Broadcasters have been syndicating third party content for decades to expand and vary the appeal of their programming. Since the launch of their own Direct to Consumer offerings, major media companies have become global “broadcasters” through their streaming platforms. For these companies, licensing took a back seat in recent years as they prioritised original content to attract subscribers and differentiate their services, however the approach is once again becoming more commonplace across the industry. Global streaming services have resumed licensing of their content to others to generate incremental revenues, and are sourcing more third party content for their platforms to expand their offerings at a lower cost and risk compared with the creation of originals.
“After four years of major studios employing a walled-garden approach to the distribution of their TV content on streaming, licensing is steadily making a comeback.”
Ampere Analysis, 2024
This trend is reflected in ZOO’s order book. As announced in our February trading update, an enlarged proportion of customer assignments currently relate to them both licensing in third party content and licensing out catalogues, rather than the processing of new original programming. The Board envisages that this will be an ongoing trend, with the additional volumes of original content starting to recover later in FY26.
For streaming companies, this approach can be more cost-effective than producing purely original content, adding more diverse content to their platforms while managing production costs more efficiently. For ZOO, there is little impact whether it is new or licensed content – these titles have the same requirements to be adapted and prepared for global distribution in any language.
