Industry insights: Netflix partners with TF1 to offer live and on-demand French TV channels, RTL acquires Sky Deutschland, and Amazon ups the ad loads in the US.
Netflix will start showing traditional broadcast channels next summer
[Netflix, The Hollywood Reporter]
Netflix’s recent announcement during the annual Cannes Lions advertising festival that its viewers in France would be able to watch TF1 channels through the service starting Summer 2026 has sent shockwaves through the industry. Aggregation has long been considered one of the meta trends that will shape the future of streaming, but no one expected Netflix to be one of the major first movers.
The details of the carriage deal are largely under wraps, but essentially it’s a distribution partnership that will see TF1 Group’s popular services - both live channels and over 30,000 hours of on-demand content - available to Netflix members in France as part of their existing subscription without ever having to leave the service. The TF1 content will also be integrated into the steaming service to the extent that, according to the press release, “Audiences will benefit from Netflix’s premium discovery experience.”
Rodolphe Belmer, CEO of TF1 Group commented: “As viewing habits shift toward on-demand consumption and audience fragmentation increases, this unprecedented alliance will enable our premium content to reach unparalleled audiences and unlock new reach for advertisers within an ecosystem that perfectly complements our TF1+ platform."
Netflix and TF1 already have quite close links. Belmer sat on the Netflix board until he was named TF1 boss and the two companies have worked on several high-profile co-productions together. And there is a good chance that the deal will help fulfil Netflix’s legal obligations to invest 20 to 25% of revenue generated in France into French content that were imposed on all streamers by the French government in 2021.
While details such as how advertising will be handled are yet to be made public, it seems very much a win-win. Netflix gets a huge volume of live and on-demand content already watched by 58 million viewers a month added to its service, while TF1 gets its content placed in front of an estimated 10 million subscribers and integration into Netflix’s content discovery carousels and search.
“By teaming up with France’s leading broadcaster, we will provide French consumers with even more reasons to come to Netflix every day and to stay with us for all their entertainment,” said Greg Peters, co-CEO of the company.
But perhaps the key phrase in the brief Netflix press release on the deal is when Peters refers to it as a “first-of-its-kind partnership.”
Netflix has a reputation for trying new things, with Enders Analysis’ François Godard referring to it as “a trial-and-error company.” The implication is very much that if this goes well in France, then we might see other broadcasters in other countries also looking to come on board and Netflix being equally willing to accommodate them.
Why this matters: This is a first of its kind deal that Netflix has been involved in worldwide, and many people will be watching it to see how successful it is, how it impacts ad revenue for both parties, and how well it deals with the technical challenges of the content integration.
RTL to acquire Sky Deutschland
Meanwhile, from the broadcaster direction, Europe’s biggest television company, the RTL Group, has bought Sky Deutschland from Comcast. The price was a comparatively low $175 million (though there is an additional payment based on share price performance that could raise this to a maximum $442 million).
Sky Deutschland and its 5 million + subscribers in Europe’s German-speaking DACH region has effectively been for sale since 2022. If the deal is approved by the regulators, when added to RTL+’s 6 million established customers it immediately creates Germany's third largest streamer, positioning it between Amazon Prime and Disney+. It also gives RTL access to the significant amount of Bundesliga games that Sky won in last year’s broadcasting rights tender.
Rather than aggregating content, the prime motivation here seems to be consolidating the advertising business in the face of increasing competition from the native streamers whose ad-supported platforms have been steadily growing in the European market.
The underlying theme is ‘get big or get out’, and that is very much what RTL has been trying to do across its business. The Sky Deutschland deal comes after recent efforts by RTL to merge business units with other broadcasters in both France and the Netherlands fell through.
This may not be the end of the Merger & Acquisition activity amongst European broadcasters either. Despite Comcast making continual investment in Sky Italia, persistent rumour suggests it may divest itself of the company if the right offer comes along. And the UK’s main commercial broadcaster ITV is also seen as a target. The RTL Group is again in the mix here, though ITV’s $4 billion annual revenue makes it another order of magnitude as a target entirely.
Why this matters: Scale is increasingly important to broadcasters, especially when it comes to making money from advertising, and the deals on the table may start getting larger as smaller successful companies get swallowed up.
Prime Video increases ad load in the USA
While streaming services still have much lower ad loads than network television in the US, the number of ads being served per hour across streaming services is increasing in some instances. Ampere Analysis reports that in the relatively short period between April and June 2025, the volume of ads on Prime Video in the US increased by just over 50%.
That means that the streaming service is now showing 4 to 6 minutes of commercials for every hour of content viewed. Around 130 million subscribers in the US currently watch Prime Video content with ads. This number reflects the way in which Amazon implemented its ad-tier last year, shifting its entire user base to the ad-based service and then asking for an additional fee to go ad-free. All this translates into a huge increase in the amount of ads being served.
“Amazon’s ad load is now close to that of Warner Bros Discovery’s HBO Max. By contrast, Netflix has maintained a stable ad load and currently sits at around one-third that of Amazon,” commented Guy Bisson, analyst at Ampere.
Why this matters: Low ad loads are widely considered to be one of the key reasons for the success of ad-based streaming services, and it will be interesting to see how viewers react to such a sudden and significant leap in ad content.
