Despite commissioning half as many fiction series as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video leads in the number of partnerships with broadcasters. It has partnered across the board, from leading European commercial broadcasters such as Channel 4, ProSiebenSat.1, Mediaset España and Sky, to public broadcasters in Spain, Italy, France and the UK. This reflects Prime Video’s unique positioning in the market: primarily a gateway to more content (aggregation) and services (e-commerce). This contrasts with Netflix’s initially more proprietary strategy. Rather than relying on national broadcasters to build awareness, Netflix prioritised exclusivity as a way to attract new audiences. As a pioneer in European streaming, it can also draw on its own accumulated knowledge of local audiences rather than relying on national players. Moreover, full creative control allows it to apply its proven production and storytelling “recipes” across markets and maximise the chances of international success. These factors may help explain why, as SVOD platforms have matured their European footprint, SVOD-TV content partnerships have become less visible. While their absolute number remained broadly stable between 2021 and 2024, their share of SVOD fiction series steadily declined. Among Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, HBO Max, Apple TV, and Paramount, the number of co-commissions simply halved in 2025. Paradoxically, this coincided with a broader contraction in platforms’ output: the number of SVOD-original European fiction series fell by 30% in 2025. Yet while the golden age of broad-based SVOD-TV partnerships may be over, targeted partnerships are likely to remain, and could even intensify where they prove strategically effective. Netflix is already shifting its policy, as is visible through the integration of TF1+. The two groups deepened their content collaboration: two fiction collaborations were released in 2025, with two more projects forthcoming, while the dual-window distribution model for L’Agence and its spin-off is becoming firmly established.
