Much like its American cousins, the European television industry finds itself at a crossroads: excited about the possibilities that AI will bring for everything from content to discovery to ad placement, and yet troubled as it attempts to create a bridge from today’s suddenly fragmented media ecosystem, with its multiple potential pitfalls, to the bright future of of a GPTomorrow. More so than the US, Europe’s television industry—the streaming industry in particular—is run through the various telcos, who control access to the internet, which is usually sold as a combo package with cable and streaming. Meaning (for US readers) there are few pureplay “cable” companies. So lots of Verizons, not many Charters. Further complicating matters, Europe has a strong tradition of well-funded and popular public broadcasters who are among the dominant networks in the country—think the BBC in the UK. So a strong history of good and free. Right now, the telcos are trying to figure out where they fit in a world that is increasingly fragmented and where younger viewers frequently see television as an afterthought…all while looking to get ahead of the curve and embrace the advances in infrastructure and user experience that AI can bring. That was my key takeaway from “Walt Und Spiel”, otherwise known as the Munich Operator Summit 2025, a private conference hosted by Connecting The Dots’ Andy Waltenspiel, where my co-presenters (“insight artists”) included Maria Rua Aguete from Omdia, Jonathan Broughton from Plum Research and the duo of Paulina Schumann and Hans Neubert from Charles & Charlotte, a Berlin-based ad agency devoted to social media, whose very Berlin slogan is “F*ck TV. Go Social” Remember Piracy? In a breakout discussion on the biggest issues facing the television industry, piracy was immediately seized on as a major concern. This surprised me because the US industry seems to be largely unconcerned about piracy, fake ad views being a much more pressing issue. So I listened in surprise at stories of how many telco operators felt they were losing significant numbers of users to pirate sites. These sites are popular because they solve TV’s number one consumer problem—a fragmented and difficult to use interface that makes it hard to find whatever it is you set out to watch, one where users feel they need to turn to Google to actually find where they can watch the show they want to watch. The pirate sites solve this with slick, well-designed interfaces that allow users to find shows easily and preview them before they illegally view them. Hence their popularity. The sites shut down and reopen with a new name on a fairly regular basis—one person described it as a game of “whack-a-mole,” a term I would have bet money was only recognizable to Americans. The reason content is so difficult to find is because, outside of the pirate sites, each streaming service wants to control the user experience (and thus the data) on their app. Which in practical terms means they won’t allow the operators to create the single “meta app” the pirate sites have created, one that shows the user all of the programs they have access to and allows them to search through them and then click and start watching. While I get the desire to control your own data, streamers are being short-sighted here. The harder it is to find the shows they want to watch, the more consumers will turn to pirate sites, and then, eventually, to YouTube and TikTok and other sites that don’t make finding content such a headache. Meaning you’re not going to wind up with a lot of data either way, so pick the one that lets you keep your subscribers happy. Sports All Over The Place The other issue European operators face is one that will be instantly recognizable to Americans: sports content is all over the place and users feel they need to subscribe to multiple services just to follow their teams. That, and the difficulty of figuring out where the games actually are—what services they are on and when—has also fueled the uptick in piracy as users give up and turn to pirate sites where all the games live in the same place. The solution here is less obvious: sports leagues are out to make as much money as possible and striking deals with a range of different streamers is the best way to optimize profits. Short of creating a system that allows users to pay-per-game (unlikely, since the goal of obtaining the sports rights is to obtain subscribers), this seems like something that operators—and fans—will just have to learn to live with until it sorts itself out via a mega sports app or a consolidation of league rights. Paid Recommendations If users have one other major complaint about their TV experience, it's the quality of the recommendations they receive from most streaming apps—there was a strong sense that even years in, the apps were still coming up with inappropriate or scattered recommendations. One reason for this is the ubiquity of paid recommendations. This is something I’ve been going on about for a while now, how my non-industry friends are, almost to a one, blissfully unaware of the degree to which paid recommendations influence their feeds on everything from Amazon to Spotify to streaming services. [“Nice Mr. Bezos” did not put that FC Bayern mug in your feed because he knows you’re a fan, he did it because someone paid him to.] This, plus a paucity of relevant metadata, was generally held to be to blame for the fact that streaming apps compare so unfavorably with apps like TikTok, which, as someone observed, can start generating a fairly accurate feed in as little as a two or three hours. Which is yet another reason the industry is losing Gens Z and Alpha. The solution is not difficult either: better metadata, use of an interactive AI-based interface that allows for back and forth with the algorithm, and (wait for it) less reliance on paid placement in users’ feeds. What’s Next While AI and the seemingly magical tricks it can do offer great promise for operators, there are other, more intractable issues that need to be fixed first, UX being foremost among them. That will require something that is all too frequently in short supply throughout the industry: cooperation. For as TVREV’s media clients have heard me say dozens of times, their enemy is Google, Amazon, and ByteDance—not each other. Work together to solve the user experience problem (looking at you, streaming services) and you’ll find you’re driving fewer viewers to pirate sites, YouTube and TikTok. It will take some effort and some blind trust, but make the effort and you’ll find that everyone wins. Especially your subscribers and telco partners. |
