Western European TV revenue reaches €80.4bn in 2025

Western Europe's television market was worth €80.4 billion in 2025, up 2.4% from €78.6 billion in 2024, according to ITMedia Consulting's 24th annual report, Turning Digital 2026 – The Broadcaster's Digital Ecosystem. The report is dated 28 October 2026 and puts the annual increase at €1.8 billion.

What drove the market's €1.8bn increase?

Combined revenues for pay-TV and video-on-demand (VoD) rose 6.2% year on year to €37.7 billion. The report does not split pay-TV from VoD or identify the revenue mix within either, so it cannot show which component supplied the growth.

Traditional TV advertising fell 1.6% to €24.5 billion. That decline followed an exceptional 2024, when major sporting events, including the UEFA Euro 2024 tournament and the Paris Olympic Games, lifted advertising. The comparison spans a strong event year and a year without those same events; it does not, on its own, establish a permanent contraction in traditional TV.

How fast is advertising moving to streaming?

Advertising-based video-on-demand (AVOD) increased its share of total TV advertising revenue from 9% in 2019 to 26% in 2025. The 17-percentage-point shift took AVOD from just under one-tenth of the market to more than one-quarter, showing that streaming now competes directly for television advertising budgets.

ITMedia Consulting identifies the core development as the consolidation of the “Broadcaster’s Digital Ecosystem,” built around broadcaster VoD platforms, free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels, connected-TV (CTV) systems and data-driven advertising tools. The label describes an operating thesis, not a measured success: the report provides no platform-level margins, subscriber changes or audience reach for these services.

Traditional broadcasters, pay-TV operators and streaming services increasingly blur their boundaries as they compete for the same audiences, data and advertising budgets, according to the report. The convergence matters commercially because broadcasters must sell advertising against both traditional schedules and streaming inventory, while pay-TV and streaming platforms face the same pressure to monetize video.

That makes the ecosystem description more than a technology label. It shifts the basis of competition from the scheduled channel or standalone app toward selling video against particular audiences. The report does not quantify how much advertising has migrated from traditional broadcaster inventory to third-party platforms, however, so the scale of the claimed convergence remains open.

What do Europe's digital revenue pools show?

Broadcaster video-on-demand (BVOD) advertising revenue reached roughly €2.6 billion across Europe in 2025. FAST channel revenue surpassed €360 million across the five major European markets covered by the research: the UK, Italy, Germany, France and Spain.

The figures establish different reported revenue pools, but not a precise head-to-head: BVOD spans Europe, FAST covers only five markets, and one measure covers advertising revenue while the other covers total FAST channel revenue. Neither number alone shows profitability or audience scale.

Which national markets stand out?

The UK remains Europe's most digitally advanced advertising market, according to ITMedia Consulting. No UK market total or ranking method accompanies the claim, leaving the designation as the report's assessment rather than a result readers can independently test from the data.

Italy's national split shows that traditional TV took 39.2% of total advertising expenditure, the highest share among major European nations. That resilience contrasts with the report's broader account of AVOD's rise. The research also covers Germany, France and Spain, but provides no national advertising mix for them in the figures supplied.

What do the figures leave unanswered?

Revenue growth alone does not answer whether households watch more television, whether traditional pay-TV subscriptions are stable, or whether smaller services can sustain streaming infrastructure. The figures omit subscriber totals, household penetration, churn, average revenue per user, content costs and platform profitability. They also stop at 2025, so the October 2026 publication cannot show whether momentum has persisted this year.

For operators, the commercial test is whether advertising growth in streaming formats and FAST can offset pressure on traditional TV as they develop the ad technology and data systems described in the report. The report suggests that direction but gives no spending plan, platform-launch schedule or 2026 forecast.

No regulatory deadline or standards change appears among the stated drivers; the explanation rests on commercial migration and platform convergence.

The next reporting cycle should test whether that convergence raises advertising yield for broadcasters and operators rather than simply adding more platforms and complexity.