This year’s early summer has been rocked by successive news of “one-of-a-kind” carriage deals between major TV networks in Europe and streaming services, starting with Netflix and France’s TF1 and followed by Prime Video and broadcaster France Televisions and this week’s Disney+ and ITV pact in the U.K.
While these alliances have been applauded by media analysts, local creators, producers and right-holders are more skeptical. While non-exclusive, these partnerships are perceived as potentially disrupting for producers and distributors who already anticipate that they’ll have less opportunities to work with other streamers and broadcasters who are not part of existing deals.
Those collaborations, which are bound to flourish in major markets across Europe, reflect the shifting power dynamics between linear television and streaming services. In recent years, global services like Netflix have become a force in European markets, especially in France where it’s believed to have more than 12 million subscribers. At the same time, European TV players, like TF1, France Televisions and ITV, have attempted to address the decline of linear audiences with on-demand services such as TF1+, France.tv and ITVX, respectively, but none are nearly as powerful as global players like Netflix. Yet, these TV networks have a broad enough reach locally to be attractive partners for streamers who seek to continue to expand their subscriber base and reduce churn rate at a time of increasing audience fragmentation.
In a lengthy post on LinkedIn earlier this week, Banijay France CEO Alexia Laroche-Joubert called out the multi-year deal with Netflix and TF1, which kicks off in 2016 and will see TF1’s five linear channels and on-demand content become available on Netflix. Laroche-Joubert speculates that under the deal, TF1 and Netflix will co-finance TV series together, which she argues will “hamper” the marketing of producers and distributors’ catalogues, as well as hurt the financing of TV content from other streamers. The latter “will undoubtedly refuse to acquire second window rights after a broadcast on TF1 and Netflix,” wrote Laroche Joubert.
A similar issue could arise with France Televisions, whose deal with Prime Video – which came into effect on July 3 — brings linear content from its on-demand platform, France.tv, on the service. That means not only TV shows and movies, but also sports rights such as the Roland-Garros tennis tournament and the 2025 European Women’s Championship.
When it comes to directors and producers, there’s also a concern that these “marriages” will impact the content of streamers that will look to court older and broader audiences with content skewing towards mainstream audiences, and perhaps will be less inclined to board edgier shows and documentaries. This content evolution already began after streamers like Netflix and Amazon entered the advertising market, but there have been a flurry of series co-produced and co-financed between traditional TV groups and SVOD services in the last four years. Netlfix, for instance, teamed with TF1 on its first daily soap, “Tout pour la lumière” (pictured).
Analysts such as Paolo Pescatore at PP Foresight argue that these collaborations are not meant to be particularly lucrative, but they’re crucial strategically speaking.
“Arguably it will not change the fortunes for some of the players,” says Paolo Pescatore, founder and TMT analyst at PP Foresight. Yet, it’s “a win-win for all parties,” he says, adding that “for free-to-air broadcasters it gives them a new lease on life, for streamers a broad range of programming and for users it reduces fragmentation by having more content in one place.”
Pescatore says those deals “represent a next step towards traditional blockbuster domestic shows being exclusively available on streamers.”
Regarding the potential of such deals mushrooming across Europe, Francois Godard at Enders Analysis predicts that more will follow, especially in Germany where Prime Video already launched linear channels from broadcasters ARD and ZDF several years ago. Godard says Max will likely be the next streamer to form a deal with a local TV group.
Over in Italy, TV groups have a “different, perhaps more traditional approach” with regards to streamers, says Augusto Preta, founders and CEO at ITMedia Consulting. “The only group which I think could potentially do things like TF1 is Mediaset, but they’re pursing plans to form a European TV group to compete directly with streamers,” says Preta, pointing to the Berlusconi family’s television group’s current takeover bid for ProSieben. The other group that could strike a deal with a streaming service is Rai (which is fully owned by the Italian government), but “when you speak about Rai, everything is a political decision and the feelings towards streamers can fluctuate a lot,” Preta says.
As for the U.S., there’s even less chances of pacts between TV groups and streamers, says Godard, because there are “fundamental differences” between those two markerts. “European free-to-air channels are genuinely free and possess substantial audience power, unlike their American counterparts which are typically part of a paid cable package,” says Godard.
Adds Pescatore, “There are significant differences between the U.S and Europe which is more relevant for the latter.” However, the analysts says collaborations in Europe “will prove to be a test bed for the U.S market given the widespread adoption and maturity of streaming.”