I first wrote a DPP report about the transition from broadcast to streaming over seven years ago. Even then, that transition was well underway. And even then, one change stood out above all others: relatively fixed costs of broadcast are being replaced by variable costs of streaming.

Streaming promises a direct link between viewership (and presumably therefore, revenue) and cost. That’s appealing from a business perspective: the barrier to entry is comparatively low, and costs only increase as the product achieves success. The challenge for many, however, has been understanding and forecasting those costs accurately. 

It can be hard to know what ‘good’ looks like. So a new piece of independent DPP research, supported by Bedrock Streaming, set out to answer that question.

We present a new metric: the Streaming Platform Ratio, which identifies the proportion of a platform’s revenue which is spent on the technology and operational cost of building and running the platform.

We’ve worked with 15 media organisations from Europe and the USA, to understand their platform revenues and costs, and calculate their own Streaming Platform Ratio. From this, we’ve calculated an industry average ratio for broadcasters and streamers – and we’ve compared that against the gold standard for efficient streaming: Netflix.