EU's biggest TV broadcasters are combining resources to launch streaming video services in countries like UK, France, and Germany to compete against Netflix
Scott Roxborough / Hollywood Reporter : Tweets: @fdestin Tweets: Fred Destin / @fdestin : F-I-N-A-L-L-Y!!! Some industries just want to be disrupted. Orange could have done this years ago with Dailymotion http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2018 report is the moment the idea discussed back when local rivals first floated banding together to outbid Netflix on content rights turned into an actual pan-European project: the biggest broadcasters in the UK, France and Germany pooling resources for joint streaming services. The tweet in the piece captures the industry's own impatience — Fred Destin notes Orange could have built this years earlier with [[a:entity-dailymotion-placeholder|Dailymotion]].
The plan matured into France's Salto: producers granted it extensive exclusive rights while blocking sales of French shows to Netflix and others, and French regulators approved the launch for early 2020. The arc closes differently than the broadcasters hoped — by 2025 Netflix had signed a landmark deal putting TF1's five linear channels on its platform, turning a wall into a distribution channel.
First-order effects
- Netflix immediately faces nationally coordinated competitors in its three biggest European markets, with French producers contractually obliged to offer Salto exclusive rights before any sale abroad.
- The UK, French and German broadcasters trade standalone streaming ambitions for shared infrastructure and content costs, accepting co-ownership with domestic rivals to reach scale.
Second-order effects
- Content producers gain a second bidder: with a funded national platform in the market, rights negotiations shift from take-it-or-leave-it Netflix terms to auctions between the coalition and the global player.
- Netflix's response path is visible in the later TF1 deal — rather than breaking exclusivity head-on, it licenses the broadcasters' own linear channels, converting the coalition's content into Netflix inventory.
Third-order effects
- European broadcast coalitions built on exclusivity tend to end in negotiated coexistence rather than displacement, with regulation — the proposed 20% EU-content catalog rule and cross-EU portability for subscription services — shaping the terms of that coexistence.
- If the pattern holds, national 'sovereign' streaming platforms become feeder systems and licensing partners to global platforms, with public policy, not exclusivity contracts, as the main lever over catalog availability.
The trend: European broadcasters' defensive national streaming coalitions are giving way to regulated coexistence with global platforms, as exclusivity walls erode into licensing deals.