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Broadcasters have been forced to adapt to both streaming content and to big streamers for well over a decade but are now entering a critical period as other challenges join to create a perfect storm. Many public broadcasters, especially in Europe, face a terminal decline and eventual extinction of license fee income, as consumer habits continue to fragment around multiple streaming, social media and other online outlets.

As this happens, OTA (Over The Air) transmission is entering its final chapter as next generation systems such as ATSC 3.0 and 5G Broadcast gain some traction. This means broadcasters must preserve their identity and purpose as they become alternative streamers themselves.

Yet there is hope not just of survival but also a bright future for broadcasters that adopt positive strategies of coexistence with major streamers, which almost invariably will be senior partners with deeper pockets and more global reach. To navigate these turbulent waters, broadcasters must make the most of the assets they do possess, which include trust and preferred status, which they can exploit through their own online portals and streaming platforms.

Broadcasters must also attain scale in some form, which could be through mergers and acquisitions, but does not have to be. It can also be through partnerships and new joint ventures, some of which are already showing tentative signs of bearing fruit.  There is scope for collaborating with the big streaming beasts themselves, some of which acknowledge that public broadcasters have a unique role in local markets which can help them reach viewers.

Working Collaboratively

Netflix in particular has been vocal about its support for national public broadcasters and its desire to cooperate with them rather than preside over their decline. Cynics might see this as a tactic to evade sanctions, which in this case involve levies on revenues to support local content development. In the UK, for example, there have been recent calls from Members of Parliament to impose a 5% levy on UK subscriber revenue for investment in a cultural fund to help finance drama with a specific interest to British audiences.

Netflix’ retort is that it is already doing this through highly acclaimed productions such as Adolescence, Baby Reindeer, and Toxic Town in the UK, with comparable series in other countries. It points to the potential for collaborations with public broadcasters, while at the same time observing that the latter welcomes the cash injection while attempting to retain full control over the production. Still, this implies there is scope for working out symbiotic relationships that benefit and play to the strengths of both parties. 

There are some clear pointers that have emerged, one being that while there is a case for preserving multiple broadcasters for programming diversity, there is a definite need for scale over the online platforms used to deliver the content. We are seeing this consensus in the UK market, where there have been calls for public broadcasters to merge.

Sustainable Streaming

Even though the BBC tends to be excluded from such calls, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 all argue they are better apart than together, so that they can continue competing for airtime by presenting alternative content, so long as they can sustain – or in some cases regain – profitability. They are more likely to do the latter by pooling their resources over distribution, rather than each investing huge sums in their own platforms.

Channel 4 was an early online pioneer. Its 4oD service launched in 2006, but with its current revenues running around £1 billion a year and high ongoing investment costs, it is unlikely to be able to sustain an independent streaming platform in the future. It should perhaps focus that revenue on original content creation.

Even ITV with its ITVX streaming platform, which was designed to compete with the big streamers, may not be sustainable. Indeed, there have been calls for all UK broadcasters to align themselves behind the BBC iPlayer as a technically competent and well proven platform, and there have been suggestions from the likes of former BBC Director General Tony Hall for iPlayer to be rebadged with a neutral brand name. Meanwhile Freely has emerged as a unified streaming platform, as opposed to catchup, for which iPlayer is predominantly used.

Freely was launched in April 2024 as a free, all-internet TV service with support from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, and also provides access to other live UK TV channels. It is pitched as an alternative to Freeview as well as pay TV services, streaming live channels online rather than OTA.

Consolidated Pushback

There has been resistance to direct consolidation among broadcasters in some other countries such as France, when in September 2022 the regulator blocked the TF1 and M6 channels from merging. Five months later, in February 2023, Dutch competition regulator the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) blocked a merger between Talpa Networks and RTL Netherlands, two of the country’s biggest broadcasters. The argument was that this would reduce competition over programming and content creation.

However, the rising threat of streaming has chipped away at resistance, more in some markets than others. A notable case was in Germany with the surprise June 2025 revelation that RTL Group would acquire Sky Germany, combining two of the biggest media brands with around 11.5 million paid subscribers between them.

While still awaiting approval by several regulators, notably Germany’s Federal Cartel Office, the fact it has been announced so confidently is testament to acknowledgement of changing commercial and competitive pressures given the rising power of the big streamers. This deal would combine RTL Deutschland and Sky Deutschland, bringing in the latter’s streaming service WOW, creating a position in combined online, free TV, and pay TV that would have been deemed too dominant only a few years ago.

It also brings together Sky’s premium sports rights, such as Bundesliga football, DFB-Pokal, Premier League, and Formula 1, with RTL’s entertainment and news brands. RTL is offering €150 million in cash plus a variable component up to €377 million depending on its share price trajectory over the next five years.

The North American Perspective

We have also been witnessing weakening resistance to M&A (Mergers and Acquisitions) in the US market, which has been unfolding for a decade but with a new twist added by the second Trump administration. The US OTA TV market is distinctive in its demarcation between national and local TV stations, connected by distribution deals.

There used to be numerous local TV station groups but general consolidation over the last 10 to 12 years has concentrated 40% of these under three broadcast conglomerates; Gray Television, Nexstar Media Group, and Sinclair Broadcast Group. Each of these owns around 100 stations and are affiliated with one or more national broadcasters such as ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC.

A further major consolidation is ongoing but far from complete at the time of wring in Jan 2026. In August 2025 Nexstar launched a $6.2 billion bid to buy Tegna, another major player with 64 local stations reaching over 100 million potential viewers. Tegna shareholders approved the bid in Nov 2025 but if it completes it will not do so until the second half of 2026. This merger would most likely have been blocked until recently by the FCC as the new entity will have more than the capped 39% of national ownership, but the companies are expecting it to go through under the Trump administration, with expectations that the rule prohibiting any single entity owning more than one of the four largest stations in any single market will be scrapped.

Meanwhile, despite a long term decline for OTA TV generally, there has been a revival of viewing on big screens in the US, a trend emulated in some other markets. This is coming on the back of smart TVs, enabling viewers to access the same range of streaming content as they can from smaller connected devices.

In the US, the continuing expansion of FAST (Free Ad Supported TV) channels can be attributed at least in part to the proliferation of smart TVs. Almost 80% of US homes now have at least one smart TV, with the average being two per household, and all the leading brands in the US now have FAST services built in.

YouTube Television

This shift back towards big screen viewing also shows up in data about the leading streaming services, and not just in the US. In the UK, TV sets were for the first time the most used device category for viewing YouTube content in 2024, comfortably overtaking smartphones. According to TV ratings company Barb Audiences (formerly Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board), 41% of YouTube viewing was on TVs, against 31% on smartphones.

This partly reflects the maturation of YouTube as a serious viewing platform, on course for dominance if current growth continues, but the same trends are also evident for other sources of streaming content. For broadcasters, one implication is that they should be wary of veering too strongly towards mobile first strategies for content development and instead adopt a hybrid approach catering for all screens big and small.

New Content Production Alliances

There is also scope for alliances over content, as well as platforms, which can allow individual broadcasters to retain their identity while expanding their reach. A group of eight broadcasters in countries of NW Europe came together in October 2023 to form the New8 collective aimed at joint development of content conducive for their markets, with plans to sell to other outlets. New8 comprises ZDF (Germany), NPO (The Netherlands), VRT (Belgium), SVT (Sweden), DR (Denmark), YLE (Finland), RÚV (Iceland), and NRK (Norway).

The group released its first drama called ‘The Queen of F**king Everything’ at the end of 2024, the first show to emerge from the New8 European broadcasting collective. Produced by Finland’s Rabbit Films, this was bought by five of the New8 members, that is ZDF, NPO, VRT, NRK and RUV. It demonstrated scope for broadcasters to collaborate successfully to monetize content production, even when this is across language boundaries.

All 6 articles in this series are now available in our free eBook ‘Content Operations In The Multi-Screen Age’ – download it HERE.