How European streamers are finding success amid Netflix’s dominance

In the clash of the streaming titans, Netflix notched a public relations win when the Financial Times declared it the victor. The newspaper cites ever-ballooning user numbers, eye-popping share price growth and a constantly increasing share of viewing hours among households.

That sentiment may feel especially true in Europe, where traditional broadcasters are largely struggling to compete with global streaming giants. However, away from the limelight and the headlines, some local players have managed to adapt and thrive, attracting new advertising spend. That raises an important question: Should advertisers look beyond Netflix and Amazon Prime Video to invest in smaller, regional streamers?

In the U.K., commercial broadcaster ITV has found success with ITVX, its streaming video platform. The company’s latest earnings show a 15% year-on-year increase in digital advertising revenue, with ITVX seeing monthly active users grow 14% during the same time period. CEO Dame Carolyn McCall credited programmatic media buying as a key driver of this growth.

RTL is growing within Germany and beyond, recently reporting that streaming revenues were up 42.4% in 2024 compared to the previous year, in part thanks to “rapidly growing advertising revenue” on its streaming platforms RTL+ in Germany and M6+ in France.

The two stand out as rare successes in a world that tends to be dominated by big, American and well-funded streaming giants like Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+. How have the relative minnows, both from a more traditional broadcast background, managed to gain market share?

Local content, sports content and ad tech capabilities are a big part of their success, says Rob Moyser, senior analyst for TV and online video at Omdia, a research firm. Moyser points to ITVX’s diverse programming, which covers everything from FA Cup football in the U.K. to homegrown crime dramas such as Vera.

“It’s a similar thing with RTL,” Moyser adds. “They have strong local content, as well as sports being a big part of that success story.”

However, the two differ in key ways: RTL+ is marketed toward consumers willing to pay more for fewer ads. This kind of subscription is often bundled with telco services in Germany, including through Magenta. By contrast, ITVX is a bigger, broader ad-supported service that reaches a wider audience.

Both platforms succeed where some do not — offering premium homegrown content that makes a subscription worthwhile. “Some services like Viaplay expanded too aggressively,” Moyser says. “In the Nordics, they have strong local content, but they needed to be broader, while in other markets, they didn’t have enough local content to justify their pricing.”

Threading the needle in the way the German and U.K. streamers have done is difficult, admits Moyser. He points to Spain’s Movistar Plus+, Telefónica’s digital subscription streaming platform, as one streamer that is slowly getting the mix right by adding sports content in 2022.

Content is not the only factor in play, though, as evidenced by Netflix’s recent decision to turn on programmatic ad buying in EMEA. Indeed, ITVX’s success is underpinned by its advanced ad tech capabilities, something that the likes of the U.K.’s Channel 4 and Channel 5 and France’s TF1 have also been investing in.

Deutsche Bank forecasts that by 2026, digital advertising will account for more than a third of total advertising revenue for ITV. “Leveraging its digital platform, ITV has been able to attract a long tail of new advertisers that typically did not advertise on ITV’s linear TV network,” says Nizla Naizer, research analyst at Deutsche Bank, adding that the same is true of RTL+.

Another question is whether those advertisers would ever consider swapping out their buys on Netflix and Prime Video for local streaming services. There certainly are benefits for advertisers looking to target specific audiences. “When you sign up to ITVX or RTL+, you have to provide your postcode — something you don’t do with Netflix and Amazon — so because they have that level of information, they can target ads more effectively based on geography,” Moyser says.

It’s unlikely that ITV, which Deutsche Bank estimates has managed to expand its total addressable advertising market from £800 million to £6 billion by introducing ITVX, will ever supplant Netflix in the minds of ad buyers. That doesn’t mean it’s a failure — far from it, says Moyser. “The key thing is not that they are overtaking Netflix and Amazon, but they complement them by offering more specific local content and better geotargeting for advertisers,” he says.