Connected TV World Summit wrap-up: The new lives of global streamers, broadcasters and platforms
Analysis
Connected TV World Summit 2025 shone a light on how three key segments of the TV industry are adapting to “life after” and quickly building a new story for themselves.
The audience heard how global streaming services are adapting to life since investors rescinded their “grow at any cost” free pass and started to demand profits. Meanwhile, pay-TV operators are adapting to life after losing their monopoly on the best subscription content, in a market with increased competition for the role of aggregator (from smart TV operating system providers).
And the conference also found out how broadcasters are adapting to life since broadcast spectrum became legacy technology and their future was tied to digital market share.
SVODs adapt business model
It became clear that, having turned their focus towards profit, global streamers have proved themselves willing to adapt business models quickly.
Most of the largest global subscription VOD (SVOD) services have now introduced an advertising tier to lower entry costs and so grow their subscriber base in a market where subscription stacking has plateaued. More streamers are looking to live sport as a way to attract and retain subscribers. The trend is towards studios selling more of their content to third parties again, with less held back for exclusive use by their own direct-to-consumer (D2C) services.
Many subscription streamers are also willing to make their service available in hard bundles, complete with discounts, in a bid to increase uptake and reduce churn. The different models were outlined and dissected over two days, with bundling one of the dominant themes.
A more accurate description would be “the return of bundling” because, as independent analyst Ben Keen made clear in his presentation, the TV industry today is reimagining business models that worked in the past, from advertising to sport, as a way to attract and then retain subscribers.
Keen was one of several speakers to highlight the willingness among streaming apps “to go back to the bundle”, noting how bundles are proven to drive new sign-ups and reduce churn.
Strategies in super-aggregation
The growing interest in bundling is good news for platform operators and it was clear at Connected TV World Summit that, even in a market rich in D2C offers, nobody can turn their back on aggregation.
In fact, pay-TV platforms are reinventing themselves using classic skills in bundling, discounting and subscription management across streaming services and beyond, hoping they will become indispensable to TV-loving households like they were when offering linear channel bundles that contained studio content — from the likes of Disney — that was exclusive to pay-TV.
Several pay-TV operators expressed confidence that they are in the strongest position (of any TV industry stakeholders) to help consumers turn streaming subscriptions on and off on a monthly basis. As historical bundlers used to offering consumers discounts for “bulk buying” and for loyalty, they are ready to use their solid revenue base — often backed by broadband and mobile subscriptions — to offer the most attractive multi-streamer packages.
Next steps in super-aggregation: Bundling, discounting and streamer subs management
Witness KPN in the Netherlands and its new loyalty programme that allows customers taking both broadband and mobile to choose a free streaming service each month. The choice of streamers expands depending on how many loyalty points the user has, but starts with Netflix’s basic plan and ESPN (which has the rights to Eredivisie football).
The pan-European pay-TV operator Liberty Global asserted that part of its future value-add is using its understanding of what customers like to watch, and its understanding of what content is available across streaming services, to recommend which streamers a household should bundle and when. Virgin Media O2, for example, lets customers add and remove pay-TV packages and streaming subscriptions every month.
There is a belief that a bundling/discounting heritage could serve operators well in the years ahead. Brigita Brjuhhanov, TV product owner at Elisa, made the point that consumers cannot pick up the phone and ask Netflix for money off — but they have a historical expectation that pay-TV providers can offer discounts if they take more products.
Advanced thinking at broadcasters
Connected TV World Summit also demonstrated the advanced thinking at broadcasters as they grow their broadcaster VOD (BVOD) services.
The migration from catch-up hubs to comprehensive entertainment destinations is well-known. The conference provided next-level thinking, including the use of shorts at Shahid (the MBC-owned streaming leader covering the MENA region) to increase engagement with younger viewers — all part of a wider success story that has left this BVOD outpacing Netflix subscriber growth in the region.
Shorts have provided an “in” for Shahid with advertisers that already buy against short-form content on other platforms and which are looking for brand-safe and local content to grow reach in younger demos.
We heard about the decision at ITV (one of Europe’s largest commercial broadcasters) to entrust its crown jewels long-form content to YouTube, with the expectation that it will be watched on the video-sharing platform and not on its own ITVX. Channel 4 has already adopted this strategy to drive incremental viewing.
Traditionally, broadcasters have looked to draw digital viewers into their player services, so this is bold thinking, underpinned by landmark commercial deals that allow ITV and Channel 4 to sell their own advertising against their YouTube content.
ITV and C4 happy to let viewers watch long-form content on YouTube
Scottish commercial broadcaster STV offered another globally significant innovation, having become an aggregator, hard bundler and discounter of third-party streaming itself.
In the ultimate expression of how broadcasters can empower their digital presence, STV has on-boarded sports streamer Premier Sports to its STV Player, offering a bundle of STV Player+ (the ad-free premium version of the BVOD) and Premier Sports with a combined discount amounting to approximately 20%.
Premier Sports owns attractive rights, including the Scottish Premiership and Scottish Cup (both football), and the rationale is that sport plus entertainment is a winning ticket that will keep viewers on the digital platform for longer. STV is responsible for sign-up, so is the consumer touchpoint for this bundle. STV has taken a leaf out of the pay-TV playbook and illustrated the potential for broadcasters to become mini-aggregators in the digital space.
TV innovations
There was plenty of other innovation on display at the event.
Virgin Media O2 explained how it has been using free ad-supported TV as a way to “repair” the programme guide viewing experience, which was diminished after the withdrawal of broadcast linear channels from the likes of Disney and Fox (as studios looked to move consumers into D2C).
Vodafone TV outlined the value of integrating YouTube on its pay-TV platform — something that is helping to engage younger viewers for longer, thanks to its constant diet of new content from popular creators.
Many of the pay-TV speakers agreed on the value of expanding the aggregation offer beyond TV — with gaming, fitness, esport, music/audio and book/magazine apps listed as suitable additions. Returning to the theme of next-gen bundling, David Bouchier, chief TV and entertainment officer at Virgin Media O2, said: “There are many more opportunities, not necessarily as a technically integrated proposition, where we have the subscription relationship and can use our ability to offer flexible and value-for-money options.”
One example is Perplexity’s Perplexity Pro AI-powered search engine service, worth £150 a year but offered free to O2 and Virgin Media broadband customers. It became clear at this event that pay-TV operators view subscriptions aggregation and management as a potential streaming-era superpower.
There was strong evidence that pay-TV providers can also use platform and device innovation to expand their addressable market and pursue new business models.
The audience heard how Comcast Entertainment OS (offering a next-gen user experience across set-top boxes and TV sets) has helped Sky in the UK create a streaming-first pay-TV offer suitable for the electronic programme guide and how it enabled Comcast in the US to target broadband-only customers with a streaming and app centric TV service (using the Xumo Stream Box).
Meanwhile, Foxtel in Australia has used Entertainment OS as the basis for Hubbl, a standalone entertainment brand with streaming set-top box and smart TV options that aggregates the streaming universe and helps Foxtel drive uptake for its own SVOD services (notably Kayo and Binge).
The right platform OS wins new customers for pay-TV operators, says Sky
Representing broadcasters with powerhouse digital services, Natasha Matos Hemingway, CEO of Shahid, hailed the power of locally made and authentic stories, and the importance of marketing teams based in the region who know the culture and dialects and help feed what is a massive social following for her SVOD/AVOD hybrid service.
Kerensa Samanidis, general manager at BBC iPlayer, echoed the power of “local” and the power of original British content as the basis for growing market share.
Everyone TV, the platform company owned by four UK public-service broadcasters, explained how Freely has dramatically raised the bar for product and user experience agility in the free-to-air and horizontal platform market, thanks to the use of HbbTV OpApp, which allows regular product improvements in the form of application updates that do not touch the smart TV operating systems of their device partners. The HbbTV specs have been consistently implemented by consumer electronics makers and that is helping Freely add more device partners quickly.
Next era of TV
Connected TV World Summit gathers many of the best analysts in the world to articulate current challenges and solutions before platforms, broadcasters and non-broadcaster streamers detail their real-world innovation.
Jack Davison, executive vice-president at content consultancy 3Vision, showed that Q3 2024 was a landmark quarter for global streaming, when Paramount+, Disney+ (with Disney+ Hotstar) and Warner Bros Discovery all produced an operating profit in D2C, albeit modest or marginal.
One of the ways US studios are trying to grow profit is by licensing more content to third parties. Davison showed that the proportion of first-window premieres being licensed from a US studio to its own streaming service (in nine markets) declined from 64% in 2023 to 60% in 2024. That figure was only 17% in 2018. When content is sold to third parties for its premiere, pay-TV, local SVODs and free TV were the main beneficiaries.
Turning to bundling, Davison asserted: “One of the reasons ad tiers are significant for streamers is that they enable them to operate with a lower wholesale cost, which has implications for bundling.”
Ampere Analysis provided an in-depth study showing that streaming services could drive lifetime customer value by allowing themselves to be discounted within hard bundles, when working with the right kind of partners (which subscribers will also be interested in but are probably not already using). The economics work because initially lower revenue per customer is offset by reduced churn.
Reduced churn can counterbalance discounting and make SVOD bundling work
Connected TV World Summit featured agenda streams covering the future of networks, the role of smart TV operating system providers as aggregators, the emerging market opportunity presented by the connected car and advanced advertising. The Media Leader will follow up on the best of that in the coming weeks. From sessions focused on the future of business and product at global streamers, broadcaster streamers and pay-TV aggregators, the outstanding takeaway was accelerated innovation, especially in business models and partnership.
It is also evident that none of these groups is going to dominate the others for the foreseeable future and none faces extinction. The world has lived through the era of broadcaster domination (before the arrival of pay-TV) and platform supremacy (when broadcasters and other channel owners could not exist without a free-to-air or pay-TV multichannel platform partner). Both are now history.
There had been predictions that broadcasters will die at the hands of YouTube and global streamers and fears that pay-TV has no purpose in a world of D2C streaming.
All the evidence from Connected TV World Summit was that strong broadcasters have the means to thrive in digital and platform operators still have much value-add to offer consumers. An ultimately consolidated global streaming market will be profitable. Broadcasters need platforms. Global streamers need platforms. Platforms need both.
These three powerful forces have all opened a new chapter and will co-exist — because consumers still want them all.
Finding the formula for profit in global subscription streaming