The Race to Scale: Streaming’s Path to Financial Sustainability

The streaming industry talks endlessly about revenue and about content spend. It rarely talks about the third line of streaming economics: the cost of running a streaming platform, from playout and CDN delivery to the player applications. That gap is why the Streaming Platform Ratio exists. On this live episode of The Media Odyssey Podcast, Marion Ranchet and Evan Shapiro sat down with the following guests behind this study, Jonas Engwall (CEO, Bedrock Streaming), Rowan de Pomerai (CEO, the DPP) and Bjarne Andre Myklebust (Head of Distribution, NRK - Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) to unpack what it measures, what the first 16 platforms revealed, and why scale keeps coming out as the answer to streaming profitability.

The Streaming Platform Ratio is a benchmark created by Bedrock Streaming and the DPP that measures how much a streaming service spends on building and operating its platform as a percentage of its streaming revenue.

Key takeaways

• The Streaming Platform Ratio = platform build and run costs as a share of streaming revenue.
• Netflix's ratio is estimated at about 10%.
• 16 platforms, mostly European, shared anonymized financials with the DPP. Their ratios ranged from roughly 9% to 30%.
• Scale is the strongest driver: platforms below roughly 100 million in revenue spend almost double the proportion of high-scale platforms.
• Public service broadcasters such as NRK came out slightly ahead of commercial players, partly because they started streaming 25 years ago and partly because they are the largest platforms in their markets.
• Bedrock Streaming already has customers at 10% and is targeting 9%. Its model is to pool scale across countries on one central, configurable platform.

Why did Bedrock Streaming want a platform cost benchmark?

Marion Ranchet opened by asking Jonas Engwall why Bedrock felt the industry needed to get under the skin of product and tech spend. Engwall explained that Bedrock's mission from day one has been to give its stakeholders a platform that is on par with, or better than, the global streamers, so that local players can compete with their content on an equal footing. That ambition forced Bedrock to benchmark itself constantly against Netflix, Disney+ and the other giants, first on features and capabilities, then, as the market shifted its attention from features to finance, on cost. Benchmarking cost turned out to be far harder than benchmarking features: nobody could say with confidence whether they were spending the right amount. The Streaming Platform Ratio was Bedrock's answer.

What is the Streaming Platform Ratio and how is it calculated?

Rowan de Pomerai, who was quick to give Jonas Engwall and the Bedrock team full credit for the idea, defined the metric in one line: as a proportion of your streaming revenue, how much are you spending on building and operating the platform? If a service makes $10 million and spends $2 million building and running its platform, its ratio is 20%. Simple to state, but surprisingly difficult to source, which is why Bedrock partnered with the DPP. As an independent industry body with relationships across media companies, the Digital Production Partnership could collect confidential financials, anonymize them and publish only aggregated results. Nobody, including Bedrock, has seen any individual company's numbers.

What is Netflix's Streaming Platform Ratio? About 10%

Before approaching the industry, the team needed a knowable benchmark. Evan Shapiro drew the parallel with his own Media Universe map: you can prove a point using publicly available information. Netflix is the one company where total revenue and streaming revenue are effectively the same thing, so de Pomerai took its publicly reported technology and development expenses, added estimates for costs such as CDN delivery, and arrived at a round figure of about 10% of revenue. Engwall added that when he first started asking this question years ago the figure he heard most often was 30%, while Netflix has in fact been hovering around 10% for the past five or six years.

What did the 16 streaming platforms reveal?

The study gathered data from 16 platforms, mostly European, spanning public service and commercial broadcasters and their SVOD, AVOD and BVOD services. De Pomerai noted that US companies were harder to bring in as soon as financials were involved (several large US players wanted to talk but their legal teams said no), and that European broadcasters were also more eager to learn. The headline finding was a range of roughly 9% to 30% of revenue spent on the tech stack.
Evan Shapiro pressed on the split between public service and commercial broadcasters. Bjarne Myklebust confirmed that public broadcasters came out slightly ahead. NRK has been streaming for 25 years, launching its player around the same time the BBC launched iPlayer, and early movers have had time to work on the cost side. NRK runs three CDNs and puts them in price competition every year, effectively gaining around 20% more traffic annually for the same money. Since the cost of producing content is the same for traditional television and OTT, the real battleground is playout, distribution and the player application.

Is streaming cheaper than broadcast distribution?

Myklebust challenged a long-held industry assumption. Broadcast, one-to-many, was always considered great economics. But almost 90% of his distribution budget still goes to traditional networks such as DTT, while 20% to 25% of NRK consumption now happens on its OTT platform. Once only 5% or 6% of households use a national DTT network, the maths flips: streaming becomes the cheaper platform. Having hard ratios helps NRK manage that migration actively rather than simply paying its dues to the old network while waiting.

Why scale is the real driver of streaming platform cost

De Pomerai cautioned that the public-versus-commercial split partly reflects the cohort: few very large commercial groups took part, and within European markets the public broadcasters are usually the biggest streaming platforms. The clearer signal in the data was scale. Splitting the cohort at roughly 100 million in revenue, lower-scale platforms showed almost double the proportional cost of high-scale platforms. Certain platform costs are fixed, so the bigger you are, the easier the ratio gets, which is exactly why Netflix, with the biggest scale for the longest time, sits at the bottom.
For Jonas Engwall, none of this was a surprise. Bedrock has always argued that without scale you cannot viably build a platform on par with the global giants. He confirmed Bedrock uses the ratio internally as a measure of its own success: some Bedrock customers already sit at 10%, and the company is working to push them towards 9%. Evan Shapiro connected the dots: in a world where programming costs are the same for everyone, and even as generative AI arrives, platform cost is where the competitive edge and the savings will come from, and a shared, centrally operated tech stack such as Bedrock's is how a single-market European player gets the lowest possible fixed cost.
Marion Ranchet asked whether this is a European question rather than a US one, given how hard it is for single-market players to chase scale. Engwall's answer: local audiences all use Netflix, Spotify and Disney+, so they expect the same quality from a local service, especially during a World Cup or live sport, and a local player gets no free ride. Bedrock creates scale across countries with one central platform that looks and operates differently in each market. And where he once believed the US, India and China were big enough to go it alone, it turns out even US players are now unifying platforms in search of scale.

Build or buy? CapEx or OpEx?

Evan Shapiro raised the eternal boardroom conundrum: build a streaming platform in-house or buy one. Myklebust described traditional broadcasters moving from a CapEx to an OpEx world, licensing software rather than buying black boxes, which brings agility but is a painful transition. His verdict was unambiguous: buy. A broadcaster's core business is making good content and reaching the audience, because content has no value until it reaches the audience. NRK does not build its own CDNs; it buys capacity. De Pomerai added that few broadcasters built their own transmission networks either, and that one participant in the study operated both an insourced and an outsourced platform after M&A, so its leadership will have found the results particularly instructive.

Vertical video, microdramas and Europe's innovation streak

The conversation closed on vertical video. Evan Shapiro recalled that Jonas Engwall was the first person to talk to him, more than three years ago, about adding a vertical feed to a premium streaming product, with M6 in France. Engwall said the initial use case, shorts teasing long-form content on the platform, produced a very high conversion rate, and vertical video is now live on at least three of Bedrock's four platforms with growing demand. Myklebust revealed that NRK is releasing 21 Days, a microdrama series shot vertically for a younger audience, on its own mobile player and on social media, though NRK limits syndication to keep control of its programming and algorithms. Marion Ranchet pointed to Whale TV's new microdrama app on connected TV as a sign the format is spreading beyond mobile.
Shapiro predicted a massive wave of premium vertical originals, citing TF1's docuseries with Gaspard G, France Télévision with HugoDécrypte, RTVE with an influencer, Fremantle verticalizing Neighbours, and Peacock ordering six vertical reality shows. Ranchet noted that almost every example was a European broadcaster, proof, alongside the Netflix - TF1 partnership and the RTL-Sky, ITV consolidation moves, that European broadcasters are innovating rather than surrendering to linear decline. De Pomerai's closing caveat, from the DPP's European TV and streaming outlook: Europe is not one market. In Finland, YLE outperforms the big US services in a way that is not happening in Southern Europe.
Evan Shapiro ended by crediting Bedrock, its founding broadcaster partners and Europe's public broadcasters for teaching him many of the streaming trends he now talks about, an apt close to an episode about finally measuring what it costs to compete.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Streaming Platform Ratio? A metric created by Bedrock Streaming and the DPP (Digital Production Partnership). It expresses the cost of building and operating a streaming platform as a percentage of the platform's streaming revenue.
What is a good Streaming Platform Ratio? Netflix, the reference point, is estimated at about 10%. The 16 platforms in the first study ranged from roughly 9% to 30%. Bedrock Streaming has customers at 10% and is aiming for 9%.
Who took part in the study? 16 streaming platforms, mostly European public service and commercial broadcasters, shared confidential financials with the DPP, which anonymized and aggregated them. Participants received the full anonymized report.
Why do larger platforms have a lower ratio? Many platform costs are fixed, so they shrink as a share of revenue as scale grows. In the study, platforms below roughly 100 million in revenue spent almost double the proportion of high-scale platforms.
Where can I listen to the episode? The Media Odyssey Podcast, episode 93, The Streaming Platform Ratio, recorded live at Streaming Made Easy Live during IBC 2026 in Amsterdam.