THE STREAMING PLATFORM RATIO

Streaming platforms are spending anywhere from 9% to 30% of revenue just to run their tech stack and a new study finally puts real numbers behind the guesswork.

Don’t miss this special episode recorded on stage at Streaming Made Easy Live with Jonas Engwall (CEO of Bedrock Streaming), Bjarne Andreas Myklebust (NRK, Norway's public broadcaster), and Rowan de Pomerai (CEO of the DPP). They unpack the new Streaming Platform Ratio study benchmarking 16 European platforms against Netflix, why public broadcasters are outperforming commercial ones on tech efficiency, and the coming wave of premium vertical video.

Key Takeaways:

1. The Streaming Platform Ratio Benchmark

Bedrock and the DPP surveyed 16 mostly-European streaming platforms to measure tech spend as a percentage of streaming revenue, anonymizing all results. They used Netflix as the public baseline and its publicly disclosed tech and development spend comes out to roughly 10% of revenue, a figure that's held steady for the past five to six years.

2. Scale Is the Biggest Cost Driver

Platforms with revenue above roughly $100 million showed nearly half the proportional tech cost of smaller platforms. Public broadcasters performed slightly better than commercial players overall because larger organizations benefit from fixed costs spread across more revenue.

3. Legacy Broadcasters Are Still Paying Two Bills

NRK reports that traditional DTT distribution still consumes about 90% of its budget, while OTT already accounts for 20-25% of consumption. Public broadcasters that started streaming early (echoing BBC's iPlayer) built in competitive advantages like NRK running three CDNs with annual price competition to control distribution costs.

4. Buy, Don't Build

Panelists agreed that most platforms are shifting from CapEx to OpEx, buying software and licensing CDN capacity rather than building in-house infrastructure, since content is where broadcasters create value. The DPP noted that no broadcaster builds its own transmission towers or satellites either, so the same logic should extend to streaming infrastructure.

5. Premium Vertical Video Is the Next Wave