO channel and the LEGO Little Ones channel on YouTube and Bluey.TV.

Start there, then listen to the episode for everything behind it.

LISTEN and/or WATCH in full 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.

That’s it for today but before you go:

🗳️ Poll time

For our newest edition of Above the Fold with Looper Insights, we decided to test that pitch against hard placement data. We tracked 7 UK AVOD services across 14 streaming platforms, from Fire TV and Samsung to Sky Q and PlayStation consoles. Across May 2026, those 7 generated £60.4M in Media Placement Value (£MPV) over 29,785 promotional spots and 2,433 unique titles.

So who actually walked away with that £60.9M? Let’s find out.

Today at a glance:

• The number that settles it

• Why the broadcasters still win

• What this means if you are not a PSB

Plus the full May rankings and placement data in our latest report.

Subscribe now

The number that settles it

Three names took 84% of the market.

ITVX, Channel 4 and Channel 5 generated £51.2M of the £60.9M in £MPV across May. The four international streamers, Tubi, Pluto TV, Plex and Rakuten TV, split the remaining £9.7M between them. ITVX alone, at £23.2M, outweighs all four of those services combined by nearly two and a half times. One caveat: Rakuten TV runs both a free ad-supported service and a transactional store, so its figure reflects placement visibility across both rather than AVOD alone.

So the Free Streaming shelf that was meant to let new entrants reach audiences without a broadcast empire behind them spent May promoting, overwhelmingly, three broadcast empires.

Why the broadcasters still win

Scale explains most of it. ITVX ran the highest spot count of any service in the analysis and placed it across all 14 tracked platforms. Channel 4 matched that 14-platform spread, the joint widest in the market. When a service appears on every major device in UK homes and does so thousands of times over, the placement value compounds in a way a narrower footprint cannot reach.

The content behind the spots tells the rest and each broadcaster promoted to a clear identity. ITVX led on drama, headed by the Gemma Arterton espionage thriller Secret Service, which topped the entire market for the month.

Channel 4 promoted to a different audience entirely, with returning reality franchises like Celebs Go Dating anchoring its slate.

Channel 5 built its month on homegrown drama, led by Number One Fan and its flagship commission The Hardacres.

What unites the three is not so much a shared content strategy but the machinery underneath. Amazing content, decades of platform relationships, the carriage deals, the prominence agreements and the budgets a broadcaster accumulates. That machinery is what the home screen “rewards”.

What this means if you are not a PSB

The international tier reached £9.7M in May, with Tubi and Pluto TV doing most of the lifting.

Tubi leads and it is doing something the others are not. Its slate leans on YouTube-native franchises like Ben Azelart, Jordan & Salish Matter and The Royalty Family, creator content with no equivalent at scale on any other UK AVOD service. Ampere Analysis put Tubi UK’s catalogue growing 99% across 2025, the fastest of any AVOD service it tracked. So the May prominence sits on a base still expanding fast.

Then the lesson for whoever owns the content rather than the platform it runs on. Police Interceptors ran on both Channel 5 and Pluto TV in May, promoted on two unrelated free services and counted on both. One hour of British factual telly, working twice in the same month. If you are a rights holder choosing between an exclusive and going wide, that is the argument for wide.

The other lesson is consistency. The broadcasters win on presence. They turn up on all 24 platforms, week after week and no single slot has to carry them. A challenger can match a PSB on one placement. Holding that across the whole market, through the quiet weeks and the loud ones, is what takes years to build.

None of this is a UK quirk. The home screen behaves the same way across European CTV and the question for every broadcaster and streamer is whether they are putting enough behind prominence to match their ambition.

This piece shows three broadcasters owning 84% of the shelf. The report shows you the placement-by-placement detail of how, every title's £MPV and the creative that earned it. Get it here.

That’s it for today. Comments, shares or likes come a long way 🙏🏻

Catch up on our previous reads:

🗳️ Poll Time:

Walmart is acquiring French start up Vibe.co, a self-serve connected TV ad platform built for small and mid-sized businesses. Terms were not disclosed. WSJ and The Information both put the price at roughly $1.4B, with The Information breaking that down as $1.2B in cash plus about $180M in executive retention payments.

This is Walmart’s second major CTV purchase in two years. VIZIO cost $2.3B in 2024. Add Vibe.co and Walmart has spent more than $3.5B building connected TV infrastructure.

The logic behind both deals is the same. VIZIO gave Walmart the screen and the viewership data running through it. Vibe.co gives Walmart the software to sell ads against that screen without needing an agency or a media buyer on the other end. Layer in Walmart’s own shopper data and closed loop measurement and a small business can now buy a CTV campaign the way it buys a Meta ad, then watch the sale happen at checkout.

The advertisers Vibe.co was built for, the ones too small for a national TV buy, are also the bread and butter of local broadcasters. Walmart Connect just built a faster, cheaper, more measurable way to take that business away from them.

🎥 Not every bundle deserves a yes

For the final episode of Inside the Bundle, in partnership with Bango, we finish on a high note with a good friend of mine: Kerry Ball, EVP Business Development & Partnerships for BBC Studios Global Channels & Streaming and the former Chief Commercial & Strategy Officer who built BritBox’s distribution playbook. She’s super open (how refreshing!): according to her, 80 to 90% of BritBox’s syndication subscribers, picked up through Amazon Channels, Roku and other partners, were never going to find the service through direct marketing on its own.

We get into the framework behind that number: streamer-to-streamer bundles with Starz, Hallmark and MGM Plus, a pop up branded corner inside HBO Max and why annual subscriptions do more for churn than any retention email ever will.

For the Nordics versus North America telco comparison and what Kerry thinks about banks and MVNOs crashing the video party, you’ll have to press play.

Watch the full episode here:

This closes the series. Thank you to all our amazing speakers: David Bouchier, Kenechi Amobi Belusevic, Vincent Stevens, Joan Cruells, Ana Lopez, David Purdy, Chris Van der Linden, Kerry Ball.

🎙️The kids are NOT alright

Two Shapiro on The Media Odyssey Podcast this week!

Jamie Shapiro took the stage during StreamTV Denver to interview Andy Donner from Common Sense Media, Sara DeWitt from PBS Kids and Evan Shapiro. The conversation builds on a report Evan co-produced with Common Sense Media called “It’s 10pm, do you know what your kids are watching?”.

Parental demand for trustworthy kids content keeps climbing. The supply side is what’s cratering. Streamers commission kids shows when the metric of the moment rewards it, then cut the budget the second a different metric takes priority. It happened to documentaries, then indie film and kids content just joined the list. From there, the episode gets into who actually has a shot at fixing this, whether AI belongs anywhere near kids production and why the best odds sit with the corner of the industry that has the least money to spend.

👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.

📺 The lowest-earning category on YouTube

Kids and families make up one of the most-watched parts of YouTube and one of the worst paid. The big accounts pull billions of views a year, the engagement charts look spectacular and yet the money per view stays stubbornly low.

I caught up with Gregory Dray to understand why the mismatch but more importantly what he plans to do about it. Dray co-founded the kids media company Animaj, he chairs the new Hasbro and Animaj venture Lumee, and he spent years before that running YouTube Kids globally, so he has made this argument from inside the platform and outside it. He puts kids and family at more than 15% of all viewing on YouTube. This pretty much tracks with every single report we get from Precisify which shows YouTube as the go to platform for kids aged 2-12. In their latest research, YouTube sits n°1 at 65% in the UK and Germany, 66% in Australia and 75% in the US.

The timing of this interview is no coincidence. This week, the kids content business gathers in the Alps for Annecy, the animation industry’s biggest week of the year, while the brands and agency that can pay for the advertising around that same content take over the Croisette for Cannes Lions. How can we ensure that the people who make what children watch and the people who buy the ads beside it sit at the same table? Lumee is here to create that opportunity.

🎥 Your video library doesn't exist (to AI, anyway)

ChatGPT can read your entire website in under a second. It cannot watch a single one of your videos. There’s a name for that blind spot now, well three names.

→ AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) is the oldest of the three. It started with Google’s featured snippets and voice search, where the goal was writing the one answer Siri or Alexa reads back.

→ GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) means getting your content cited inside the actual answer ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Claude generates.

→ GEA (Generative Engine Advertising) points to ad formats sitting inside generated answers. It barely exists as a product today and nobody has decided where the ad budgets land on it.

In partnership with Nvidia, the Paris ad tech Aive launched at VivaTech a platform called Video AEO/GEO/GEA, built to turn every video into a knowledge source that AI agents like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity can index, understand and cite.

The stack: Aive’s own MGT (Multimodal Generative Technology) running alongside Nvidia’s open source Nemotron models. Together they read more than 25 signals per video at once, automatically picking out the products, brands and spokespeople on screen, along with key messages and visual proof. Co-founder and CPTO Rudy Lellouche says the system tracks actions and exact timing frame by frame and that it works just as well on video with no sound at all.

Video makes up most of internet traffic and almost none of it gets parsed by the engines now deciding what gets recommended. Every brand pouring budget into video has been building an asset the next wave of search can’t see. I called this in my 10 bets for 2026 piece. Tubi and M6+ landing on the ChatGPT store « solved » the front door. Aive is going after what’s behind it. The video itself still has to be translated before any of that discovery work means anything.

That’s it for today but before you go:

🗳️ Poll time

“There's no FDA for the platform raising your kids”.

Andy Donner, Common Sense Media

Two Shapiro on The Media Odyssey Podcast this week!

Jamie Shapiro took the stage during StreamTV Denver to interview Andy Donner from Common Sense Media, Sara DeWitt from PBS Kids and . The conversation builds on a report Evan co-produced with Common Sense Media called "It’s 10pm, do you know what your kids are watching?”.

Parental demand for trustworthy kids content keeps climbing. The supply side is what’s cratering. Streamers commission kids shows when the metric of the moment rewards it, then cut the budget the second a different metric takes priority. It happened to documentaries, then indie film and kids content just joined the list. From there, the episode gets into who actually has a shot at fixing this, whether AI belongs anywhere near kids production and why the best odds sit with the corner of the industry that has the least money to spend.

Listen to this one whether you sign off on content budgets or you sign off on screen time. The episode makes a real case for the executives, then makes an even more personal one for the rest of us about what's actually shaping our kids while nobody's checking.

LISTEN and/or WATCH in full 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.

That’s it for today but before you go:

🗳️ Poll time

Subscribe now

I caught up with Gregory Dray to understand why the mismatch but more importantly what he plans to do about it. Dray co-founded the kids media company Animaj, he chairs the new Hasbro and Animaj venture Lumee, and he spent years before that running YouTube Kids globally, so he has made this argument from inside the platform and outside it. He puts kids and family at more than 15% of all viewing on YouTube. This pretty much tracks with every single report we get from Precisify which shows YouTube as the go to platform for kids aged 2-12. In their latest research, YouTube sits n°1 at 65% in the UK and Germany, 66% in Australia and 75% in the US.

The timing of this interview is no coincidence. This week, the kids content business gathers in the Alps for Annecy, the animation industry’s biggest week of the year, while the brands and agency that can pay for the advertising around that same content take over the Croisette for Cannes Lions. How can we ensure that the people who make what children watch and the people who buy the ads beside it sit at the same table? Lumee is here to create that opportunity.

Today at a glance:

• What the Disney deal gives away

• Privacy became the alibi

• The reservation bet

• What happens off YouTube

• The grind that has to pay

What the Disney deal gives away

Disney Advertising and Lumee stroke a deal to have the JV representing a selection of family inventory across roughly 65 Disney YouTube channels in the US, the first outside name Lumee has taken on beyond its two founding partners. Put the three portfolios together and you reach more than 100B YouTube views across 2025 alone.

What a get for Lumee and what a fascinating move from Disney. Disney runs one of the biggest ad sales operations in media. It’s 2025-26 upfront closed with sports advertising alone near 4 billion dollars and streaming above 40% of total volume, on top of a direct line to every major agency on earth. It still decided that a fifty-fifty startup, chaired by the former boss of YouTube Kids, could sell part of its YouTube family inventory better than Disney could in house. Companies rarely hand out work they find easy.

“Kids’ and family content is currently the most undervalued real estate in the digital world.”

Gregory Dray, speaking to Variety

Disney’s own framing stays diplomatic, all about trust and reaching families wherever they watch, which is exactly what you would expect a company to say while admitting the in-house route was not working.

Privacy became the alibi

The privacy constraint is real. In 2019 Google paid the FTC 170M$ to settle charges that YouTube had collected data on children and the platform then made creators label anything aimed at kids as Made for kids. That label switches off personalised advertising, comments and data collection. Disney paid 10M$ in 2025 to settle claims it had mislabelled kids videos across channels including Pixar and Disney Animation. Nobody serious argues that small children should be tracked and targeted.

The cost of that switch landed fast.

“After January 2020, YouTube was forced to change practices and stop doing targeted advertising for kids’ content, which caused the money for kids’ creators to fall overnight by 50%.”

Gregory Dray (from our conversation, translated)

So the kids business moved to contextual advertising, which places ads by what sits on screen rather than who watches. Lumee is built for exactly that, COPPA compliant and contextual by design. That part of the story holds up.

Then Dray’s argument turns. Privacy explains why you cannot run behavioural targeting against a six-year old. It does nothing to explain why a seller cannot move premium contextual kids inventory cleanly, above all on connected TV, where the higher CPMs live. That is a product and engineering job and by his account YouTube keeps leaving it half built with promised fixes for selling kids inventory on the big screen that arrive every six months and never quite ship.

The reason sits in plain view on Alphabet’s own balance sheet. The company plans to spend between 175 and 185B$ on capital projects in 2026, most of it pointed at AI. Anything outside that priority waits and the unglamorous plumbing of kids monetisation sits a long way down the queue. Line up the numbers and the indifference makes cold commercial sense. YouTube’s advertising business earned around 40B$ in 2025. Dray puts the entire global kids advertising market near 4B$. A platform that size has little reason to grind through hard, constrained, low-margin work for a prize a tenth of what it already banks.

The reservation bet

So what is the alternative Dray is selling. Lumee does no auction at all. Every placement is booked in advance, the way television advertising worked before programmatic took over and Dray is rebuilding that old model inside YouTube. The inventory goes out as premium, brand-safe and contextual, placed by what is on screen and around which shows, with visibility down to the individual video and channel.

"We take the old linear model and copy and paste it into YouTube."
Gregory Dray (from our conversation, translated)

The bet underneath is a price bet. Dray reckons booked, verified, premium placement is worth a multiple of cheap auction inventory and he puts reservation at three to four times auction rates during base periods. The catch is that he has to talk the market into it. Agencies have spent years chasing Peppa Pig and Disney audiences as cheaply as the auction allows and Lumee turns up asking them to pay a premium for control and context instead. That is a re-education job and re-education takes time.

Two hard limits shape how far the model can stretch. The first is partner sales rights. Lumee can only represent channels that already hold the right to sell their own YouTube inventory, which the Disney, Hasbro and Animaj brands do. Plenty of enormous channels do not, so even when owners come knocking, YouTube’s own rules keep them out. Dray points to El Reino Infantil, one of the largest Spanish language kids networks anywhere, as inventory he simply cannot touch. That ceiling doubles as a feature, since he is adamant Lumee should stay a curated house rather than swell into a catch-all network.

"We will selectively represent ad sales for premium third-party brands ... to avoid becoming a broad ad network."

Gregory Dray (from our conversation, translated)

The second limit is measurement and it is the one that matters most. By his account, Nielsen, Comscore and Kantar can measure a publisher’s reach against households with children on every major platform except YouTube, because YouTube will not share the data. A category that nobody measures cleanly gets sold cheaply, every time. So part of the build is a set of COPPA-compliant measurement tools.

What happens off YouTube

YouTube dominates the story but Lumee also sells across CTV, FAST and AVOD and the ecosystem is not good at selling against kids content. The audience is valuable and they know it but kids and family sits awkwardly inside a general ad operation, half understood and easy to get wrong. A lot of platforms are nervous about the category, worried about the faux pas of an ad landing beside a preschool show where it has no business being. That caution leaves money on the table. A specialist who takes the whole category off their hands, with brand safety built in, solves a problem they would rather not own. I would expect platforms and channel partners are already lining up at Lumee's door.

Running a single campaign across YouTube, FAST and AVOD is hard though because the systems do not talk to each other and FAST does not pass through Google Ad Manager the way YouTube inventory does. Lumee had to build its own ad serving and order management to stitch the environments into one buy.

The grind that has to pay

The question is whether enough of the market agrees that premium kids attention is worth booking and paying for. Dray’s early read is that the demand is real. The IP he represents is close to unavoidable, so the meetings come easily, and he says parts of the market had been waiting for exactly this, a single serious front door to premium kids inventory. Curiosity is not committed budget though and turning one into the other is the work of the next year or two. For now Lumee is a proof of concept, three blue-chip portfolios and a model it still has to validate before it scales.

He is clear-eyed about how that happens. He describes two camps among the companies in the ecosystem. One wants to flip the table and force a wholesale rethink of the economics, which he is certain will never come. He sits in the other, grinding out small wins from inside the system he used to run, one product fix and one agency conversation at a time. There is nothing glamorous about it and he thinks it is the only version of this that is real.

The stakes give the grind its urgency. Kids and family pulls more attention than almost anything on YouTube and converts the least of it into money and money that never arrives cannot fund the next generation of shows. Every year the gap holds, the audience drifts further onto a platform that monetises a sliver of what it could, while the companies making the content those kids actually watch keep subsidising the reach.

Whether Lumee changes that will not be settled by a press release. It comes down to whether a media buyer in London or New York will pay three times the auction rate for a Peppa Pig pre-roll because they can finally see, channel by channel, what they are buying. That is the sale Dray has set himself. He spent years learning how YouTube says no. He is betting he now knows how to make it say yes.

That’s it for today.

See you on Thursday for another edition of Streaming Made Easy.

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TF1 went live inside Netflix France yesterday. 5 channels: TF1, TMC, TFX, TF1 Séries Films, LCI. Up to 40,000 titles. I scrolled the entire TF1+ hub shelf by shelf this morning inside the Netflix mobile and CTV apps.

When you open the Netflix mobile app, a full-screen pop-up greets you straight away: “Discover TF1+ on Netflix. Experience more series and variety on Netflix.” Two buttons, OK or Explore TF1+. Tap Explore and you land directly in the hub.

If you dismiss the pop-up instead, TF1+ isn’t gone. It’s sitting further down the home feed as its own row, the 6th one down, labelled “TF1+ on Netflix.”

Once you’re inside the hub, here are the genre rows top to bottom: TF1+ Essentials, TV Dramas, Entertainment, Soap Operas, Summer Movies, Competition Shows, Reality TV, Police Series, New episodes every day, Family Watch Together, TV Comedies, Action Movies, Comedy Movies, Documentaries, Romantic movies, Thriller Movies, TV Movies, Sports, News & Current Affairs.

I don’t get Sports and News & Current Affairs sitting dead last especially with several programs with Mbappé front and center (did you see his two amazing goals on Tuesday night?!). I wasn’t able to test on a second account to see if the row order differs (here I used a brand new account as I hold a Dutch Netflix account so couldn’t see TF1 at all). This could change as the Presidential Election coverage ramps up. TF1 has also invested in new sports rights with the Rugby Nations Championship (1st game between France - New Zealand on July 4th), the Rugby World Cup, Euro & World Cup Basketball tournaments, France football friendly matches until the Euro, and the Champions League’s finales coming to TF1 for the 2028-2031 cycle.

Now onto the live component which is the biggest change for a platform like Netflix. There’s no live channel tiles anywhere on mobile. Every single row is on-demand only.

This is where the TV experience differs. On TV, TF1+ shows up as a genre filter pill at the start of the genre row. Tap into TF1+ on TV and the first row you hit is “En direct,” 5 live channels playing simultaneously: each tile showing the current programme, its time slot, and what’s coming up next. Right below that: “TF1+ Essentials” the curated row mixing tentpole titles, then the rest of the 18 genre rows I described above.

Sure Live TV makes more sense on a television, where someone might land on the big screen wanting something to just play, the way they’d flip a remote. On a phone, nobody’s settling in for 3 hours of linear viewing. The on-demand depth on mobile and the live-first layout on TV both match how people actually use each device but could this change? TF1 does offer live channels in its mobile app.

Search treats TF1+ as a real entity too. Type “TF1” into Netflix’s own search bar and the first result is a dedicated TF1+ branded banner, not a generic title card. Below it sits a results grid from the TF1+ catalogue.

What about the program tiles? The TF1+ wordmark only appears in the surrounding UI text, never on the artwork itself. Open any title page and the key art runs logo-free, no TF1+ branding burned into the image the way Netflix watermarks its own Originals on some thumbnails. Could this hurt TF1 long-term with viewers attributing all its content to Netflix?

Switch to a Kids profile on the same account and the TF1+ row disappears entirely, hub and all, not filtered down to age-appropriate titles, just gone. As far as I can see, there’s not even kids titles from TF1 inside Netflix. That tracks because Netflix doesn’t allow ads inside Kids profiles while TF1 does inside TF1+ (for an ad-free experience, Tfou Max is TF1’s standalone kids SVOD).

Speaking of SVOD, TF1+ Premium, TF1’s paid ad-free tier, doesn’t carry over into this integration either. Netflix subscribers get TF1 content with ads (even if they are on a Netflix ad-free plan). I wonder how ad-free viewers will react to seeing ads inside Netflix (the pair must have tested this with focus groups) and whether TF1 will bring the same ad load as it does in streaming (I had crossed the Belgian border by the time I could test watching a full episode).

I’m not going to debate here whether TF1 made the right call doing this deal. That argument needs real data so I’ll wait for the first Netflix weekly Top 10s and the Médiamétrie numbers before I say anything about whether this was the right move. What I will say is this. You can’t blame them for trying.

Last night also reminded me that French Media can put on a show « à l’américaine » when it wants to. The evening deserved its upfront name with stars, Ambre (winner of the Star Academy) singing two songs, Dancing with the stars grooving on the Kpop Demon Hunters’s hit song.

Now if I’m honest, the thing that actually got my heart racing was watching Larry Tanz take his seat in the audience, hearing Greg Peters work through a few lines of French and Japanese on stage. How crazy am I? 😆

That’s the part of this job that still gets me. Media, at its best, is genuinely fun to cover.

Today’s edition is free for everyone as this launch is a big deal for our industry. But if you want to keep getting editions like this one, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to Streaming Mase Easy (even just for a month). It’s what keeps me going.

Sharing, commenting, whatever you feel like doing is caring.

Happy Friday,

Marion

This is not a minor UI tweak. Netflix has never embedded a broadcast TV channel partner before and at that scale no less. We are talking live channels, restart, pause and up to 40,000 titles from TF1+‘s catalogue, all sitting inside the Netflix interface. The technical lift alone was significant: TF1 runs 5 channels, 24 hours a day, with breaking news and live sport baked into the schedule. Netflix’s usual product, a clean SVOD library you browse at your own pace, had to absorb something far more demanding.

So how does it actually hold up?

In the video, I give you a 1st glimpse of the integration. Once I’ve played with the interface myself, I will walk you through the full experience: where TF1 lives on the Netflix home screen, how the live channels are presented, how the catalogue is surfaced and whether TF1’s branding survived the integration or got swallowed by Netflix’s design system. Spoiler: brand visibility is one of the things worth watching closely here.

There is also the ad question. TF1 PUB handles all advertising within the TF1 content on Netflix, with Médiamétrie ratings counting towards TF1, not Netflix. That means even subscribers on Netflix’s ad-free tier will now see ads when watching TF1 content. That is a significant shift in the user experience and advertisers are paying attention.

The wider implications are real. Canal+ and French telecoms operators have long sold themselves as the one-stop aggregator for French TV and SVOD. Netflix doing this deal directly with TF1 moves the goalposts. France Télévisions followed with a similar hub inside Prime Video. Disney+ now distributes the live channel of L’Equipe. The distributor model is under pressure and will not look the same in 3 years.

Watch the video to see how the integration actually plays out. Then tell me whether you think TF1 got the deal terms right.

Sharing is caring. If you’re reading about this launch first here, tag me, reshare. I made the trip from Amsterdam to Paris as I had a hunch this wouldn’t be any upfront. I was pretty damn right.

Now time for bed.

Marion

“You’re renting your audience… YouTube, their job is to get you not to watch Valerie’s content. Their job is to get you to watch what’s next after Valerie’s content.”

Billy Cooper - CEO Visible things

This week I got to do something rare: sit back and relax to listen to The Media Odyssey Podcast.

flew solo this week for a guest he’s wanted on the show for a while. Valerie Bertinelli’s career started on shows like One Day at a Time, Hot in Cleveland and then she ran her own cooking show on Food Network. Earlier this year she launched something most TV stars wouldn’t even contemplate: her own platform. She built it with Billy Cooper, whose company Visible Things turns television veterans into direct-to-fan operators.

Cooper’s origin story matters here. He and his co-founders Andrew Greenberger and Willis Robertson met at a production company called 44 Blue, where Cooper ran Pit Bulls & Parolees for Animal Planet for nearly 20 seasons before Warner Discovery decided the channel didn’t need original programming anymore. The lesson he took from that collapse became the whole business. Audiences keep asking for a show long after a network kills it, so why not hand them the means to bring it back themselves.

That’s exactly what happened with Valerie. The team licensed all 172 episodes of Valerie’s Home Cooking back from Food Network, then built three new shows around her, including one where her longtime recipe developer Sophie Clark walks viewers through the swaps and substitutions a real cooking show never lets you see. There’s a book club, a wellness podcast and a Hot in Cleveland revisiting series recorded inside Valerie’s actual wine cellar.

Valerie’s Place chases the 1% of Bertinelli’s 5 million social followers who’d actually pay to be part of her community. Three months in, the platform’s own social accounts went from zero to 300,000 followers and the email list alone sits at 50,000.

Bertinelli and Cooper make the case that the business isn’t the show, it’s her. The playbook applies well beyond television. Anyone with a name, a face and an actual fan base can run the same play.

LISTEN and/or WATCH in full 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.

That’s it for today but before you go:

🗳️ Poll time

Subscribe now

Rakuten TV Enterprise changed that for one session on June 9 during which Maria Chacon Brito, Head of FAST Channels Partnerships at Rakuten TV, put the company’s own platform consumption numbers on screen for the first time. What viewers actually watch across FAST and AVOD, broken down by market, by genre and by 3 distinct performance metrics. Some of it confirmed what the industry assumes, a fair amount didn’t.

This edition covers that session in full as well as two research pieces Rakuten TV drop: “The FAST Advantage” on European consumer attitudes to free streaming and “Beyond the Break” on CTV advertising. I’ll draw on both where they add to the platform data.

Today at a glance:

• Equal on time, miles apart on behaviour

• What Europe actually watches

• The 3-question framework for FAST: What drives viewers in? What makes viewers stay? What brings viewers back?

BONUS: Instead of my crooked pictures from the event, the team at Rakuten TV was kind enough to share the slides with me and so with you too.

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Equal on time, miles apart on behaviour

They look balanced on paper. FAST accounts for 54% of total viewing time on Rakuten TV while AVOD accounts for 46%. Close enough to call even but the behaviour behind that number is completely different.

FAST generated 356 million plays in the period while AVOD generated 66 million. FAST is where people browse: only 19% of FAST plays run past 3 minutes. On AVOD, 73% stay beyond 3 minutes. The average qualified session is 37 minutes on FAST, 52 on AVOD. FAST is where viewers arrive without a plan while AVOD is where they go with one.

AVOD is also heavily skewed toward film with 86% of viewing going to movies, 14% to series (the library is deeper with 6K+ movies live while the series library is still growing with 700% episodes). Engagement on both is almost identical, 72% for movies and 73% for series, which means once someone picks something on AVOD, they commit regardless of the format.

This matters for how you programme and monetise each format. An AVOD viewer who sits through 52 minutes of a film behaves very differently from a FAST viewer who dips in and out. Treating them identically is where the revenue gap opens up.

The FAST Advantage consumer survey puts a number on the broader shift. 80.1% of European viewers now treat FAST as a main or alternative way to watch television, and 93.7% watch it on the main TV screen in the living room. FAST has stopped being background noise, it’s primary viewing.

What Europe actually watches

Drama, thriller and action fill the top 3 in every AVOD market: UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Comedy and adventure at 4 and 5, barely any variation by country.

Go one level deeper, to the actual titles, and it gets even more interesting.

Read more