Report Highlights

Understanding the video streaming market: A Buyer's Overview

The video streaming market delivers internet-based video content across three primary commercial models: subscription video-on-demand (SVOD), advertising-based video-on-demand (AVOD), and transactional video-on-demand (TVOD). Primary buyers span consumer-facing media and entertainment companies, enterprise organisations deploying internal video communications infrastructure, broadcasters transitioning from linear to digital delivery, and advertising agencies allocating connected TV budgets. The technology stack encompasses content delivery networks, encoding and transcoding infrastructure, digital rights management systems, and analytics platforms, meaning procurement in this market is rarely a single-vendor engagement and almost always requires integration across multiple specialist providers.

From a procurement structure, the market is moderately concentrated at the platform layer — Netflix, Amazon, and Google collectively control the dominant share of consumer viewing hours — but highly fragmented at the infrastructure and tooling layer, where hundreds of vendors compete on CDN performance, video player technology, monetisation middleware, and streaming analytics. Contract lengths for infrastructure vendors typically run 12 to 36 months with volume-based pricing tiers. Platform licensing deals, particularly in the content aggregation and white-label streaming space, are commonly structured as revenue-share or per-subscriber arrangements rather than flat fees, which creates meaningful total-cost-of-ownership complexity during vendor evaluation.

Factors driving video streaming procurement

Three operational triggers are actively accelerating procurement spending in 2025. First, the broadcaster transition deadline is real: major European public broadcasters including the BBC and ARD have announced concrete timelines for reducing linear broadcast infrastructure investment, forcing immediate procurement of streaming delivery, metadata management, and audience analytics systems to replace legacy playout workflows. These are not exploratory budgets — they are capital reallocation decisions with defined go-live dates that compress evaluation and negotiation timelines significantly for suppliers and buyers alike.

Second, connected TV advertising has forced enterprise advertising buyers to re-platform their buying infrastructure. The Interactive Advertising Bureau's CTV ad spend tracking showed double-digit annual increases through 2023 and 2024, driving demand for server-side ad insertion platforms, identity resolution tools, and programmatic pipes that support streaming inventory. Third, the enterprise video communications segment — internal learning, town halls, and hybrid event delivery — is experiencing mandatory platform upgrades driven by Microsoft's deprecation of legacy Skype for Business infrastructure and the resulting migration wave toward enterprise video streaming platforms like Kaltura, Brightcove, and Panopto.

Challenges buyers face in the video streaming market

Vendor lock-in at the encoding and DRM layer is the most structurally underestimated risk in this market. Buyers who select a single-vendor solution combining transcoding, packaging, and DRM protection — common among mid-market media companies using AWS Elemental or Azure Media Services — often discover after contract signing that migrating encoded content libraries to a competing platform requires re-encoding at substantial cost and operational disruption. This creates a de facto switching barrier that suppliers do not proactively disclose during the sales process, and which standard RFP responses rarely surface without targeted technical questioning about format portability and license key migration.

Total cost of ownership surprises represent the second persistent challenge. Egress fees — the cost of transferring video data out of a CDN or cloud storage provider — are consistently underestimated during budget planning because they scale with actual viewership rather than contracted capacity. Organisations that launch a streaming service with modest initial audiences frequently encounter egress bill shocks when content goes viral or live events draw peak concurrent viewers far above planning assumptions. Buyers must demand binding egress rate schedules and peak-traffic pricing commitments upfront, not as post-contract amendments, and must model at least three audience scenarios — base, upside, and stress — before committing to any CDN or cloud infrastructure vendor.

Emerging opportunities worth watching in video streaming

AI-powered personalisation infrastructure represents the most commercially significant near-term shift for buyers procuring streaming platform technology. Companies like Magnite and The Trade Desk are embedding large language model-driven contextual targeting directly into CTV ad decisioning, while platform vendors including Brightcove are launching AI-generated chapter markers and auto-summarisation features as native product capabilities. Buyers who are currently mid-cycle on a platform procurement decision should explicitly evaluate vendor AI roadmaps and determine whether those capabilities are included in base licensing or priced as premium add-ons, since the cost gap between these approaches will widen significantly by 2026 and 2027.

The second notable opportunity is the emergence of FAST — Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV — as a white-label infrastructure play for content owners who previously lacked the scale to justify a direct-to-consumer streaming investment. Platforms including Plex, Rakuten TV, and Samsung TV Plus now offer revenue-share channel partnerships that require minimal upfront capex from content owners. For procurement directors at regional broadcasters, sports federations, and media rights holders, this represents a viable low-risk entry point into streaming distribution that bypasses the need to procure and operate a full streaming technology stack independently. Evaluating FAST channel partnership terms should be part of any media distribution strategy review conducted in 2025.

How to evaluate video streaming suppliers

The three most important evaluation criteria in this market are: first, origin-to-edge latency performance under peak concurrent load — demand demonstration of third-party verified performance data during live events at 50,000-plus concurrent viewers, not synthetic benchmark tests; second, format and DRM portability — require written contractual confirmation that encoded assets can be exported in standard formats and that DRM license keys can be migrated to a competing provider without content re-encryption; third, monetisation stack integration depth — for AVOD or hybrid monetisation models, verify that the vendor's ad server integrations cover your specific demand partners and that server-side ad insertion is supported without requiring a separate middleware vendor, which adds cost and latency to every ad impression served.

The most common evaluation mistake buyers make in this market is over-weighting the platform demo experience and under-weighting operational support quality. Streaming failures almost always occur during high-stakes live events — playoff broadcasts, product launches, executive town halls — when support response time and escalation path clarity matter more than any feature on a comparison matrix. Buyers should require a documented incident response SLA specific to live streaming events, a named technical account manager, and at least two client references from organisations with comparable peak traffic profiles. Suppliers who look exceptional on feature lists but cannot provide live-event incident references from comparable deployments are high-risk selections regardless of commercial terms.

Market at a Glance

Regional demand: Where video streaming buyers are

North America remains the most mature demand region, accounting for the largest share of both consumer streaming revenue and enterprise video platform procurement. US buyers operate in a highly competitive SVOD environment where subscriber growth is effectively flat among the top five platforms, shifting procurement focus toward advertising technology, churn prediction analytics, and content cost optimisation tools. Canadian buyers are additionally navigating the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11), which mandates Canadian content investment thresholds for foreign streaming platforms, creating localised compliance procurement requirements that do not exist in other regions and that affect platform licensing and content management system selection.

Europe is the fastest-growing region for enterprise video streaming procurement, driven by public broadcaster digitisation programmes, GDPR-compliant streaming analytics demand, and the rollout of high-speed broadband under EU Digital Decade targets. Asia Pacific presents the highest volume growth in consumer streaming, led by India — where JioCinema's free IPL cricket streaming model demonstrated the market-shaping power of sports rights in price-sensitive markets — and Southeast Asia, where mobile-first streaming infrastructure requirements differ substantially from desktop-centric Western deployments. Latin America and the Middle East and Africa are emerging demand centres where infrastructure limitations, local content licensing complexity, and currency volatility create distinct procurement challenges that favour suppliers with regional delivery infrastructure and local-currency contract flexibility.

Leading Market Participants

• Netflix
• Amazon Prime Video
• Apple TV+
• Disney+
• Google (YouTube)
• Akamai Technologies
• Brightcove
• Kaltura
• Limelight Networks (Edgio)
• Comcast Technology Solutions

What comes next for video streaming

Three structural changes will define the market over the next three to five years. Consolidation among SVOD platforms will accelerate as subscriber growth ceilings force platforms to seek scale through merger rather than organic acquisition — the Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Global strategic negotiations signal a wave of platform bundling that will reshape content licensing economics for every buyer procuring streaming rights. AI-generated content at scale will begin to challenge the cost assumptions underlying traditional content investment budgets, with tools from companies including Runway and Sora enabling shorter-format original content at dramatically lower per-minute production costs than live-action equivalents.

The practical implication for buyers is to build contractual flexibility into any platform or infrastructure agreement signed in 2025. Revenue-share terms that were negotiated when subscriber growth was the primary metric will become disadvantageous as advertising becomes the dominant monetisation model. Buyers should insist on model-switching clauses — provisions allowing renegotiation of commercial terms if the platform's primary monetisation model changes materially during the contract period. Additionally, any enterprise buyer currently on a single-CDN contract should initiate a multi-CDN evaluation by Q3 2025 to ensure traffic routing flexibility as AI-driven content delivery optimisation tools make multi-CDN management operationally feasible at lower overhead than was the case two years ago.

Market Segmentation

By Revenue Model

• Subscription Video-on-Demand (SVOD)
• Advertising-Based Video-on-Demand (AVOD)
• Transactional Video-on-Demand (TVOD)
• Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV (FAST)
• Hybrid Models
• Pay-Per-View

By Streaming Type

• Live Streaming
• Video-on-Demand
• Linear Streaming
• Cloud Gaming Streams
• Interactive Streaming

By End User

• Media and Entertainment
• Enterprise and Corporate
• Education and E-Learning
• Sports and Events
• Government and Public Sector
• Healthcare

By Device

• Smart TVs and Connected TV Devices
• Smartphones and Tablets
• Desktop and Laptop Computers
• Gaming Consoles
• Set-Top Boxes

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. What contract length should buyers target when procuring a CDN for video streaming? ▼

Target 24-month contracts with volume-based pricing tiers and a written egress rate schedule locked for the full term. Avoid 36-month terms without renegotiation triggers tied to traffic volume milestones.

Q2. How should buyers assess a streaming platform vendor's live event capability? ▼

Require third-party verified performance reports from live events with at least 50,000 concurrent viewers and a documented incident response SLA specific to live streaming. Vendor-produced case studies without verified concurrent viewer data are insufficient for evaluation.

Q3. What is the most important DRM-related clause to include in a streaming infrastructure contract? ▼

Insist on a license key portability clause confirming that encrypted content assets and associated DRM keys can be migrated to a competing provider without requiring full re-encryption of the content library. This single clause eliminates the primary switching barrier in this market.

Q4. How does the FAST channel model compare to operating a proprietary streaming platform from a procurement cost perspective? ▼

FAST channel partnerships with platforms like Plex or Samsung TV Plus require near-zero upfront technology capex in exchange for a revenue share typically ranging from 40% to 60% of advertising yield. Proprietary platform ownership delivers higher long-term margin but requires sustained investment in CDN, DRM, player technology, and analytics infrastructure.

Q5. Which enterprise video platform should buyers shortlist for internal communications use cases? ▼

Kaltura, Brightcove, and Panopto are the three platforms with the deepest enterprise LMS and SSO integration capabilities and verifiable reference customers at 10,000-plus employee scale. Buyers should evaluate all three and prioritise the vendor whose incident SLA and named support model best matches their internal IT team's capacity to manage escalations.