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Viewed through this lens, RTL’s tie-up with Sky Deutschland looks more consequential. As François Godard, Media and Telecoms Analyst at Enders Analysis, has previouslt told VideoWeek, the deal roughly doubles RTL’s size in Germany, representing a massive shift in the German TV market.
In early March, OpenAI pulled back from Instant Checkout, a plan in which consumers would shop for goods directly inside ChatGPT. This was after a five-month trial in which the company appears to have found that building a successful commerce platform is harder than it looks. “Like many of OpenAI’s initial launches, it felt more like a public demo of what the tech could do than a very sustained effort to set up a commerce business,” said Niamh Burns, an analyst at Enders.
Then, last week, it ditched Sora, its viedo-generation platform, and with it a $1bn deal in which Disney was going to license OpenAI-generated content to “unlock new possibilities in imaginative storytelling”. This was strategic for OpenAI, because Sora was a money pit. It was awkward for Disney, which reportedly learned that the platform would be axed an hour before the public did.
The middle tier is gone. Streaming pricing is bifurcating toward premium ad-free and ad-scaled tiers. Netflix played the long game—letting Disney+ and HBO Max normalise higher prices and absorb the churn risk, then hiking Standard to $19.99 and Premium to $26.99 to reclaim the premium position once the ceiling had been raised.
The industry has crossed the profitability threshold, but the gap with Netflix widens rather than closes. Linear is still funding the transition—the spin-offs and segment collapses are a visibility play as much as a structural one.
Ad tiers are scaling fast but monetising slowly. Sports is the acquisition flywheel everyone is betting on, yet the ROI remains unproven—Peacock's losses widened the moment NBA rights hit. Reach is rising; depth of engagement is diverging.
François Godard of Enders Analysis wonders how YouTube’s role might expand at future editions of the World Cup.
“I don’t see any major conflict of interest between broadcasters carrying full games and social media carrying clips. However, clearly, this is a first step for YouTube. I could very easily imagine them bidding for live rights to full games . . . It is a worrying warning sign for traditional TV broadcasters,” he said.
Matt Brittin has no direct experience in news and television. But he has joined the board of the British daily newspaper "The Guardian." "He created the Google Showcase service, which has provided significant financial support to many media outlets. He understands the importance of media pluralism," says Claire Enders of the Enders research firm. "He is a leader who can contribute a great deal to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) [the association of European public broadcasters, including France Télévisions and Radio France]," she adds.
YouTube is after “one-off events that shows that ‘youtube’ is TV, that change expectation from viewers and advertisers,” says media analyst Francois Godard of Enders Analysis.
Enders Analysis, the research firm, described the collapse of the Sora agreement as “a brutal lesson in the perils of licensing in an emerging technology sector with clear ‘deal fever’.”
OpenAI has switched off its video AI Sora, under pressure to streamline and monetise as Anthropic captures enterprise momentum.
Google remains as the dominant US video AI player, with more established media industry relationships. Video AI will coalesce around more targeted, industry-ready tech.
The media industry might not mourn Sora, but the unwinding of the Disney/OpenAI deal means it's back to the drawing board on establishing a model for extracting revenue when media IP is used in video AI.
