How Media Companies Medal in a Different Olympics: European Video Market Share

As Team USA collects Olympic medals by the handful in Paris, the U.S. is also winning another major competition in Europe: the battle for TV and streaming viewers’ attention.

A new report from the European Audiovisual Observatory shows that the same U.S.-based companies that reign over TV and streaming stateside are also dominating across the pond. On the TV front, about one in four private European TV channels are owned by an American company, the majority of which operate on a multinational level.

And if we’re giving out medals for TV portfolios, then the U.S. sweeps, thanks to Warner Bros. Discovery (363 channels), Paramount (302) and Comcast (179), which collectively own 58% of the channels of the top 10 European TV players.

On the streaming side, 8 out of the 10 largest portfolios are from Europe-based companies, but WBD is tied for first place with Comcast, at 61 VOD services (including SVOD) each. Those two companies alone make up over a third of the total VOD services in the top 10.

Vivendi, the French mass-media company that owns the also-massive film and TV conglomerate Canal+ Group, takes the silver for VOD by a wide margin from its European counterparts.

Zooming out to what the report describes as Europe’s TV and VOD “main players” shows an even greater non-European presence. In terms of combined TV and VOD market share across the continent, major U.S. brands such as WBD, The Walt Disney Company and Netflix, along with Japan’s Rakuten and China’s Huawei, have shut out all European companies from the top 10.

With TV and VOD presence in 46 markets, along with its sizable portfolio, Warner Bros. Discovery handily reigns supreme in Europe. Many of WBD’s major TV and VOD offerings in Europe are the same as the States — Discovery+, CNN, HBO Max and the like — with the game-changer being the coveted pan-European Olympics broadcast rights, which has allowed WBD to air the Games on its own Eurosport network since 2018.

WBD is at the tail end of that original $1.4 billion deal with the International Olympic Committee, and its new agreement gives free-to-air TV rights to the European Broadcasting Union. But with full streaming and pay TV rights to the Olympics secured through 2032, WBD will still be the access point for the Games for a good number of Europeans.

That said, WBD’s gold status in Europe isn’t ironclad. The company’s increasingly ugly breakup with the NBA stateside shows the importance of sports in WBD’s arsenal and demonstrates the ripple effect a loss like this can cause.

The feud with the NBA is just the latest misfortune for WBD following mass layoffs earlier in July and price hikes for Max in June, but it’s yet to be seen if its abundant assets in Europe will help the company weather the storm or go down with it.

Still, while traditional U.S. media companies leveraged their strong TV presence to break into VOD, Netflix and Amazon (tied for third at 41 markets each) are dominating just from streaming — yet another example of streaming encroaching on TV’s one-unchallenged territory.

Netflix not only sports solid subscriber numbers in Europe, but the streaming giant has also spent big on international content in its push for more original franchises, to the point of even impacting Hollywood’s ability to rebound post-peak TV.

Another big spend for both Amazon and Netflix has been in the world of sports rights, with the former being part of the NBA’s new agreement and the latter bringing WWE and the NFL into the fold. As live sports drift away from cable TV in the U.S., it may only be a matter of time before the streamers start looking at European sports rights.

Unsurprisingly, streaming is big business in Europe. A recent Bango report found that 70% of those surveyed across Europe had an SVOD subscription, easily outpacing all other subscription types. But not only does Europe on average spend less than the U.S. on subscriptions — €696 ($752.58) to the U.S.’ €863 ($933.66) — 42% of respondents have also canceled a subscription due to price jumps.

But as a potential silver lining to the generalists including WBD, over half of those asked would be loyal to a brand with an all-in-one subscription bundle, and 38% would even be willing to pay more for a more comprehensive entertainment bundle.