Report: US players prominent in European VoD sector
January 6, 2023
Non-European players have taken a strong foothold in the European AV market. One in four of the top 50 TV groups and more than a third of the top 50 groups for on-demand services has a non-European parent company, according to a report from the European Audiovisual Observatory.
US players represent the largest group of non-European parent companies of AV services in Europe. Around one in five (19 per cent) of all private TV channels (excluding local TV) are US-owned and over one third of all SVoD (38 per cent) and TVoD (34 per cent) services in Europe belong to a US company.
US players are all fully operating on a pan-European level, serving numerous European markets. The Walt Disney Company, for example, has a virtual European omnipresence operating in 45 European TV markets.
With regards to their establishment hubs, pan-European players employ different strategies. Netflix, for example, uses a centralised strategy with a single country of establishment from where it is targeting the European markets. A core hubs strategy is used by the BBC, where typically a small number of countries serve as a basis to target various national markets. AT&T, by contrast, applies a decentralised strategy where a larger number of establishment hubs serve the European markets.