Dick Pope BSC: Life through a Lens

British Cinematographer

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One of the most understated and respected cinematographers of his generation passed in October, leaving behind a body of work that can’t be matriculated by awards or nominations.  

Richard Pope, known as Dick, was born in Bromley, Kent in 1947. An early appreciation for stills photography came from his father who gave him a Box Brownie and let him use his Zeiss twin lens reflex camera.  

“The camera was particularly suited to portraiture and Dick began to recruit potential subjects from his neighbourhood, turning his lounge in Kent into a makeshift studio,” records Phil Méheux BSC in the book Preserving the Vision. “He had also become a regular at his local cinema, where he developed a strong passion for film and decided to combine his love of photography and cinema into a career as a cinematographer.” 

Aged 16, he began a three-year apprenticeship at the Pathé Film Laboratory in Wardour Street, Soho. In 1968, having tried unsuccessfully to join the BBC, he went freelance and became a clapper loader on low-budget British sex comedies like Loving Feeling which, according to Méheux, felt far away from his ambitions.  

By 1974, he was filming documentaries, travelling to remote and hostile areas including war zones for films about endangered indigenous tribes for Granada series Disappearing World (1974), political journalism for World in Action (1976-8), and arts programmes for The South Bank Show. 

During the 1970s and into the early 1980s he operated on hundreds of rock concerts, many for BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test and shot music videos for artists including Tina Turner, The Police, and Alison Moyet. He shot The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’, Queen’s ‘I Want to Break Free’ and Kylie Minogue’s ‘Wouldn’t Change a Thing’. Other promos included for Madness (‘It Must Be Love’), Fine Young Cannibals (‘Suspicious Minds’), and Rick Astley (‘Hold Me In Your Arms’). 

He moved into television drama in the early ‘80s, earning a BAFTA nomination for his work on 1987 comedy mini-series Porterhouse Blue before being invited to shoot his first narrative feature as DP. This was Welsh language comedy Coming Up Roses (1986) for director Stephen Bayly which screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes and on which a mutual colleague of Mike Leigh suggested they ought to meet. 

“I’d worked with Roger Pratt BSC on High Hopes and expected to go on working with Roger but he was busy with Terry Gilliam shooting The Fisher King,” Leigh explains. “Roger was very, very apologetic but I needed to find someone else. Working with Dick just seemed like a good idea. He was a great guy, we talked the same language and it turned out to be a great relationship.” 

The comedy Life is Sweet (1990) was the start of a hugely successful career collaboration between Leigh and Pope which spanned 12 features plus shorts and commercials. 

“Once we’d worked together once it was dead obvious we’d work together again,” Leigh says. “First of all, he’s a brilliant cinematographer and that was clear from the word ‘go’. We also shared a sense of humour, we shared a sense of cynicism and we shared taste.” 

Their next feature collaboration, Naked (1993) is arguably their most celebrated. The coruscating satire of class, power, and sexual relationships won Leigh and actor David Thewlis awards at Cannes but it’s Pope who conjures the film’s monochromatic nocturnal bleakness. 

“I go into a long period with the actors and there’s always an agreed point in the proceedings when I start to share with Dick and the designers what I think is emerging,” Leigh says. “When I did that on Naked I was able to say to Dick, ‘I think the film is kind of nocturnal, maybe monochromatic, although we knew we were shooting in colour. It’s about this guy on a solo journey and Dick was immediately on the case. The bleach bypass tests he shot were right on the button. 

 “It continued from there. Every time we made a film he absolutely tuned in on cinematically, photographically, visually, aesthetically, dramatically with exactly the right thing.” 

This includes Pope’s use of bold primary colours on the optimistic Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) and his inspired use of Super 16 film to create the postwar world of Vera Drake (2004). Leigh highlights the combination of 16mm shot handheld with 35mm shot formally to differentiate between the past and present in Career Girls (1997) and his “beautiful rendering” of the four seasons in Another Year (2010). Other highlights include the sumptuous Victorian theatre imagery of Topsy-Turvy (1999), Pope’s sensitive references in Mr. Turner (2014) to the artist’s paintings, and his bold rendering of the turbulent world of Peterloo (2018). 

What is notable about the critical acclaim accorded to Pope is that he did his best work without announcing his presence. 

“I don’t think Pope had a signature [look],” observed Matt Zoller Seitz, an editor at RogerEbert.com. “Pope seemed like the cinematography version of a character actor, giving the performance that particular film needed.” 

If there’s any aesthetic through-line in the work it relates to Pope’s “evidently unassuming intelligence about how best to serve material,” Seitz said. “He seemed to have an instinct for doing as much as he could to help a movie, a scene, or a moment without seeming as if he was trying to inappropriately spice things up or wow the audience or dazzle in some superficial or obvious way.” 

In an interview for the 2021 remaster of Naked, Pope himself noted that Leigh’s films are full of “invisible moves”.  

“People always think that the camera is locked down and doesn’t move in his films, like in the work of Ozu, but of course it does move. In the silhouette shot when Johnny is having his big rant at Brian about Nostradamus and the end of the universe, the camera is moving closer all the time into a much tighter shot, but it’s almost invisible, and you don’t realise it’s happening. That was what I tried to do – make it as invisible as possible, make it feel like you’re just being drawn in by the words, but the camera is actually moving in all the time.” 

Roger Deakins CBE ASC BSC says Pope’s legacy is one of unpretentious photography. “Naked is the epitome of that. It would have been so hard to shoot that film in those circumstances with so little money but he did it beautifully.  

“He was very much a people person. Some cinematographers have a bit of a reverential view of themselves. Dick wasn’t like that. He was more ‘get in there and just do it.’ For Dick, it was all about the story, the characters and about working with people. He loved working with crews and just loved the experience of the job. He was willing to muck in and not have special treatment.” 

 Leigh has a similar take, “He wouldn’t have been able to function as an artist – which is what he was – if he didn’t have a great sense of compassion. He absolutely got what my stories are about and he was brilliant with actors and knew how to serve their needs. That’s very important, obviously, because my films are very performance based.” 

Pope’s other work includes for Richard Linklater (Bernie, Me and Orson Welles), Christopher McQuarrie’s directorial debut (Way of the Gun), Barry Levinson’s Man of the Year, Douglas McGrath (Nicolas Nickleby), Brian Helgeland (Legend); Beeban Kidron (Swept from the Sea), Chiwetel Ejiofor (The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind), Harry Macqueen (Supernova), and Graham Moore (The Outfit). 

  When Edward Norton wanted to convey the loneliness of life in 1950s New York for his noir feature Motherless Brooklyn he turned to Pope. They had met on the set of Neil Burger’s The Illusionist (which earned Pope an Oscar nomination in 2006). 

“Dick’s talent for making the past seem visceral is what made me want to go to him,” Norton told IBC365. “I used Robert Frank and Vivian Maier photos to convey the path I wanted to go down and Dick brought the idea of Edward Hopper paintings.” 

Pope said of the project, “It’s a dream for any cinematographer to be asked to recreate fifties New York with all the visual flourishes of a noir. I was brought up on noir film. My father idolised noir actors of that era and was a number one fan of Dick Powell (whose Philip Marlowe in 1944’s Farewell My Lovely is considered definitive). That’s why he called me Richard.” 

Pope was a favourite of cinematographers, winning the coveted main prize at Camerimage in Poland no less than three times. Particularly memorable for him was a presentation of Naked at the festival’s first edition in 1993. In the audience were Sven Nykvist ASC FSF, Vittorio Storaro ASC AIC, and Vilmos Zsigmond ASC along with students from many film schools in Europe.  

“After the screening it became apparent that the students had never seen anything quite like it before,” Pope recalled to BFI curator James Bell. “They mobbed me in the auditorium then kidnapped me and took me to a smoky backroom where they demanded all I knew about everything to do with the making of the film and Mike Leigh’s method. Then at the end of the festival at the awards ceremony, the students mounted the stage and in a piece of pure agitprop, hijacked the proceedings and gave their own award to me for Naked, which is a beautiful piece I still have and treasure – a stained glass panel evoking Rosebud, the sled from Citizen Kane.” 

 

My friend, Dick  

Starting their careers around the same time, it was inevitable their paths would overlap but Pope was to become much more than a colleague to Roger Deakins CBE ASC BSC. 

“He’s probably my best friend in the business,” says Deakins. “We started together and went through the same kind of evolution.” 

They met in the late ‘70s at Solas Enterprises, a documentary filmmaking cooperative run by directors Jack Hazan and David Mingay. “I spent more time with Dick than I did with anybody else. He was working as an assistant at that time and making his way up to become a cameraman. 

“We had a lot in common even though we had very different backgrounds. He’s very much a Londoner and I’m from the West country with very different characters but we got on really well. We’d sit in the office, have a cup of tea and swap war stories.” 

When Pope landed work shooting concerts he would invite Deakins to operate a second camera. “I remember going up to Birmingham one weekend and filming The Clash with him,” Deakins recalls. 

A few years later, shooting 1984 for Mike Radford, Deakins was able to return the favour, with Pope operating second unit. When Deakins went to Kenya to shoot Mountains of the Moon (1990) for Bob Rafelson, Pope shot second unit too.  

“I knew he’d shot documentaries on the Maasai there with producer Chris Curling with whom Dick had already shot documentaries. Dick loved Kenya. He also loved just being off on his own shooting some shots for us. Once he’d finished he’d go off into the bush for days and we wouldn’t know where the hell he was but he always come back with one or two wonderful shots. 

“That was the last time we worked together, but we’ve always kept in touch. Sometimes he’d come to stay with us in Devon or catch up over dinner in London. We even ended up both going to the Academy Awards as nominees (in 2015 for Mr. Turner and Unbroken respectively). 

“We’re both very cynical about the ritual and pomposity of filmmaking which is perhaps why we got on so well. Dick had a wonderful way of undercutting all of that and not letting it get to him.” 

Deakins and his wife James describe Pope’s sense of humour as “nuts” and “left field” adding, “He was charming and funny and he had a great deal of curiosity. He was so enthusiastic and loved film. Every time he had a movie coming out we looked forward to seeing how he tackled that particular challenge.” 

Deakins adds, “I just really miss him as a friend. I don’t think it has sunk in yet.”

A perfectionist  

“He was extremely creative in terms of how he thought about light,” says Lucy Bristow ACO Assoc. BSC, who loaded on Life is Sweet and operated on Hard Truths, bookends of a career on which they paired on numerous other projects. “He could turn something very bland into something very beautiful. Dick crafted everything and was always striving to improve the shot. He was like a dog with a bone and wouldn’t leave it alone. He had incredible perfectionism.” 

When Bristow graduated from loading to operating, Pope encouraged her to go into the grade and pursue the film’s look into post. “He impressed on me the importance of understanding the whole process, including beyond the end of the shoot. He was also fantastic at making actors feel comfortable. He had a wicked sense of humour. That’s what crew and actors respond to on set.” 

Bristow also recalls working with Pope in Ghana on a tricky nine-week shoot for HBO TV movie Deadly Voyage in 1996. 

“So many things went wrong including the generator bursting into flames in the middle of the night, actors getting bitten by dogs, and the second AD getting sepsis from a fall and having to be airlifted out. The Ghanian crew felt the film was so jinxed, they even got a local healer in to bless the rest of production. Of all the films with Dick this was the most eventful as an experience.”

 

NAB Preview: Agentic AI poised to steal the show

IBC

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New imaging technologies, AI creative mates and wrestlers await visitors to Las Vegas while America’s free press is under attack. 

The spectre of Big Brother hovers over NAB. President Trump’s sustained attack on the First Amendment verbalised against MSNBC, ABC, CBS and CNN, includes a White House ban on AP for continuing to use ‘Gulf of Mexico’ and an executive order to decimate the international news organisation Voice of America.

In his pocket is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) whose chairman Brendan Carr is perpetuating an investigation into an interview aired by CBS during the presidential campaign.

CBS is accused of doctoring an interview with candidate Kamala Harris that ran on the current affairs show 60 Minutes. The full transcript and video have been handed to the FCC which is delaying a decision on whether or not it broke any rules, perhaps to hold CBS parent Paramount Global to account while its merger with Skydance Media needs FCC approval.

Meanwhile, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has urged the case to be dismissed. The NAB said in documents to the FCC on 7 March: “Despite the complaint’s focus on how the former vice president’s answer to a single question was edited, nothing here indicates, let alone demonstrates, deliberate falsification or a deliberate intent to mislead …”

It continued: “Even assuming a successful claim could be made, Congress did not grant the FCC the authority to develop and enforce its news distortion policy, and that policy also almost certainly violates the First Amendment.”

This political vendetta and the wider pressures on journalists questioning Trump’s authority hangs large over the NAB Show where leading figures from the FCC and broadcasters like CBS are present.

Choose collaboration or creative armageddon

With Vegas only a short hop from LA, there will be some Hollywood heavyweights in attendance. These include Alice Brooks and Myron Kerstein, the cinematographer and editor respectively behind musical fantasy Wicked: Part 1; Jeff Groth, editor of The Joker and Better Man; and Fenton Bailey, Co-founder at RuPaul’s Drag Race producer World of Wonder. Amazon MGM Studios’ Head of Post Production, International Features & Head of International VFX, Arturo Sedano Diaz gets his own session talking about post-production.

The biggest beast is David S. Goyer, a writer and producer specialising in sci-fi. He worked with Christopher Nolan on the Dark Knight trilogy, co-wrote and produced Batman V Superman as well as executive producing the Sandman TV series and showrunning AppleTV series Foundation. One of his current projects is the script for Guillermo del Toro’s remake of 1960’s classic Fantastic Voyage.

Goyer has his own fireside chat during which he will outline the problems facing the entertainment industry and a remedy, involving his own AI-driven company, called Incention.

“The choice before us is clear: embrace the future of collaborative creation or watch as fear of AI paralyses the industry,” declares the Incention ‘manifesto’. “Traditional IP development is broken. Valuable franchises lie dormant, waiting for major studio investment. Creative communities remain untapped. Meanwhile, AI threatens to flood the market with algorithmic slop – prioritising quantity over quality.”

He will warn of a paralysis of fear gripping Hollywood. “Executives, frozen by AI's rapid advancement, cling to old models that no longer serve creators or audiences – or their businesses! They see AI as either a complete replacement for human creativity or an enemy to be defeated. Both perspectives miss the revolutionary opportunity before us.”

Incention is backed by the a16z venture fund and built on the blockchain, meaning a creator’s work can be tracked and rewarded. The first piece of IP from the company, intended as a franchise, is a suitably sci-fi world called Emergence.

Agentic AI makes first moves

NAB will be the industry’s coming out party for Agentic AI, a form of AI that no longer relies on predefined algorithms and user instructions, but demonstrates autonomy, adaptability, and the capacity for decision-making.

“This evolution is reshaping every facet of the media landscape, from content creation and distribution to audience engagement and monetisation strategies,” says Zeenal Thakare, Sr. Vice President – Enterprise Sales Solutions Architect at Ateliere Creative Technologies.

Goyer’s Incention platform includes an AI agent designed to serve as a creative partner to help with aggregating ideas, crafting narratives, and even generating full videos.

A session run by Silicon Valley AI company TipTop Technology, asks us to envisage production meetings where avatars “step in as stand-ins, providing insights and sharing essential updates” to ensure everyone stays on track to meet deadlines.

Also debuting at NAB is a claimed “first AI-powered conversational assistant” offering design to deployment support for media workflows. This comes from qibb whose CEO Jonas Michaelis said in a release: “By adding an intelligent, conversational assistant directly to our platform, we are empowering both seasoned engineers and non-technical users to develop, refine, and oversee media workflows like never before.”

Thakare thinks the technology will give audiences new power as co-creators. “Agentic AI systems enable viewers to customise storylines, characters, and outcomes in real-time, blurring the lines between passive consumption and active participation.”

Sport imaging tech unveiled

Innovations scheduled to debut at NAB include Dream Chip Technologies’ latest miniature fixed point-of-view camera, touted as the smallest available with a global shutter. A global shutter eliminates motion artefacts, ensuring crisp imaging of action – deemed essential for applications such as goal-line technology. Weighing just 55g, including lens and stereo microphone, the AtomTwo could be worn by referees or mounted on a lightweight drone.

Not to be outdone, fellow German developer Proton will unveil the “world’s smallest slow-motion mini cam.” Also targeting sports production and featuring a global shutter, the Proton High Frame Rate (HFR) camera also captures frame rates of up to 240fps and has a C-mount lens system.

The HFR function is available in a ‘flex’ format allowing the camera head to be separated from its processing unit. This means operators can mount the head unit in tight places – such as pylon cameras in stadia – while positioning the processing unit elsewhere for cable management and stability.

Another potential sports application is the ability to enhance the most important areas of any video stream – live, in real time. In a claimed first-of-its-kind technology a new Generative Video Codec (GVC) is presented by latakoo at NAB’s Futures Park. It automatically enhances the most relevant parts of a live feed or, used manually, it can pinpoint specific areas – like a player’s foot on the goal line – "delivered in razor-sharp quality while optimising bandwidth.” 

 “You can dial it in with GVC to see what matters to you first,” says Jade Kurian, Co-Founder of latakoo, who also notes its military and police surveillance applications. “While you’re dealing with that critical video, the rest of your video will be transmitted more slowly in the background to you in perfect clarity.”

Hard to get excited by NextGen TV

ATSC 3.0 (or ‘NextGen TV’) is the broadcast standard being rolled out across the US with the aim of improving over-the-air TV. As of October 2024, just over three-quarters of the country was within reach of an ATSC 3.0 signal but there are concerns that momentum has stalled.

As reported by Jared Newman, support from TV set brands is patchy, 4K remains largely non-existent on ATSC 3.0 channels and consumers don’t seem interested in the platform’s interactive features. On the plus side, more broadcasters are focusing on HDR and Dolby Atmos is available too but the biggest issue is that broadcasters are mandated to provide simulcasts of channels over earlier generations of ATSC. While that ensures that citizens don’t get excluded from a sudden switch-off it also means that broadcasters are unable to use their spectrum as efficiently as they would like – not least for more NextGen TV functions like datacasting that could produce new revenues.

Earlier this year the NAB petitioned the FCC to do just that and put a date in the calendar for shutting down the current ATSC 1.0 and switching signals to NextGen TV. This may explain the multiplicity of sessions at NAB promoting and explaining the various aspects of the standard.

Camera to cloud continues

The transition to remote production jumped during Covid when camera-to-cloud (C2C) solutions were essential to keeping isolated teams in-sync. It has continued to evolve as more monitor-recorders able to connect over Wi-Fi or via bonded cellular solutions provide high-speed, low-latency internet on location. Devices from Atomos, for example, are integrated with C2C media asset platforms, like Adobe Frame.io, Sony Ci Media, MediaSilo and Dropbox Replay. Sundance Film Festival has been using Atomos C2C workflows for its recent coverage.

The Mavis Camera app, launching at NAB, will marry the connectivity of an iPhone with Frame.io. It is also launching Mavis C2C, a service that provides progressive uploads to Sony Ci, MediaSilo, Amazon S3 and Grass Valley Framelight X, for teams capturing content on iPhone for news and social.

A Camera to Cloud panel featuring Adobe will highlight how cloud-native solutions are being used in live sports broadcasting.

However, adoption remains limited. Many cameras still rely on recording media to cards rather than directly to accessible hard drives, restricting seamless access. Internet connectivity – especially in remote locations – can also be a challenge.

“To truly capitalise on high-speed connectivity, you need a software solution that can efficiently utilise all available bandwidth,” says Chris Fournelle of Signiant. “Without the right technology, even the fastest internet won’t guarantee the seamless, accelerated transfer of large media files needed for modern workflows.”

Ready to rumble

Having signed a $5bn deal with Netflix for global rights to the next decade of WWE, the sport’s President Nick Khan and Chief Content Officer Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque are in Vegas to talk about its adaption to live streaming and strategies for fan engagement.

The sport has been on the road with an 11-date tour of Europe including stops in Belfast, Nottingham, and the O2 before hosting “the biggest WrestleMania of all time”, at Vegas’ Allegiant Stadium in April after NAB has left town.

Also of note, AWS and Nvidia are sponsoring the esports simulator challenge on the LVCC show floor which offers you a chance to put pedal to the metal around the Las Vegas Grand Prix track.

Streamticker: The biggest streaming mergers and acquisitions of 2024

Streaming Media

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The 2024 edition of Streamticker, recapping the streaming industry’s most momentous mergers and acquisitions of 2023, kicked off with Disney’s gobbling up the last extant portions of Hulu, as Comcast ceded its re­maining 33% stake. But if the late-2023 deal marked only the quiet conclusion of an already-silent part­nership, the much noisier news of Jan. 6, 2025, found Disney absorbing sports-centric streamer Fubo and merging it with Hulu Live + TV.

The new merger scuttles one of the splashier deals of 2024, which found Disney/ESPN, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Fox joining forces in the megabun­dle sports streaming app Venu Sports. The deal im­mediately signaled the end of Fubo’s widely publi­cised lawsuit against Venu Sports and would appear to leave erstwhile Venu Sports partner Warner Bros. Discovery out in the cold. Disney’s Fubo acquisition (and the inevitable Fubo + Hulu + Live polynomials to follow) is projected to shake out over the next 12–18 months.

In the meantime, let’s review the done (or more nearly done) M&A deals that reshuffled the stream­ing industry in 2024.

(One high-profile merger you won’t see here is the 2-decades-in-the-making DirecTV acquisition of Dish Network and Sling TV from EchoStar. The deal was announced on Sept. 30, 2024, then nixed on Nov. 21, with the Dish bondholders’ rejection of the ex­change debt terms cited as the sticking point that scuttled it—at least for now.)

ZIXI JOINS CLEARHAVEN PARTNERS

In June 2024, Boston-based private equity firm Clearhaven Partners made an undisclosed but “sig­nificant investment” in IP video solutions provider Zixi, with both parties saying the move would enable Zixi to take growth to the next stage.

Founded in 2006, Zixi provides solutions to custom­ers such as Amazon Prime Video, AWS Elemental Media Connect, Fox, MLB, the NHL, Roku, and You­Tube TV. Clearhaven Partners is building a portfolio of enterprise and B2B software investments, includ­ing streaming solutions developer Wowza.

Analysts quoted by Zixi forecast IP-based video sys­tems to reach $8 billion a year in the next decade, with a 30% compound annual growth rate. In 2023, Zixi’s annual recurring revenue from OTT customers grew 100% year over year. Its broadcaster customers increased more than 30%, and its Software-Defined Video Platform was used to broadcast more than 1.5 million live sporting events. In addition, Zixi claims to provide the lowest total cost of ownership for large-scale IP video delivery deployments, resulting in. up to 60% lower egress costs.

In September 2024, former ThinkAnalytics boss Marc Aldrich succeeded Gordon Brooks as Zixi CEO, and Brooks moved to executive chairman. In Decem­ber, Zixi announced a partnership with sports rights acquisition and content distribution company DICE Verse for distribution of DICE Verse’s IP channels.

JW PLAYER AND CONNATIX MERGE

JW Player (JWP), a video streaming and data in­sights platform, merged with Connatix, a private eq­uity-backed video delivery and monetisation solu­tion, forming JWP Connatix. The pair believe they are better united in order to capitalise on the shift of eyeballs to CTV. A statement announcing the pact claimed it would create the largest independent glob­al video network across CTV and online video, reach­ing more than 1 billion unique users and delivering 30 billion-plus combined video plays and ad impres­sions every month.

“How and where viewers consume video is rapid­ly changing,” says David Kashak, chairman of JWP Connatix. “As a result, media companies require in­novative solutions that allow them to maximise audi­ence engagement and help optimise revenue across disparate monetisation models, whether it be adver­tising, subscriptions or commerce.”

Dave Otten, who co-founded JWP in 2008, is CEO of the combined company, which is headquartered in New York City. He says, “[W]e are bringing together two knowledgeable, and dedicated teams, whose skill-sets and values are a perfect match. We could not be more excited about this partnership and look forward to shaping the future of digital video together.”

AMAGI BUYS ARGOID AI

Amagi, an India-based CTV solutions provider, ac­quired Silicon Valley startup Argoid AI, adding the latter’s AI capabilities, engineers, and data scien­tists to the company. Amagi will integrate Argoid AI’s content recommendation algorithms and pro­gramming automation tools into its Amagi NOW and Cloudport products. One aim is to improve solutions that will help transform FAST services into person­alised streams.

“Amagi has been investing in AI/ML over the last couple of years,” says Baskar Subramanian, co-founder and CEO of Amagi. “We strongly believe in AI/ML’s pivotal role in transforming the Media and Entertainment industry, creating efficiencies, en­hanced monetisation, and a superlative viewer expe­rience. … The combined tech expertise of both com­panies will address key challenges in the streaming industry, such as content discoverability, viewer re­tention, and intelligent programming.”

MEDIAOCEAN ACQUIRES INNOVID

Mediaocean paid $500 million for fellow ad-tech company Innovid to better compete with the sector’s dominant player Google by creating an omnichan­nel ad platform across digital, social, streaming, and linear. Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Israel, Innovid went public in 2021 when it was valued at $1.3 billion, losing much of that value since, though it is expected to report $150 million in revenue for 2024.

The acquisition by Mediaocean delists Innovid from the New York Stock Exchange. Innovid will be merged into a Mediaocean subsidiary, Flashtalking, an ad server for advertisers that Mediaocean bought in 2021 also for around $500 million. Innovid CEO and found­er Zvika Netter is CEO of the new combined organi­sation, reporting to Mediaocean CEO and co-founder Bill Wise.

“There’s no other company, except for Google, that has everything in one place,” Wise told AdExchanger. “But what Google doesn’t have is neutrality and inde­pendence. … Marketers and their agencies are rec­ognising that they don’t want to rely on the world’s largest sellers to provide their buy-side ad tech.”Netter adds, “We have no problem with the walled gardens. But we believe that the technology being used to deliver and measure advertising should be separate from the media business. We’re saying either buy and sell media or be in the business of delivery, data, mea­surement, and accountability. A walled garden is not a bad thing. We work with YouTube. We work with Net­flix. We work with all the large media companies. And we deliver and measure ads across these platforms.”Mediaocean employs more than 1,000 people and generates $500 million annually. Its largest share­holder is the CVC investment fund. The acquisition was expected to close in early 2025.

DOLBY ADDS STREAMING SOLUTION AND CODEC LICENSES

Dolby Laboratories reported a strong financial performance for Q4 2024 and the full year, posting a total revenue of $1.27 billion, slightly down from $1.30 billion in 2023. In July, Dolby acquired THEO Tech­nologies, the Belgium-based provider of playback solution THEOplayer, for $55 million. Dolby plans to combine THEO products with its own Millicast solu­tion to deliver live experiences “with no perceptible difference between what you see in-person and what is streaming on your device.” The combined prod­uct range also includes THEOlive, a live-streaming solution that delivers ultralow-latency streaming at scale, and Dolby Hybrik, a cloud-based media work­flow management service.

“People want to engage with their content in real-time and have a more personal relationship with their content,” says Giles Baker, SVP of Dolby Cloud Solu­tions. “With Dolby Millicast, we’ve enabled service pro­viders to improve the audiovisual experience and offer experiences that are delivered in real-time. Add­ing THEO’s suite of products creates a comprehensive cross-platform solution for sports and entertainment companies seeking to enable the most interactive real-time digital experiences.”

A month earlier, Dolby announced the buyout of GE Licensing, an innovator in patent licensing and management, from GE Aerospace for $429 million in an all-cash transaction. GE Licensing represents multiple consumer technology companies from Tai­wan, South Korea, and China, with IP in electron­ics, smart systems, materials, and advanced manu­facturing. Overall, the transaction will comprise a portfolio of more than 5,000 patents, including foun­dational patents in video codecs, such as HEVC and VVC, and audio compression technologies, such as a patent for audio-on-demand communication and telecommunication-related technologies.

“We are pleased with the progress we made in fis­cal 2024,” says Kevin Yeaman, president and CEO of Dolby Laboratories. “As we enter 2025, we have strong momentum with Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision, our imaging patent portfolio has got stronger with the GE Licensing acquisition, and we are excited about our opportunity with Dolby.io, which is well positioned to provide real time interactive experiences for sports and entertainment.”

The company’s licensing revenue, which makes up the bulk of its business, is expected to range from $305 million to $335 million in Q1 2025.

EVS BUYS MOG TECHNOLOGIES

EVS bought Portugal-based MOG Technologies to enhance its file-based ingest and transcoding capa­bilities for live and near-live production workflows. “With a team of 50 based in Porto, the acquisition grants EVS access to a pool of highly skilled talent,” says EVS.

MOG Technologies generates an annual revenueof approximately €4 million (about $4.1 million). EVS CEO Serge Van Herck points to MOG’s software-defined ingest capabilities and transcoding features for on-prem and cloud and how these fit with EVS’s Balanced Computing strategy, which is evident in products like MediaCeption.

Additionally, EVS spent €3 million (about $3.1 mil­lion) for a minority stake in TinkerList, a Belgian company aiming to make live broadcasting more intuitive, reliable, and productive. TinkerList ’s prod­uct Cuez is a web application and automation sys­tem that’s designed to connect with a variety of pro­duction devices.

Erik Hauters, CEO of TinkerList, comments, “We are happy to have the means and the support of EVS to achieve our vision, closing the gap between the writer’s room and the technical broadcasting envi­ronment. This investment will allow us to further extend the scope of our application to increase its relevance across a wider set of productions, while maintaining the same level of simplicity in usage. The strengthened partnership wil help us to expand globally, thanks to EVS’s direct and indirect world­wide footprint. Moreover, this investment from a sol­id broadcast leader demonstrates the sustainability of our company.”

AKAMAI ACQUIRES EDGIO ASSETS

In September 2024, CDN provider Edgio filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In November, Akamai ac­quired select assets held by the company. Edgio listed $379 million in assets and $369 million in liabilities, according to court papers. At the time, its network comprised 300 points of pres­ence (PoPs) worldwide, more than 7,000 ISP intercon­nections, and more than 275Tbps of global capacity, serving around 900 customers.

Akamai was the winning bidder of the assets, which included customer contracts from Edgio’s businesses in security and content delivery and non-exclusive license rights to Edgio’s entire patent portfolio. No assets related to the Edgio network were acquired by Akamai. Dan Rayburn noted in a December 2024 LinkedIn post that investment firm and Edgio debtor Lynrock won the assets for Uplynk and Interdigital, some of Edgio’s patents.

Edgio was only formed in 2022 after Limelight Net­works acquired Edgecast from Yahoo and Apollo Global Management, with the combined company re­branding that year. Between 2013 and 2016, Edgecast was a subsidiary of Verizon. Verizon acquired Yahoo! in 2017 and merged it with its Verizon Digital Media Services business (including the CDN service) to form Oath and later Verizon Media.

In 2023, Lumen Technologies and StackPath quit the CDN business, selling their enterprise custom­ers to Akamai.

AVID ENHANCES NEWS WITH WOLFTECH

Avid acquired Wolftech Broadcast Solutions, a de­veloper of news planning, production, and publish­ing tools. Wolftech was founded in 2011 as a startup within TV 2 Norway, a broadcaster that has incubated companies such as Vizrt, Mosart Media Lab, Vimond, and Electric Friends. It started out working with live video production tools, then in 2013 was tasked by TV 2 to develop a better planning tool for news. The first version of Wolftech News launched in 2014, and its first customer was VRT in Belgium.

Wolftech LIVE is the company’s web-based newsroom control system that allows broadcasters to build and broadcast news, sports, or entertainment shows. It is integrated into the Wolftech ecosystem and is designed to deliver a seamless transition from planning to pro­duction.

Other vendor partnerships with Wolftech in­clude AWS, Adobe, LiveU, Vidispine, and Marquis. Avid has retained the Wolftech brand and will integrate the tools into Avid MediaCentral. Avid CEO Wellford Dil­lard says, “Wolftech is unquestionably on the leading edge of where the industry is going, and this acquisi­tion demonstrates Avid’s commitment to transform news, sports, and live production workflows.”

ATELIERE ACQUIRES AGILE LIVE

Ateliere Creative Technologies, which describes it­self as a generative AI media software solutions com­pany, bought Agile Live, a live TV production platform from Spanish developer Agile Content. Agile Live is claimed to slash live production costs by up to 70% with technologies such as proxy video editing.

Rebranded Ateliere Live, the software platform enables production editing, mixing, graphics, and effects for REMI workflows. The company explains, “In an Ateliere Live production pipeline, video stays in the GPU until just prior to distribution, instead of being repeatedly encoded and decoded through a chain of video processing steps. This results in a sub­stantially lower environmental footprint than tradi­tional solutions that maintain the ‘serial processing steps’ architecture.”

Agile Live customers include Sveriges Television (SVT), whose head of production development, Den­nis Buhr, says, “Our goal is to lower the technical and operational cost per produced hour to half or less of current levels, and we are excited about collaborat­ing with Ateliere to further enhance the reach and capabilities of the system.”

Dan Goman, CEO and founder of Ateliere Creative Technologies, says, “With this acquisition, we are revo­lutionising the live production content industry to deliv­er enhanced real-time content directly to consumers.”

MEDIAGENIX BUYS SPIDEO METADATA

Mediagenix, which provides SaaS-based solutions for content strategy, content value management, and scheduling, acquired Spideo, a specialist in content recommendations. “The acquisition aligns with an acceleration in streaming and digital content con­sumption, whilst effectively tackling complex microsegmentation,” Mediagenix explains. It highlights the importance of metadata, and that a single “source of truth” for all content metadata “is rapidly becom­ing essential for media organisations to effectively monetise their catalog across platforms. …”

Spideo generates 2 billion recommendations from 120 million users a month. Integrating its technology into Mediagenix software is said to deliver improved semantic metadata enrichment, content discover­ability, smart curation, and scheduling automation.

Fabrice Maquignon, CEO of Mediagenix, says, “Content discovery and personalisation are crucial to reducing churn, boosting engagement, and driv­ing monetisation. … [I]ntegrating Spideo’s cutting-edge solutions … allows us to tap into new market segments and better support media companies in realising their strategic business goals.”

Spideo customers include Bouygues Telecom, Canal+, France Télévisions, Globo, Sky+, and Tele­visa. Mediagenix customers include AMC Networks, TelevisaUnivision, and A&E Networks.

Earlier in 2024, the Belgium-based Mediagenix expanded into the U.S. to tap demand for FAST and VOD ad solutions. It opened a U.S. headquarters in Miami and acquired (from an undisclosed source) a media program management tool widely used by broadcast networks and cable companies. As part of the transaction, Mediagenix acquired 55 new cus­tomers and 11 employees from the unnamed partner, which it described as the “market leader in broad­cast inventory and revenue workflow management.” The newly acquired technology was created by Mediagenix and introduced into the U.S. market nearly 2 decades ago via that partner.

Emmanuel Müller, Mediagenix’s managing direc­tor for the Americas, says, “With this strategic acqui­sition and market expansion, Mediagenix plans to fill the growing void in the U.S. broadcast industry: true automation. The acquisition of this reference tech­nology anchors our position as a leading provider of content strategy and scheduling solutions world­wide, allowing us to directly engage with broadcast and cable networks looking to expand and monetise offerings in FAST and VOD.”

ACCEDO BUYS EASEL TV

In March 2024, Swedish OTT solutions provider Ac­cedo acquired Easel TV, a U.K.-based rival, to bring both companies’ SaaS platforms under one roof. Ac­cedo CEO Michael Lantz says that Easel TV “has done a fantastic job in establishing themselves on the mar­ket,” adding, “We believe that we will be stronger to­gether as we continue to innovate in this market.”The Easel TV brand will be phased out. Easel TV clients include NBCUniversal, Sky, and TiVo. Acce­do customers include Deutsche Telekom, ITV, Globo, Hallmark, Bloomberg, and Tata Play. Accedo recently launched a Quality as a Managed Service offering, allowing streaming companies to outsource quality assurance testing and app certification with original equipment manufacturers to achieve cost efficiency, improve QoS, and fight churn.

OUTBRAIN ACQUIRES TEADS FOR $1 BILLION

Outbrain, a company that uses AI to drive content recommendations and performance online, agreed to acquire Teads, an omnichannel video platform, from Altice in a $1 billion deal. Merging with Teads gives Outbrain access to TV and video publishers to tap into the growing CTV market. Teads provides publishers with a range of ad formats, most notably its outstream video, alongside creative optimisation and interactive features for CTV.

The combined company is expected to generate more than $1.7 billion in ad spend this year, with the trans­action expected to close in Q1 2025, subject to stock­holder and regulatory approvals. The two companies said the acquisition will create one of the largest adver­tising platforms for the open internet, mobile, and CTV, bringing together 20,000 direct advertisers with a base of 10,000 premium media environments. The combined platform will cover more than 50 markets, according to the firms, reaching more than 2 billion consumers per month. Outbrain CEO David Kostman will be CEO of the merged entity, with Teads co-CEOs Bertrand Quesada and Jeremy Arditi serving as co-presidents.

“This is a transformative transaction to establish a true end-to-end, full-funnel platform for the open internet,” says Kostman. “The combination of our highly complementary offerings accelerates our vision to become the preferred partner to deliver meaningful brand outcomes across premium, qual­ity media environments—while scaling the industry-leading offerings Teads is known for.”

Altice had been looking to sell Teads for some time, after withdrawing its plans to take the company public in 2021. Altice was then ex­pected to offload most of its media assets after accruing €60 billion (about $61.7 billion) in debt and facing a fraud investigation in Portugal.

In October 2023, reports said that Altice was seeking around €3 billion (about $3.1 billion) for Teads. But the $1 billion price tag still ex­ceeds the $307 million Altice paid for Teads in 2017. According to Video Week, “[T]he acqui­sition represents an opportunity for Outbrain to expand into more premium environments, particularly CTV, seeking to work with more upper-funnel advertisers.”

The merger is subject to approval after a U.K. government investigation into whether the transaction will result “in a substantial less­ening of competition” within the U.K. market.

WALMART + VIZIO = STREAMING AGGREGATOR

Walmart’s February 2024 $2.3 billion purchase of smart TV maker VIZIO and its SmartCast operat­ing system was intended to create a more potent ri­val to Amazon’s booming ad business. Walmart’s ad sales are still a fraction of Amazon’s, but the bricks-and-mortar retail giant leads in daily grocery sales.
Walmart’s ads business grew 28% to $3.4 billion last year, but this makes up less than 1% of its total sales. Variety even suggests that Walmart is perhaps the only player that can rival Amazon as the all-in-one dealer of the streaming market. “Walmart is well on the way to going toe-to-toe with Amazon as the ‘ev­erything store’ of streaming,” writes Variety’s Tyler Aquilina, “with its own hardware, connected TV OS, subscription marketplace, and, if not its own pro­prietary SVOD, at least a high-profile partnership to offer one.”

SmartCast has more than 18 million active accounts and is included in every VIZIO TV set. It connects with other services like Apple Airplay and personal assis­tants like Alexa.

“Longer term, Walmart can also use the Vizio plat­form to develop more of its own entertainment con­tent—something it might link with the Walmart+ membership scheme,” notes Neil Saunders, manag­ing director of GlobalData. Walmart U.S. EVP and chief revenue officer Seth Dallaire says that combining VIZIO with its media business, Walmart Connect, “would be impactful as we redefine the intersection of retail and entertainment.”

SIMPLY TV ACQUIRES INFLOW MEDIA

Denmark’s Simply TV, a provider of content discov­ery and metadata, bought InFlow Media in July 2024, claiming to form Europe’s leading metadata company.

This is the second acquisition made by Simply TV, following the purchase of the Dutch metadata special­ist GVIDI in 2022. InFlow Media, formed out of Universum Norway and Ritzau Mediaservice Denmark in 2019, develops EPG metadata and supports the transition to time-shift viewing, personal video recorders, and VOD in the Nordics. Simply TV was founded by Daniel Rühmann and Morten Trolle, who previously launched EPG Sys­tems, which was acquired by Gracenote in 2013.

BENDING SPOONS BUYS BRIGHTCOVE

Brightcove, the Technology and Engineering Emmy-winning video platform vendor, was sold to app devel­oper Bending Spoons for $233 million in November 2024. Founded in 2004 with a video player, Brightcove expanded into full online video services and a mone­tisation suite for clients such as the BBC, Showtime, AMC Networks, and the LPGA. It went public in 2012 but has faced challenges of late, reporting a net loss of $3 million for Q3 2024.

This was Milan-headquartered Bending Spoons’ sixth acquisition in 2024, following those of file-sharing platform WeTransfer, digital publishing platform Issuu, live-streaming app StreamYard, app maker Mosaic Group, and Meetup, a social network with 60 million members. In 2022, it acquired note-taking software firm Evernote. Bending Spoons is valued at more than $2.5 billion and is reportedly planning an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.

SEEDTAG ACQUIRES BEACHFRONT

Seedtag, a specialist in contextual advertising, ac­quired Beachfront, a U.S.-based sell-side ad platform for CTV and streaming. Since the announcement in June 2024, Beachfront’s technology, inventory, and ex­pertise in CTV advertising has been incorporated into Seedtag’s contextual ad solutions. Seedtag recently launched Contextual TV in the U.S., an offering that harnesses AI-based network dynamics.

Jorge Poyatos, co-CEO and co-founder of Seedtag, says, “With the acquisition of Beachfront, we will fur­ther enrich our unique Contextual TV solution by incorporating a native platform into our stack, add­ing additional signals to our AI, and expanding our publisher partnerships.”

 

The State of Live Sport Streaming 2025

Streaming Media

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The sport media sector continues to undergo rapid change, with streaming aggregators attempting to reconsolidate for greater ef­ficiency but still falling short of traditional broadcast models in reach and revenue.

The widespread misconception that sport viewing has declined at the same pace as the rest of broadcast TV needs to be put to rest. In fact, sport viewing has been the most resilient component of broadcast TV, as global communal experiences like the Olympics and national tentpoles like the Super Bowl demon­strated in 2024.

As Enders Analysis points out in the report “Defying the Decline,” it’s not just the big-ticket items on net­work TV that were ratings hits this year. In the U.K., young viewers now consume nearly half of their sport through Comcast-owned Sky, “dwarfing the combined efforts of the BBC and ITV, which refutes the widely held view that young people don’t watch sport behind a pay­wall,” the report says. Warner Bros. Discovery-owned TNT Sports also saw its audience share rise in Europe despite subscription price hikes.

“Fears that young people are no longer interest­ed in sport are overblown,” the report states, point­ing out that sport is now a growing proportion of all live TV set viewing with those younger than age 35: 17% in 2023, up from 7% in 2015. In addition, the report notes that “in a world of personalised al­gorithms and subcultures, sport is one of few glues that bind fans together.” It helps too that sport have to be watched live. But Enders Analysis also credits broadcasters and leagues “for maintaining sport’s appeal in a changing media landscape.”

In addition, Altman Solon’s 2024 Global Sports Sur­vey states that interest in live sport remains high across all generations, with approximately 60% of sport fans from all geographies saying they tune in to televised sport at least monthly (go2sm.com/dellea).

DEMOGRAPHIC SHIFT

However, there is a distinct generational divide. Samba TV’s “Live Sports on Streaming Platforms” report reveals that across sports such as MLS, the NHL, and the UEFA Champions League, younger, higher-income audiences prefer streaming, while older, lower-income viewers favour broadcast TV. “For example, MLS on Apple TV+, the NHL on Hulu and ESPN+, and UEFA on Paramount+ are all attracting Millennials with money to spend—one of the most coveted demos for advertisers. Older and lower-income households stick to traditional TV. This trend gives advertisers a clear roadmap: use streaming platforms to engage affluent, younger audiences, while leveraging broadcast TV to reach older or less tech-savvy viewers,” notes Jan Ozer in his analysis of the report.

Audience sizes for streaming-only sport events vary widely. At the top end are events like the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight, which drew 29 million U.S. household viewers on Netflix. The NFL also per­formed well, with 14.2 million U.S. viewers watching the Eagles beat the Packers 34–29 on Peacock in Sep­tember. Ozer says, “By comparison, smaller events like MLS games on Apple TV+ struggled to reach sim­ilar numbers, with some matchups, such as Charlotte vs. Miami, attracting just 69,000 viewers, while the NHL’s New York Rangers vs. the Detroit Red Wings drew only 87,000 viewers. These numbers suggest that even well-established leagues like the NHL face chal­lenges in drawing large audiences for streaming-only events, especially when they’re not available on na­tional linear channels.

“For sports leagues,” Ozer continues, “the implica­tions are more complex. Should leagues align their distribution strategies with their existing audiences—focusing on streaming to retain younger, affluent fans—or diversify by maintaining a presence on both broadcast and streaming platforms to expand their reach? Balancing these priorities could be key to fu­ture growth.”

Altman Solon’s survey points out that rightshold­ers risk undermining their future value with high fees and paywalls. Younger fans might be keen on sport but are unwilling or unable to pay for the live event. Short-form highlights are their preferred en­try point. The survey also found that only two-thirds of sport fans watch live matches, due to difficulty accessing content and a lack of willingness to pay. A related survey says that 65% of global sport execu­tives are concerned over the continued relevance of live broadcasts for sport fans.

Calling it a “serious problem,” Altman Solon’s David Dellea states that “short-form content cannot possibly replace the unique commercial value of live sport. We’ve reached the tipping point where content orig­inally created to generate interest in the games has become as sought after as the games themselves. The critical question for rights holders is: how can we nav­igate challenges of discovery and access to funnel younger audiences to a live product that they want to watch?”

In its “Digital Trends 2025” report, IMG notes that fans are increasingly drawn toward community-fo­cused platforms like YouTube and Reddit while also highlighting the emergence of the “sport influencer” as a key factor in driving attention to a live event. “2024 has seen a clear advancement in direct-to-consumer strategy and a widespread industry shift towards com­munity-focused platforms,” comments Lewis Wiltshire, IMG’s SVP and managing director of digital.

According to data from Ampere Analysis, 63% of 18–24-year-olds globally watch influencer videos ev­ery day, and 89% watch YouTube on at least a monthly basis. YouTuber Jake Paul has nearly 21 million sub­scribers, which gives events featuring him a ready-made younger-profiled audience.
However, while sport dominates the big screen, our phones command our attention. IMG predicts that “2025 will see sports abandon the notion of ‘first screen’ and ‘second screen’ to put more emphasis into winning the battle for both screens—at the same time.”

OLYMPIC VIEWING GOLD

No event underlined the power of live both for TV and streaming than the 2024 Paris Olympics. “Audi­ences are following and interacting with the Olym­pic Games like never before. These were an Olympic Games of a new era,” championed IOC president Thomas Bach.

Five billion viewers, or 84% of the possible global audience, watched some of the 460,000-plus hours of coverage from Paris across broadcast and digital plat­forms, claims the IOC. In France, 95% of the potential audience watched an average of 24 hours of coverage. Engagement on social media went through the roof, with a 290% increase over the COVID-impacted 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

The IOC and rightsholder broadcasters used influ­encers to attract a younger audience via social. NBC­Universal partnered with content creators on Meta, Overtime, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube to promote the Games to their followers. The broadcaster also gave Snoop Dogg an official commentary role and saw peaks of 30.6 million viewers a day, up 82% on Tokyo. Led by Peacock, NBCUniversal streamed 23.5 billion minutes from Paris, more than 40% the amount streamed from all previous Games combined.

In Europe, Warner Bros. Discovery saw record en­gagement across all platforms, with a cumulative reach of 215 million and more than 7 billion minutes streamed—a boost of 23% from Tokyo. This helped to deliver a record number of paid sign-ups on Discov­ery+ and Max during the Olympics.

Increased U.S. ratings pushed NBC’s ad revenue past the previous record of $1.25 billion it took in during the Tokyo Olympics. The final number for Paris will be the largest ad revenue take for any U.S. TV event in history, according to an NBC representative. (Super Bowls usu­ally generate around $1 billion for the network that’s broadcasting the game.)

NBC’s Olympics president Gary Zenkel tells SportsPro that the growth had come as a “huge re­lief” after the network saw a sig­nificant slump in viewing for To­kyo and the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. It has paid $7.65 billion for successive Games in the U.S. through 2032.

Other broadcasters also posted strong ratings. BBC Sport saw its coverage streamed a record 218 million times online, more than double the 104 million from Tokyo.

The trick for both Warner Bros. Discovery and NBC­Universal will be to convert users who subscribed to view online during the summer into longer term subs, ideally until 2028 when there’s a home bonanza as the Games land in Los Angeles.

The IOC’s in-house broadcaster used AI to pump out 95,000-plus highlights in what is just the start of AI’s impact on sport production. NBCUniversal also credited its Paris success to new tools such as Pea­cock Discovery Multiview, which allowed viewers to watch multiple simultaneous events, and Your Daily Olympic Recap, which let users personalise their own highlights, compiled using generative AI with AI-
created commentary in the voice of sportcaster Al Michaels.

THE NETFLIX OF SPORT IS NETFLIX

With Netflix’s 2024 broadcast of two NFL games on Christmas Day, the dam has burst on its pretense to be just a movie and TV show platform. As Ampere Analysis puts it, “The company has desig­nated live sports a key component of its continued growth strategy.”

According to Nielsen, the two Christmas Day games each had an average of 24.2 million viewers, peaking at 27 million during Be­yoncé’s halftime performance at the Baltimore Ravens vs. Houston Texans game. Although that’s 5 mil­lion fewer than CBS and Fox drew for Christmas Day games in 2023, it’s still a record for a streaming-exclusive NFL game. But it’s good news for Netflix, which has report­edly paid $150 million for rights to Christmas Day games until 2026.

In 2023, Netflix hosted a Formula 1-golf mashup and a concocted a “Netflix Slam” tennis event held in March 2024. Then in November 2024, it presented the Paul vs. Tyson bout at Texas’ AT&T Stadium. Net­flix claimed a global viewership of 108 million people, comprising around 60 million households. In January 2025, it began airing WWE programming, the start of a 10-year, $5 billion deal. The NFL is arguably the only true sport property here (sorry, WWE fans)—the others being sport/entertainment crossovers that fit the Netflix brand.

The Paul vs. Tyson fight was beset with buffering, pixelation, and stuttering issues, which Sandvine re­ports were caused by problems within Netflix’s app, instead of ISP network performance. This suggests that Netflix was at fault for the 40% drop in QoE. Jer­emy Bowman at The Motley Fool judges it “a good problem to have as it shows that the fight [was] in such high demand that it was stressing Netflix’s technical infrastructure.”

While Netflix may not gain many new subscribers from its NFL deal (because most viewers are likely to already be Netflix subscribers), Ampere Analysis predicts that the package may help reduce subscrib­er churn rates domestically.

The bigger picture is the synergy between Netflix’s global reach and sport leagues’ international ambi­tions. While more than 80% of viewers for the Christ­mas NFL games came from the U.S., the deal made the games available to Netflix subscribers worldwide, in a synergy that fits both parties’ ambitions. The NFL has been sending teams to play regular season games in London for nearly 20 years, recently expanding to Germany, Mexico, Brazil, and Spain. European soc­cer leagues, such as the U.K’s Premier League, Spain’s LaLiga, and Italy’s Serie A, have also expressed a desire move some competitive games abroad.

“Leagues like … the English Pre­mier League in soccer have a glo­bal audience, and no platform is better equipped to connect view­ers with those games and relat­ed content than Netflix,” says The Motley Fool’s Bowman. “The NFL, NBA, and MLB are all eager to reach audiences outside of North America. That’s why they’ve start­ed hosting games in far-flung loca­tions like London and Brazil. But teaming up with Netflix seems like a better strategy as it would give millions of subscribers a chance to watch those games and introduce them to potential fans who aren’t familiar with them. No other streaming platform can offer that kind of value or worldwide exposure to sports leagues.”

In December 2024, Netflix announced that it had se­cured exclusive domestic rights to the FIFA Women’s World Cup for 2027 and 2031, marking the first time the tournament will appear on a streaming service.

Ampere Analysis cites Formula 1 as another sport that could work very well for the platform, which has primed its audience with the documentary series For­mula 1: Drive to Survive.

PIRACY REMAINS ENDEMIC

Piracy of sport streaming is rampant—so much so that ESPN reporter Adam Schefter was accused of watching an illegal streaming site when he shared a highlight on social media relating to the NFL’s Octo­ber New York Jets vs. Houston Texans game. The high­light featured a watermark of an illegal streaming site.

Meanwhile, having paid $400 million per season for rights to cover Ligue 1, the top soccer division in France, DAZN set a target of 1.5 million subscribers within 6 months only to find that in the first week of its broadcasts, around 200,000 people were illicitly streaming its coverage.
Sport streaming piracy remains endemic, accord­ing to Synamedia, which suggests the global sport in­dustry is missing out on $28 billion a year as a result. In addition, “There is more live streaming piracy than in the past because live is the most valuable content to try and monetise with a pirate business model,” Werner Strydom, head of advanced technology and innovation at Irdeto, told IBC365.

Dealing with live piracy requires responding to an illegal stream within minutes of an event having started, and this is a major area where AI can help in triggering and accelerating workflows. “If an algo­rithm detects a watermark or a fingerprint of content that’s distributed illegally, the model is also smart enough to be able to react and deal with it,” says Tim Pearson, Nagravision’s VP of global solution and part­ner marketing. “You can scan for a lot more patterns and do a lot more pattern matching with AI than you can do conventionally.”

Meanwhile, in Italy, anti-piracy platform Piracy Shield (managed by the nation’s media regulator to protect rights on behalf of Prime Video, DAZN, and Sky) mistakenly blocked access to legitimate provid­ers along with illegal ones.

Reducing the cost of subscriptions is a counter mea­sure that’s as useful as tightening security. Nearly two-thirds of French football fans believed the high cost of a subscription encouraged more illegal streaming of Ligue 1, according to an Odoxa report from August 2024. When DAZN slashed its prices, it saw subscrip­tion numbers rise.

Netflix took a different route by making the Paul vs. Tyson fight free to all of its subscribers. While this maximised reach, it likely also had a piracy-deterrence effect. According to Ampere Analysis’ Sam Nursall, “[T]hose who tend to access fights by illegal means [were] presented with a much smaller monetary incentive compared to the typical [pay-per-view] model,” noting that 70% of global boxing/MMA fans have pirated live sport.

STREAMERS’ SELECTIVE SPORT RIGHTS STRATEGIES

Whereas Netflix (with the WWE) and Apple (with MLS) acquired long-term rights to sport properties, Amazon and Disney+ are pursuing different strat­egies. April 2024 saw Amazon, Rogers Communica­tions, and the NHL secure a sublicensing deal mak­ing Prime Video the home of Monday Night Hockey games in Canada from 2024 to 2026. In the U.K., Am­azon acquired one UEFA Champions League match per week from 2024 to 2027, which is in line with its other Champions League deals in Germany and Italy.

According to Ampere Analysis’ Danni Moore, “This indicates that while customer acquisition around busy retail periods was Amazon’s initial aim in ac­quiring sport rights, it has subsequently switched its focus to retaining customers’ interest across lon­ger periods of time.” Another example of this is Am­azon’s Thursday Night Football deal with the NFL, for which Ampere Analysis estimates Amazon is paying $1.1 billion per season.

Disney+, meanwhile, acquired exclusive rights to broadcast the UEFA Europa League and Europa Con­ference League in Sweden and Denmark for the next three seasons. Ampere Analysis notes that these in­vestments can be seen in the context of streamers start­ing to experience a slowdown in subscriber growth, to­gether with market saturation in some of their bigger territories, and that introducing sport content is one way to tap a new potential audience.

Disney’s major move in 2025 will be the launch of a standalone SVOD service, informally called ESPN Flagship. The new DTC platform, with no publicly an­nounced price, could land in the fall. The company is laying the groundwork to lasso new viewers by offer­ing ESPN content as part of a larger Disney enter­tainment bundle.

Nonetheless, Ampere Analysis thinks it’s unlikely that there will be a scramble for rights. “[M]aking these investments profitable has proven challenging to date, given the limitations around monetising the rights in the same way that traditional broadcasters have been able to through higher-cost subscriptions and premium channel carriage fees,” writes Ampere Analysis’ Dan Harraghy. “With many streamers in the early stages of broadcasting sport and still developing an understanding of its strategic merits, the race for sports rights is likely to be a marathon, not a sprint.”

Meanwhile, heralded by Wall Street as positive for Big Media, negative for their rivals, and defensive versus Big Tech, the prospective August 2024 launch of a $42.99 per month super sport app was quickly mired in the courts. Due to be called Venu Sports, the blockbuster streamer from Warner Bros. Discov­ery, Fox, and Disney would combine the trio’s respec­tive sport offerings into one OTT service that would include major properties such as the NFL, MLB, the NBA, the WNBA, the NHL, MLS, and NASCAR, plus the PGA Tour and the FIFA World Cup.

Venu Sports’ prospects were diminished in July 2024 when Warner Bros. Discovery lost its bumper package of NBA games to Amazon and Comcast/Peacock (which joined with Disney to pay the league $77 billion through the 2035–2036 season). The deal collapsed entirely in January 2025 after Disney set­tled an antitrust lawsuit with Fubo by purchasing the company and merging Fubo and Hulu + Live TV. Four days later, the three companies announced that Venu Sports was ceasing operations.

In other news, Warner Bros. Discovery sued the NBA for failing to allow it to use its matching rights for TNT Sports’ licensing package before agreeing to an 11-year deal with the league that does not include rights to live games in the U.S., but does include interna­tional and digital rights for NBA content. It will be allowed to promote NBA content on TNT Sports and its sport digital brands Bleacher Report and House of Highlights.

 

Streaming Year in Review 2025: Online Video Is Now an Advertising-Led Business

Streaming Media

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Old Hollywood got Wall Street’s memo: “Do whatever it takes to do what Netflix is do­ing.” And finally, the studios have begun making money from streaming.

With the exception of NBCUniversal, the biggest leg­acy media companies all reported a profit from their direct-to-consumer (DTC) businesses in Q3 2024. They got there by variously writing down or shedding ca­ble assets, slashing jobs, hiking prices, policing pass­word-sharing, improving bundled offerings, and put­ting the full focus of their business strategy into online.

In “The Next Big Arenas of Competition” report, consultant firm McKinsey & Co., belatedly perhaps, projects that the video streaming industry will grow to $510 billion (even $1 trillion) worldwide by 2040. In addition, it forecasts that the number of global households that stream video will increase from 670 million in 2022 to 1.4 billion in 2040. This compares with predictions from Ampere Analysis that SVOD subscriptions will grow from 1.8 billion globally at end of 2024 to pass $2 billion by 2029, by which time worldwide revenue will top $190 billion.

Behind those numbers are some variable factors, such as the pace of growth in developing countries, the shift from cable fees to streaming ones, and high­er-priced subscriptions from bundled offerings.

FREE STREAMING ON THE RISE

“Ads are the new revenue multiplier,” McKinsey & Co. states in its report. Indeed, as the number and range of streaming services proliferate, a form of mar­ket saturation has begun to kick in. In its “Global En­tertainment & Media Outlook 2024–2028” report, PwC has global OTT video subscriptions rising to 2.1 billion in 2028 from 1.6 billion in 2023, but global average rev­enue per OTT video subscription hardly moving from $65.21 million in 2023 to $67.66 million in 2028.

As subscription revenue growth levels off, global AVOD revenue will continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.1%, charts PwC. By 2028, advertising will account for about 28% of global streaming revenues, an increase from 20% in 2023.

Advertising is now the biggest revenue earner in online video, according to Omdia figures. By 2029, SVOD revenues will be at $185 billion compared to premium AVOD at $141 billion, with TikTok not far behind at $100 billion. But online video advertising will be the number-one source of revenue by far, as Omdia projects it will rake in $362 billion globally.

In 2024, the media and entertainment market topped $1 trillion, driven by the huge growth in streaming video. Omdia data marks online video as the biggest chunk ($392 billion), followed by traditional TV ($327 billion), games (sizable at $220 billion), music ($44 bil­lion), and theatrical ($36 billion). By 2026, there will be more homes watching free and free ad-supported content online than via broadcast television globally.

Omdia figures show that by 2029, 44% of people will have both pay TV and SVOD, but the number of homes watching only pay TV will have declined dramatically to 30%, while those watching only SVOD will have risen above a quarter of all house­holds. “The switch to online is clear,” says Maria Rua Aguete, Omdia’s senior research director for media and entertainment. “The pay TV bundling strategies of service providers have pushed the pay TV only home into sharp decline.”

YouTube officially became the largest streaming TV platform when, in July 2024, it was the first to surpass 10% of total viewing in Nielsen’s Gauge re­port. In the U.K., more than 9 in 10 online adults use the service, according to regulator Ofcom’s “Online Nation 2024” report.

SVOD FATIGUE

And yet, there is also evidence of streaming fatigue and an industry approaching peak SVOD stacking. Deloitte forecasts that after seeing a high in 2024 with four services in the U.S. and a little over two in Eu­rope, “SVOD stacking has reached its limit and will start declining in 2025.”
Deloitte predicts a resurgence of aggregation, in which telcos, pay TV platforms, and tech platforms will consolidate multiple content sources into single offerings, similar to the traditional model of pay TV providers. This pivot may reduce costs and create a more sustainable streaming ecosystem. “This shift from a promising, user-centric model to a complex, fragmented experience has created a call for a return to aggregation, echoing the simplicity and accessibil­ity that initially drove the streaming revolution,” says Kevin Westcott, Deloitte’s global telecommunications and media and entertainment (TM&E) sector leader. “We now expect to see a new era of streaming, one that prioritises user experience and innovation. The future of AI-powered streaming lies in platforms that can anticipate individual preferences, deliver tailored
content, and blur the lines between traditional viewing and interactive experiences.”

Hub Entertainment Research senior consultant Mark Loughney predicts that at least one “second-tier streaming service—Max, Paramount+, or Pea­cock—will cease to exist as a standalone platform in 2025. Instead, it may merge with another streamer to form a new service or be acquired by a deep-pock­eted suitor and combined with other video offerings.”

From 2025 and beyond, international streamers will increasingly look to Asia-Pacific for growth. India is cited by Ampere Analysis as a target for Netflix. “India was Netflix’s second-largest subscriber growth mar­ket in 2024, and the company has barely scratched the surface there in terms of growth potential,” says Am­pere Analysis research manager Maria Dunleavey.

PwC thinks India will be the world’s fastest-growing online video market in the next 5 years and is “ripe for consolidation,” with around 101 million paid sub­scribers and 58 OTT platforms, about half of which are regional players operating in local languages. In addi­tion, Warner Bros. Discovery opened its Global Capa­bility Centre in Hyderabad, India, in September 2023.

STATE OF THE STREAMERS

So, what were the trajectories of the major stream­ing services in 2024, and where do they stand with 2025 now underway?

Warner Bros. Discovery

Warner Bros. Discovery ended Q3 2024 with 110.5 million global streaming subscribers, including for Max and Discovery+. It also had a DTC profit gain of $289 million, which in­cludes its streaming and premium pay TV services, compared with a $111 mil­lion profit in 2023. CEO Da­vid Zaslav pointed to the continuing international rollout of Max, which is now in 72 markets. The gain of 7.2 million users in Q3 2024 was the largest-ever quarterly growth in subscribers since the launch of its flagship streamer.

However, Warner Bros. Discovery took a midyear $9 billion write down on the value of its basic cable portfolio, which includes CNN and TNT, precipitat­ing a division of legacy from streaming assets that comes into force later this year.

Paramount

In July 2024, Paramount Global announced a merg­er of Paramount with Sky­dance Media. This two-step deal, in which Sony was a potential suitor, ended with Skydance Media paying $2.4 billion for Paramount parent National Amusements and merging with Par­amount to create “the new Paramount.” Skydance Me­dia CEO David Ellison plans technical improvements to Paramount+, including in the recommendation en­gine to increase time spent on the platform and to re­duce churn. A month later, Paramount Global took a $6 billion write down in value for its cable channels, including MTV, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central.

Paramount+ reached 72 million subscribers by the end of 2024, and the company’s DTC segment, which includes Pluto TV, rose $287 million year over year to hit $49 million in profit. Paramount ended the year still $211 million in the red, but that represents a marked improvement on its $1 billion in losses a year earlier.

Disney

Disney earned $321 million from its streaming busi­ness in Q4 2024. It ended the fiscal year with 174 million Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions, with 37% in the U.S. and about 30% globally on an ad-supported tier. The company predicts $1 billion in operating earnings from streaming for 2025.

Since launching Disney+ in 2019, the business has lost more than $11 billion, and the company said that its operating margin in streaming won’t reach 10% until 2026, according to Fortune. “Disney is all in on streaming, positioned for a digital future that miti­gates traditional TV woes,” says Bloomberg analyst Geetha Ranganathan.

“Disney believes it has turned a corner, laying out positive forecasts for the next two years, featuring annual, double-digit [earnings per share] growth,” according to Enders Analysis. “Streaming is now re­liably profitable, although its low and generally inert [average revenue per user] will inevitably have to be stoked by more price rises.”

Disney’s finances were assisted by writing down $584 million in its entertainment linear networks during Q4 2024. That followed a $721 million write down in entertainment and international sport lin­ear assets in Q4 2023.

In fiscal Q2 2024, Disney’s DTC business returned a $47 million operating profit. Ampere Analysis’ Guy Bisson hails this as “a huge milestone” for the com­pany and for the entire studio streaming ecosystem. “Of all the studios, Disney was the only major to go ‘all in’ on streaming, pulling back key content for its streaming platform, massively reducing licensing to third parties and closing a number of its interna­tional thematic linear channels,” he says. “As a re­sult, managing the decline of its traditional business and the transition of its revenue streams to stream­ing was make or break for the entertainment divi­sion. … [A]s with other studios (and linear channel businesses around the world), Disney’s linear busi­ness is in fairly sharp decline. … There is no going back from here.”

February 2024’s news of Disney’s $1.5 billion invest­ment in Epic Games highlighted the competition gaming poses to TV among young viewers and, ac­cording to Hub Entertainment Research, “a massive opportunity for media companies to leverage their IP in a rapidly growing space.”

Netflix

In Q3 2024, Netflix had 282.72 million accounts globally, a year-on-year growth of 14.4%. Its adver­tising-supported tier alone now reaches 70 million monthly active users, with more than half of new sign-ups opting for the plan. Revenues grew 15% year on year to $9.83 billion, while net income was $2.36 billion, with forecasts of $43–$44 billion total revenues in 2025.

Notably, the company moderated expectations for its ad tier, stating in its Q3 2024 shareholder letter that “we don’t expect ads to be a primary driver of our revenue growth in 2025. The near-term challenge (and medium-term opportunity) is that we’re scal­ing faster than our ability to monetise our growing ad inventory.”

Unsurprisingly, Netflix has the best monthly churn rate of the eight premium SVOD services in the U.S. and Canada, fluctuating between 1%–3% in the last 2 years, according to Parrot Analytics’ Streaming Met­rics. This is well below the industry average, which is about 5%.
Parrot Analytics’ Brandon Katz attributes this to first-mover advantage (in which customers have developed habitual usage patterns over the last 15 years), compelling content, and a high-quality user experience and interface. “The company invested immense resources into its technology (Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson buffering issues notwithstanding) and it shows. This is particularly true on a macro scale in which Netflix has always emphasised being platform agnostic, i.e. compatible with all devices.”

Netflix released the second season of Korean-language hit Squid Game on Dec. 26, 2024, a weekafter the official video game adaptation, Squid Game: Unleashed, rolled out. “It’ll be the largest television show globally for weeks,” predicted Gareth Sutcliffe, head of gaming for Enders Analysis. “When that launch­es, it will be absolutely massive, and they’re shipping a game simultaneously. I think that’s really aggres­sive, and I think that that’s really incredibly clever.”

Amazon Prime Video

Amazon shared in April 2024 that Prime Video has 200 million monthly users. That said, January 2024’s launch of an ad-supported tier, making all members default to ad-supported users, turned Prime Vid­eo into the industry’s larg­est ad-supported platform literally overnight.

In November 2024, Am­azon announced the clo­sure of FAST channel Free­vee in a move aimed at bol­stering Prime Video. Assuming all Freevee content is moved to Prime Video, it will now offer more than 30,000 titles. This is fewer than Tubi and Roku but far more than Netflix, which carries 9,200 films and TV series in the U.S., according to Ampere Analy­sis’ title-tracking Analytics service.

“The upsell opportunity is clear,” according to Ampere Analysis’ Orina Zhao. As of November 2024, 44% of Freevee viewers in the U.S. don’t yet subscribe to Prime Video, with further data suggesting that Amazon might have an addressable audience of up to 21.8 million domestic users who currently access only its free content. “In the context of the wider sub­scription market slowdown, this represents a signif­icant opportunity for Prime Video to target and sign up new subscribers,” says Zhao.

BIG MEDIA EXODUS FROM CABLE

Comcast cut the cord from its own cable networks in November 2024, the first major studio to sign away its linear TV assets for a future almost en­tirely based on streaming. It will spin off most of its cable television networks into a separate publicly traded company named SpinCo. Though not unex­pected, Hub Entertainment Research says that this is “a seismic shift in the foundation of the TV eco­system.” According to Parrot Analytics’ Katz, “The reality is that the rapid decline of pay-TV has become an untenable albatross on the share price of most legacy media companies.”

This move was followed in December with the pre­viously mentioned, similar Warner Bros. Discovery restructuring that’s scheduled to be completed by mid-2025. Both sets of cable divisions are profitable but in decline. Comcast’s prospects are considered to be more positive.

SpinCo includes MSNBC, CNBC, the USA Network, E!, and the Golf Channel. Over the 12-month period that ended Sept. 30, 2024, SpinCo assets generated approximately $7 billion in revenue across 70 million households, making it attractive for investment or sale. Observers believe the odds are less favourable to Warner Bros. Discovery because it needs the cash from its Glob­al Linear Networks division to pay down the heavy debt it took on when Discovery merged with WarnerMedia in 2022. At the time, that debt was worth $53 billion.

Comcast’s NBCUniversal should be better placed for growth from the legacy assets, which will concen­trate content from its film and TV studios, NBC, and Bravo onto Peacock. Nonetheless, Peacock lost $436 million in the Q3 2024.

“The gamble is that the short-term pain of losing all that remaining [linear] revenue will be off-set by longer-term confidence from Wall Street as resourc­es are redirected to growth initiatives such as broad­band, theme parks and streaming,” says Parrot An­alytics’ Katz.

In December 2024, Comcast and Warner Bros. Dis­covery entered into a mutually beneficial multiyear distribution agreement in which Warner Bros. Dis­covery landed continued carriage for its channels, in­cluding TNT and the Food Network, for an increased fee, on Comcast (Xfinity in the U.S. and Sky in the U.K.). The move lays the groundwork for the Europe­an launch of Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max.
Eyes are now on Disney. As noted by Deadline, Dis­ney CEO Bob Iger has said that its linear business “may not be core” to the company.

ADS AND EYEBALLS TO CTV

Ad dollars are moving from linear TV to ad-sup­ported streaming and CTV at pace. With all of the major streamers (except Apple) now fully invested in hybrid tiers on their DTC services and through FAST channels on CTV platforms, “the scene is set for more traditional TV spend to move over to streaming,” says Ampere Analysis’ Bisson.

By end of 2024, global CTV ad revenue was expected to surpass $30 billion, a 22% increase on 2023. North America is the biggest FAST market, with revenue for 2024 around $7.8 billion.

PwC thinks global CTV ad spend will pass $41 bil­lion in 2028 and notes that “retail media players are increasingly experimenting with ‘shoppable TV’ ad­vertising … an opportunity underlined by US retail­er Walmart’s purchase of smart TV manufacturer Vizio in February 2024. As more consumer attention migrates away from traditional TV to user-generated, short-form content, advertisers may need to follow this migration with approaches that go beyond the 30-second or 15-second spot. These may include re­lying more on influencers, offering experiential pro­motions, and tapping into new technologies that en­able creative messaging.”

Roku and Amazon are the most popular brands of streaming media players purchased for CTV de­vices in the U.S., while Samsung is the most popular brand of smart TV purchased anywhere, according to research by Parks Associates. Samsung’s FAST platform, Samsung TV Plus, has more than 88 million monthly active users.

By the end of 2025, the growing popularity of FAST and the proliferation of FAST channels will spur in­creased competition for viewers, predicts Hub Enter­tainment Research consultant David Tice. “Legacy media firms with FASTs will realise (once again) that content exclusivity is a key audience driver and will pull back key library titles for exclusive use on their owned-and-operated FASTs. However, they will contin­ue licensing less critical content to whoever can pay.”

vMVPD RISING

As traditional pay TV services gasp for breath in the U.S., the consolidation of satellite services may signal a shifting commitment to virtual multichannel video programming distribution (vMVPD).

Though the seemingly done deal hit snags and re­mains in limbo as of Nov. 22, 2024, DirecTV’s attempt­ed purchase of rival Dish Network from EchoStar is predicated in large part on merging their respec­tive vMVPDs, DirecTV Stream (which has fewer than 500,000 subscribers) and Sling TV (with 2 million sub­scribers), to better compete with the likes of You­Tube and Hulu. Meanwhile, YouTube TV ended 2024 north of 8 million subscribers, and starting in Janu­ary 2025, it jacked up prices by $10 to $82.99 a month, explaining that this was necessary to “keep up with rising content costs.”

Hulu has seen increases in subscribers year on year, with its Hulu + Live TV ser­vice settling near 4.5 million subscribers. Hulu raised the cost of Hulu + Live TV, which includes access to Disney+ and ESPN+, by $6 to $82.99 with ads (without ads is now $95.99).

“vMVPD services might be small in comparison to the size of streamers, but the current pay TV land­scape begs the question whe­ther further consolida­tion is on the horizon,” says Ampere Analysis’ Andrew Dougert. “Traditional dis­tribution methods of TV in the US are losing viability quickly, and the future is increasingly digital. The best strategy against the unrelenting streamer swell may just be to lean into the storm.”

In January 2025, Fubo joined forces with Hulu + Live TV to create a sport and entertainment-focused vMVPD with 6.2 million North American subscrib­ers. In agreeing to end its litiga­tion against the Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Fox streamer Venu Sports, Fubo also won the chance to launch a new sport and broadcast service featur­ing Disney’s top sport and broadcast networks, in­cluding ESPN+.

XR, SPATIAL, METAVERSE, VOLUMETRIC

Apple brought Apple Vision Pro to market in Febru­ary 2024, rebranding Meta’s version of the metaverse to one of spatial computing, the chief difference be­ing the emphasis Apple puts on blending the real world with virtual data. The $3,500 goggles may en­case the wearer’s vision, but a transparent view of the outside world is piped to the 4K (per eye) display in real time.

Most of the experiences for Apple Vision Pro to date have not used AR. Among the hundreds of apps is one from the NBA that enables basketball fans to stream up to five games live or on demand simul­taneously. The PGA TOUR Vision app features 3D models of golf courses and a real-time shot tracker. Again, the video is 2D.

All major entertainment apps—Prime Video, Par­amount+, Peacock, Max, and Pluto TV—have ported to the platform, with the notable exception of Net­flix. U.K. broadcaster Channel 4 debuted a version of the game show Taskmaster.

Apple TV+ has gone one step further, providing content specifically made in Apple Immersive Video. This includes the scripted short film, Submerged, from Oscar-winning filmmaker Edward Berger, and the music series Concert for One. Apple’s long-awaited entry into this space injected momentum into the XR content creation ecosystem.

Meta is developing Orion AR glasses and Hyper­scape, its format for delivering photorealistic dig­ital replicas of spaces from the physical world into Quest headsets.

Compression specialist V-Nova offers a solution for packaging and delivering immersive content to XR headsets. Its PresenZ technology makes it possible to stream at 25Mbps using MPEG-5 LCEVC. NBCUni­versal is utilising PresenZ to turn intellectual prop­erty like How to Train Your Dragon into content that offers the user six degrees of freedom in the headset. V-Nova CEO Guido Meardi told IBC365, “We have in­vented a technology that uses the same pipeline used today to produce CG and VFX content to generate and stream XR content with six degrees of freedom. We allow the user to be inside as if it’s a video game.”

U.K. startup Condense Reality has developed a capture-to-playback pipeline for streaming live vol­umetric content. The BBC is an investor and has live streamed a series of performances by artists this year into a Radio 1-branded app built by Con­dense Reality. Nick Fellingham, the company’s CEO, says, “People talk a lot about VR, but you really feel presence when you’re consuming volumetric video. Shared live experiences in social 3D spaces is the future. It is inevitable that this kind of video will be­come more and more prevalent.”

U.K. SEEKS TO CONTINUE UNIVERSAL TV ACCESS

U.K. public broadcasters spent much of the year fret­ting over their future, with short-term and long-term solutions to ease audience migration from linear to in­ternet distribution.

Freely, which launched in April 2024, is a live-stream­ing platform from Everyone TV that’s backed by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Chan­nel 5. It works on smart TVs loaded with the latest HbbTV standard. Freely is supplementary to individu­al broadcaster players like ITVX, with a focus on live linear rather than video on demand. It is intended to wean households from digital terrestrial delivery, such as the satellite service Freeview, which is also run by Everyone TV.

Longer term, there’s an active debate about the fu­ture of digital terrestrial television (DTT). In a report published in May 2024, U.K. regulator Ofcom con­cluded that this technology is no longer economical­ly viable with the overwhelming shift to broadband. One scenario is to sunset DTT after 2040, provided the around 1.5 million people who have DTT are not excluded. A report from Ernst & Young claims that a government switch to IPTV could hit the most vul­nerable households with a £218 (about $265) annual bill increase.

Meanwhile, speculation grew this year about a merger between U.K. broadcasters Channel 4 and the BBC, given the declining numbers who are watching linear and a stagnant ad market. The combination of public service broadcasting apps in Freely is a step toward that possibility.

Ros Atkins, BBC News’ analysis editor, told the Ed­inburgh TV Festival, “Perhaps we do need to ask [the] question: Is it viable to have this many public service broadcasters in the median term? The digital revolu­tion in TV and video isn’t coming. For better or worse, it’s here. There’s no going back.”