The history of streaming always repeats itself

Remember 2019. Disney pulls its catalogs from Netflix and launches Disney+. WarnerMedia is readying HBO Max. NBCUniversal announces Peacock. Paramount is building what will become Paramount+. The watchword is unanimous: the direct relationship with the consumer. D2C is no longer a strategic option, it is a dogma.

The logic seemed unassailable: why let an intermediary capture the customer relationship, the usage data and a share of the margin, when you can bring it all in-house? Every studio would be its own platform. Every catalog, its own ecosystem. Distribution, that thankless trade of pipes and negotiations, would belong to the past.

Five years later, reality has delivered its verdict. And it tells a very different story.

The D2C wall

Three forces broke the dogma. Acquisition cost, first: recruiting a subscriber directly costs between 5 and 10 times more than acquiring them through a distributor. When organic growth runs out of steam, every marginal subscriber comes at a premium, ad campaigns, aggressive promotions, free months that erode ARPU.

Churn, next: the direct subscriber is a volatile subscriber. They subscribe for one series, cancel after the season, come back six months later. The attrition rate of pure D2C platforms structurally exceeds that of subscribers acquired through operator bundles, where the friction of cancellation and integration into the bill create mechanical retention.

Wall Street, finally: in 2022, the market changed its operating system. Subscriber growth at any cost stopped being rewarded; profitability became the only criterion. Overnight, the billions invested in direct acquisition went from the status of strategic investment to that of a liability to justify.

The do-over

Look at what is actually happening in 2025. Disney+ is distributed by Canal+ in France, integrated into the offers of the incumbent premium operator. Netflix appears in the bundles of Orange, SFR, Bouygues. Apple TV+ goes through Amazon Channels. Max leans on European telcos market by market. The platforms that swore they would never again depend on a distributor are signing, one after another, distribution deals.

This movement has a name: super-aggregation. Telecom operators, Orange, Sky, TIM, Canal+ in its role as aggregator, are rebuilding premium bundles in which the global platforms become channels among many others. A single interface, a single bill, a single customer service. Sound familiar?

This is 1990s American cable, reinvented with better algorithms. HBO, Showtime and ESPN built their empires not by selling directly, but by negotiating their place, and their compensation, in the cable operators' bundles. The battle was fought over three variables: positioning within the offer, revenue per subscriber, marketing exposure. Exactly the variables being negotiated today between an SVOD platform and a European telco.

What this changes for a French publisher

If the global giants, with their unrivaled catalogs and their billions in cash, conclude that pure D2C is a dead end, what is the probability that a mid-sized French publisher will succeed where they gave up?

The answer lies in the question. For a content publisher, the path is not to build one more platform in a saturated market. It is to be present, on the best terms, everywhere the customer already pays: in telco bundles, on Amazon Channels, in FAST environments, with CTV aggregators. This is a trade, that of B2B2C distribution. It demands a network, a negotiating method, and a fine-grained understanding of what each channel can yield.

Value is shifting toward distribution. It is shifting toward those who control aggregation, and toward those who know how to negotiate their place within it.