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For most of the past decade, television’s defining battle was broadcasters versus streamers. Now that divide is breaking down fast, as traditional TV groups – who’ve seen linear advertising and viewing fall – are now
keen to collaborate with global streamers to continue financing ambitious content and gain some scale.
Few deals illustrate the shift better than TF1’s decision to put its channels and AVOD service TF1+ inside Netflix. TF1+ already reaches around 42 million people a month, while TF1 President Rodolphe Belmer said the broadcaster estimates Netflix has roughly 14 million members in France, many of whom increasingly use it as their first destination for television.
“The more Netflix is growing, the more our addressable market in consequence is shrinking, and the more our ability to amortize our lineup of content and to finance our shows is under stress,” Belmer said. “And evidently, to tackle all that, we had to take the decision to distribute our lineup of content on Netflix to be able to reach Netflix members and advertise our content on the wider possible perimeter of French audiences.”
Belmer was speaking at the Lumière Summit in Saint-Paul-de-Vence alongside Prime Video executive Andrew Bennett, Globo CEO Paulo Marinho and Gaumont Television chief Isabelle Degeorges on a panel exploring the increasingly intertwined relationship between broadcasters and streamers.
For Amazon, aggregation has always been a core part of the business.
“We have been both a programmer and an aggregator since our inception,” Bennett said. “We were an SVOD, TVOD, then we were SVOD, TVOD, channels, now we’re SVOD, TVOD, free-to-air. It is foundational to our strategy to bring all of the selection together in one app.”
He pointed to Prime Video partnerships with France Télévisions, M6, Spain’s RTVE and Germany’s ARD and ZDF. In Europe in particular, he said, local programming has become indispensable.
“Particularly in Europe, it’s very clear to me now you cannot be successful without significant disproportionate amounts of local programming,” Bennett said. “It’s what customers want. It’s what they’re accustomed to.”
Globo, meanwhile, offers another version of the model. The Brazilian giant spans free-to-air television, pay TV, Globoplay, production and sports, reaching some 120 million people weekly, with a major novela capable of attracting around 40 million viewers per episode.
Marinho said Globo remains committed to its own ecosystem but left open the possibility of deeper partnerships with global platforms.
“I never say never because the market’s shifting and changing so fast,” he said. “It’s a possibility. I would say not for now, but maybe advancing and having part of our streaming content, sharing window, sharing advertisement would be a first step.”
Advertising sits at the heart of those decisions. As broadcasters distribute more content through third-party platforms, the question is no longer simply who reaches the viewer, but who controls the commercial relationship around that viewer.
Marinho said Globo wants to preserve its direct relationship with advertisers even when working with outside distributors. “In terms of advertisement, we try to control the relationship with the market,” he said. “And some discussions that we might have around the distribution monetization is always a very important part of the discussion. Who and how you’re going to monetize this inventory and the data piece as well.”
For Belmer, audience data has become particularly important for targeted advertising. European regulation, he argued, has focused heavily on whether broadcasters remain visible on connected devices but not enough on who controls consumer consent and the information needed to monetize those audiences.
“It is absolutely crucial for the monetization of content long-term,” he said.
But the panel drew a distinction between data as a commercial asset and data as a creative tool.
Degeorges said producers remain largely shut out from much of the audience information generated by the platforms carrying their shows.
“We don’t know. I mean, as producer, we don’t have any data,” she said.
Belmer argued that broadcasters have spent decades commissioning without direct access to individual viewer data.
“We continue to do our shows with instincts, with our understanding of the French population, and also resorting to measurement panels,” he said.
While acknowledging he wasn’t working on originals, Bennett refuted claims that Prime Video may be relying on data too heavily to develop shows. “Creativity is not something that data – it’s generally backward-looking, and creativity is forward-looking,” he said. “No data is going to tell you the alchemy of a director and a cast and music and casting.”
The convergence of broadcasters and streamers is also changing one of streaming’s original defining principles – exclusivity.
“Exclusive, not exclusive, first window, second window, that’s just a function of the relationship between your investment level and where you think the outcome will be in terms of what you think is a good investment or a bad investment,” Bennett said. “But we don’t obsess about one size fits all.”
Belmer said TF1 already shares roughly 15 shows a year with streamers under different arrangements. Sometimes a partner gets the first window and TF1 the second; in other cases, the shows launch day-and-date.
“What we have experienced, the level of cannibalization is relatively moderate,” Belmer said. “It means that it makes sense for us, financially speaking, to do this kind of deals with our partners.”
Ten weeks into the partnership with Netflix, the feared cannibalization of TF1+ has proved surprisingly limited. “For the moment, the cannibalization is very, very small, less than 10%,” Belmer said. “Much, much smaller than what we modelized when we did the partnership.”
For producers, however, greater flexibility around distribution only works if they retain enough long-term value.
Degeorges made clear that IP ownership remains fundamental to Gaumont.
“If we don’t have the IPs, yes, we get money to make the show, we get money for our companies, but at the end of the day, we don’t have any rights,” she said. “Because the IP is our library, our availability to create, to develop, to just move forward with our companies.”
She said French regulation now allows producers to retain IP in roughly 70% of cases.
Ultimately, Degeorges acknowledged there is a risk of European producers and broadcasters becoming increasingly dependent on U.S. platforms to finance local creation.
“Yes, I mean, it is a risk,” she said. “We know that. That’s why our government, everybody, has to fight. Us, we have to fight to remain, to keep this sovereignty.”
“We also have to fight for the investors in public audiovisual because they make a lot of shows and we need these shows,” she said. Her hope, she added, is that partnerships ultimately allow the industry to make “more shows, more diverse shows, more volume” while maintaining a viable domestic production ecosystem.
If broadcasters and streamers are becoming increasingly interdependent, YouTube may be giving them another reason to find common ground.
“I think that it’s absolutely necessary that YouTube gets regulated,” Belmer said. “All of us, broadcasters, streamers, we are in France and in many European countries heavily regulated. Today, as you said, YouTube has established itself on the TV screen, and it is competing for the same market as we are without any regulation.”
Belmer argued that the imbalance is especially stark because global subscription streamers have already been incorporated into France’s cultural financing system.
Amazon, Netflix and Disney, he said, “are good citizens of the French cultural exception, very good citizens. And they finance cinema, they finance shows, they play by the same rules as all of us.”
Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+ are currently challenging a newer diversity requirement layered onto France’s existing streaming investment regime. The three platforms have separately appealed a sub-quota requiring them to devote 20% of their mandatory audiovisual investment to genres including animation, documentaries and recorded or recreated live performance.
The lobbying push is mounting as the European Commission prepares to review the Audiovisual Media Services Directive which sets guidelines for streamers’ investment in European content.
Belmer said YouTube is already capturing a significant share of the TV advertising market without carrying comparable local investment obligations. He said the platform can sell advertising at prices 2.5 to three times below those of traditional broadcasters, describing those prices as “predatory.”
Degeorges made the producer argument in broader terms.
“You get money from creation, and YouTube gets a lot of money from creation because they distribute channels, they distribute creators, they distribute a lot of French content which have been financed by our ecosystem,” she said.
“In our system, actors who get money from creation have to finance creation. I mean, it’s very simple,” Degeorges said.
