Shared streaming scale can help broadcasters match Netflix cost-to-revenue ratio
Faced with increased competition and challenging macroeconomics, broadcasters are looking for ways to reduce their cost of operations and one company ready to help is Bedrock Streaming, the media-tech joint venture between M6 and RTL Group that creates and operates streaming platforms.
This is the company whose platform stands behind the Videoland SVOD service in the Netherlands and M6+, the next-generation free broadcaster VOD service that Groupe M6 launched in May 2024.
In early 2026, RTL+ in Germany will migrate to the Bedrock Streaming platform. That is another step on the road to creating a shared streaming backoffice infrastructure that could level the cost-of-ownership playing field against global SVODs.
For several years, Jonas Engwall, CEO at Bedrock Streaming (pictured), has been focused on shared infrastructure scale as the primary way to lower the cost of streaming for broadcasters.
“It is not just the small broadcasters in Europe that have a streaming scale problem. This applies to the large broadcasters too,” he explains. “Our fundamental and founding belief is the need for scale.”
Engwall believes global streaming services like Netflix and Disney+, and even audio streaming platforms like Spotify, have set consumer expectations for the kind of user experience needed in 2025. He is convinced that no media owners in Europe are big enough to compete with these platforms using their own dedicated platform.
Bedrock Streaming argues that its multi-broadcaster scale, with local customization, is the answer.
The key metric that broadcasters must focus on, according to Engwall, is total streaming platform costs in relation to streaming revenues.
Netflix is gold standard
“Netflix streaming costs are 8% of their revenues and that is the gold standard for streaming. Most companies are in the 14-20% range.
“We can now get some of our customers to 10%. That would not have been possible three years ago but is the result of increased scale. I think we can go below 10%, but it will take some time, through a combination of even more scale and some product optimisation.”
Last year, Bedrock Streaming announced a non-exclusive go-to-market partnership with Eluvio, the company that is trying to revolutionise video delivery with its Eluvio Content Fabric.
Eluvio Content Fabric is a content distribution and storage protocol that replaces file-based workflows and legacy media clouds and CDNs with an alternative media delivery solution for streaming.
It enables unlimited re-use of the same content without making file copies. The protocol runs in a decentralised manner over TCP/IP on an open global network of nodes, which is how it avoids the use of third-party media clouds or CDNs. Content owners do not have to change what they ingest into the fabric, while the output from the fabric is standard adaptive bitrate video, meaning no changes are required on receive devices.
Michelle Munson, CEO and founder at Eluvio, has stated that the Eluvio Content Fabric could reduce media pipeline costs for a large broadcast streaming service to one-sixth of what it currently pays for its cloud and CDN services.
That applies to end-to-end, direct-to-consumer streaming distribution.
Speaking when that partnership was announced, she said the fabric creates an inflection point for the economics of direct-to-consumer streaming, and that it is a no-brainer to use the technology.
Engwall confirmed last month that he believes the Eluvio Content Fabric could be a game-changer. “They are fundamentally rethinking how you move content around, in a very refreshing way,” he said. “We see great potential there.”
BVOD pilots
Eluvio has run pilots for BVOD services over the Eluvio Content Fabric and confirmed last month that the company is “absolutely interested” in working with broadcasters.
A flurry of Eluvio customer announcements over the last year (none of them involving Bedrock Streaming) could help pave the way towards a smaller broadcaster taking the plunge with this new distribution paradigm. The new customers are sports organisations who are using the content fabric to distribute their direct-to-consumer streaming services.
The first of these – and the first company anywhere to use the Eluvio Content Fabric for direct-to-consumer streaming, was the European Professional Club Rugby (EPCR), which is using the technology to show live matches and monetise archives.
United Rugby Championship (URC), Cricket Australia (CA) and WPALive.TV by Foresense (which is the exclusive broadcast distributor for The World Pool Association) were all announced this autumn. Together, these three services carry over 500 live events a year.
Eluvio has open-sourced the Content Fabric to remove any risk that content owners rely on a single company for their streaming distribution model. If they wanted, a content owner could join their own node to the fabric, with that node taking on all the functions of the fabric.
Bedrock Streaming works with standard cloud and CDN distribution solutions of course, but this partnership is an example of how vendors are thinking big in order to get the costs of streaming down in the direct-to-consumer market, including for BVOD.