Building an AVOD offer in Europe: Insights from major actors in the AVOD landscape

On Tuesday, November 17th, Dataxis hosted the first day of his 2020 Nextv Series Europe event. Few months after the first release of our figures assessing the AVOD market in Europe, North America and Latin America, it was the occasion to gather some of the major actors of the European AVOD market to discuss the opportunities for content providers, the current situation of the AVOD landscape, and the technological challenges to overcome. The European AVOD market has faced tremendous growth in terms of revenues over the last six years. Despite a significant diversification of both the offers and the players all across Europe, the Western countries -UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain on top of them- keep concentrating the major share of revenue streams, accounting for more than 90% of the total European AVOD revenues in 2020. Over the last decade, those markets have been relying on the increasing amount of content offered by domestic broadcasters, the launch of pan-European AVOD services and, more recently, the entrance of US players, already successful in their home market, backed by the vast catalogues of content provided by their parent companies - ViacomCBS, Discovery and soon, WarnerMedia and Comcast. This nascent interest for AVOD has been attracting a growing number of actors from the European TV and streaming landscape, eager to diversify their revenue streams in a context of declining TV advertising revenues, and with a more and more competitive SVOD market. PROVIDING A SEAMLESS TV EXPERIENCE TO ATTRACT ADVERTISERS AND RETAIN USERS For Philipp Rotermund, CEO of Video Solutions AG and Founder of Watch4, there is no doubt a shift has occurred in the last four years, both from advertisers and right owners. Mainly consumed over the TV screen, the AVOD content is increasingly seen as the new free TV market, and AVOD actors have tried to mimic the TV experience for the user, while multiplying distribution partnerships with connected devices providers and smart TV manufacturers to increase their reach. According to Philipp Rotermund, the TV screen is now synonymous with greater movie consumption, higher attention from the audience and an increasing flexibility for the advertisers in terms of insertion. For Olivier Jollet, Senior Vice President for Emerging Business for ViacomCBS EMEA, AVOD is an opportunity for broadcasters and pay TV operators to win back a share of their revenues lost to  SVOD players in the last decade, filling the gap between the legacy TV inventory and the digital inventory. The vision of Pluto TV is to provide a seamless TV experience, to “retain the users in the living room” as Olivier Jollet stated during our AVOD panel. In order to do so, the AVOD platforms have heavily invested in developing their own dynamic...