The Get-Big-or-Die Era of European TV Has Arrived

There’s a version of this story European broadcasters have been trying to sell regulators for close to two decades: let us merge, or watch us disappear. On July 6, Sky and ITV finally got the chance to test whether, this time, anyone believes them.

Comcast-owned Sky confirmed Monday it has agreed a £1.6 billion ($2.1 billion) deal to acquire ITV’s broadcasting and streaming operations, bringing together Britain’s largest pay-TV operator with its largest commercial free-to-air broadcaster. Sky CEO Dana Strong called it “a defining moment for British media.” ITV chief executive Carolyn McCall framed it as the creation of “a UK champion with the scale and resources to better compete with global streaming platforms.”

The deal excludes ITV Studios — the production arm behind Coronation Street and Love Island — which will be separated as a standalone, London-listed content business. ITV and ITV Studios will remain, for now, closely entwined. Sky has committed to at least £2.1 billion ($2.8 billion) in programming spend with ITV Studios between 2028 and 2032.

Scale or Die

But the Sky-ITV deal is not primarily about content or IP. It’s about scale. It’s the latest and most significant entry in a wave of consolidation sweeping European broadcasting. Legacy players — squeezed by Netflix and Amazon on the audience side, and YouTube, Facebook and TikTok on the advertising side — have all been coming to the same conclusion: We need to get bigger, or we’ll fade away.

“The Sky-ITV deal feels like part of an inevitable Europe-wide push for scale among traditional TV players,” PP Foresight analyst Paolo Pescatore tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Broadcasters can no longer afford to think only in national silos while Netflix, YouTube, Amazon and Disney operate with global technology, global data and global balance sheets.”

The BBC appears to agree. On July 8, just two days after the Sky-ITV deal was announced, new BBC director-general Matt Brittin said the British public broadcaster was in talks with commercial network Channel 4 to combine their streaming offerings into a single British “sovereign platform” to compete with US-backed offerings.

Regulators, in the UK and Europe, who in the past blocked efforts by national broadcasters to scale, appear to have accepted these new legacy mergers as inescapable.

Earlier this year, Germany’s RTL, the country’s leading commercial broadcaster, secured approval to acquire Comcast’s German pay-TV business, Sky Deutschland. Last year, the Berlusconi family’s MediaForEurope (MFE) group received regulatory clearance to take control of ProSiebenSat.1, Germany’s second-largest commercial broadcaster, adding to a pan-European broadcast conglomerate that already includes network assets in Spain (Telecinco, Cuatro) and Italy (Mediaset). In March, MFE also increased its stake in Impresa, owner of Portugal’s leading private free-to-air network, SIC.

The French Alternative: Don’t Fight Netflix, Join Them

Consolidation may also not be the only answer for broadcasters in the new digital age. France has become the leading test case for another strategy, in which legacy networks join with platforms instead of trying to fight them.

On June 19, Netflix and TF1 launched what they described as a first-of-its-kind distribution partnership, making TF1’s five live channels and more than 30,000 hours of on-demand programming available through Netflix’s interface in France. Public broadcaster France Télévisions signed a similar carriage deal with Amazon’s Prime Video. France Télévisions president and CEO Delphine Ernotte Cunci called the move “a historic step forward” for the group’s public service visibility. Amazon has since announced similar carriage deals with commercial broadcaster M6 in France and in Spain with national public broadcaster RTVE.

Whether broadcasters choose to merge with each other or move in with the platforms, the underlying diagnosis is the same. It appears that European regulators are increasingly deciding that, in the market for eyeballs, global streaming platforms and digital advertising giants are the primary threat to competition, not TV consolidation. Network hookups that would have been unthinkable a generation ago now look like an economic necessity.

Been There, Blocked That

In a sense, Sky and ITV are replaying an old script, just hoping for a different ending. Nearly 20 years ago, Sky’s predecessor BSkyB quietly built a 17.9 percent stake in ITV for around £940 million ($1.2 billion) — a blocking maneuver aimed at derailing a rival bid from cable operator NTL/Telewest. UK competition authorities eventually forced BSkyB to sell most of the stake down.

The last time British broadcasters tried to join forces on a major scale was back in 2007. ITV, together with the BBC and Channel 4, tried to launch Project Kangaroo, a joint video-on-demand venture designed to create a national streaming champion before the Americans arrived. It failed. The Competition Commission blocked it in 2009, concluding the broadcasters’ dominant share of UK-originated content would restrict competition in the nascent VOD market.

Three years later, Netflix landed in Britain and immediately took off. YouTube proved even more disruptive. Last year YouTube passed ITV to become the second-most-watched media service in the country, behind only the BBC.

New World, New Rules?

It’s this new market reality that makes regulatory approval for the Sky-ITV deal more likely. While analysts ​calculate a merged Sky-ITV would control around 70 percent of the UK television advertising market, the companies will argue that regulators need to take a broader view, looking at the entire business of online video and digital advertising, a market dominated by the likes of Google, Meta and Amazon.

UK media analysts Enders Analysis made a similar point in a note on the deal, arguing that “the most pressing issue in regulatory clearance will be defining the relevant ads market: a ‘broadcaster-only’ definition is an anachronism.”

McCall has made exactly that argument publicly, telling reporters that on a broader video-advertising measure, “Sky and ITV combined would be about 20 percent of advertising, it’s very low.” Depending on how you measure it, the combined market share of the two broadcasters in the UK is below that of YouTube alone.

Not that everyone buys that spiel. Rival broadcasters Channel 4 and Channel 5 — both reliant on advertising revenue and lacking Sky’s pay-TV cushion — are expected to raise competition concerns.

There are structural questions too: ITV holds a 40 percent stake in ITN, which supplies news to Channel 4 and Channel 5 as well as ITV itself, raising questions about how independent that arrangement can remain once ITV’s channels sit inside Sky. Both companies say ITV News and Sky News will continue operating as separate editorial units, and that ITV’s public service obligations will be upheld in full.

The broader argument for the Sky-ITV deal is that this is not consolidation for its own sake, but a necessary response to a market utterly transformed by platforms that barely existed the last time British broadcasters discussed hooking up.

“The deal feels less like opportunistic consolidation and more like an acknowledgement of market reality,” says Giao Pacey, a partner at London media and entertainment law firm Simkins LLP. “Traditional broadcasters are increasingly competing for audience attention and advertising revenue against global streaming platforms and digital-first content providers. Their ability to operate at scale is becoming a key determinant of their success.”

Where Brussels Leads, Will London Follow?

To understand why Sky believes this deal can succeed where earlier attempts failed, it helps to look beyond the UK. In Germany in 2011, RTL and ProSiebenSat.1 — the country’s two dominant commercial broadcasters — proposed a joint venture, informally dubbed “Germany’s Hulu,” to launch a shared online video platform. The federal cartel office blocked it, ruling that the project would strengthen the broadcasters’ already powerful position in television advertising. The companies appealed and lost, with courts finding that they controlled the overwhelming majority of German broadcast advertising.

At the time, both networks argued that the duopoly analysis was already outdated — that U.S. streamers would soon enter the local market and transform competition. They were right. Netflix and Amazon Prime Video arrived in Germany in 2014. As in the UK, the streamers, and then YouTube, emerged as the dominant force in online viewing.

Fifteen years on, regulators are reaching different conclusions. In April, the European Commission unconditionally approved RTL’s acquisition of Comcast’s Sky Deutschland business, a deal that closed June 1. The Commission found that the transaction would not significantly reduce competition, citing pressure from global streaming platforms and the changing nature of the media market. RTL chief executive Thomas Rabe called the approval “a milestone” that would “strengthen the competitiveness of European media companies” — language that echoes almost precisely what Sky and ITV are now saying about their own proposed merger.

Too Big to Fail, Or Too Late to Matter?

Scale alone might not be enough to save legacy broadcasters. A merged Sky-ITV would get “a larger share of a challenged TV market,” notes Madison and Wall principal Brian Wieser, representing “roughly £2.3 billion ($3 billion) in advertising revenue as of 2025, or around 44 percent of total television ad revenue.”

But Weiser warns that the deal “does not change the broader structural pressure facing television.” He estimates the combined U.K. advertising revenue for Sky and ITV “fell by 7 percent year-over-year in 2025, even as the overall advertising market grew by 10 percent.” While he forecasts the digital TV market to grow by 11 percent this year, the linear TV business “will remain under pressure and drop 8 percent,” says Wieser. “That divergence helps explain why further consolidation is likely.”

Twenty years ago, European broadcasters desperate to scale — to get big or die —  got turned down by regulators not yet convinced this new-fangled internet was all that. This time, even the watchdogs have realized the world has changed. The real question is not whether more mergers are coming, but whether this scaling up is too little too late to save legacy TV.