There are now over 100 million households in Europe with at least one television set that supports the HbbTV standard for hybrid broadcast broadband television. That is likely to reach 108 million by the end of 2025 and over 120 million in 2026. That means that over half of all homes in Europe will support HbbTV.

The figures come from market research company Dataxis. They cover Europe, excluding Russia and Turkey.

“Reaching 100 million homes with HbbTV-compliant TV sets in Europe is a testament to the strength and relevance of the open HbbTV standard,” said Vincent Grivet, Chair of the HbbTV Association.

“This achievement underscores the entire industry’s commitment to delivering innovative TV services to consumers in a harmonised manner. The mature, stable and proven standard offers broadcasters, advertisers and technology providers new opportunities in the connected TV ecosystem. We look forward to seeing further growth and adoption.”

The number of homes in Europe with an HbbTV television has risen rapidly in recent years and the trend is expected to continue, as the standard is supported by all major television manufacturers.

In 2020, there were 60 million HbbTV households in Europe, or just over a quarter of total households. By 2024, that had risen to 97 million, or just over 4 out of ten households. In 2025, over 45% of households are expected to have an HbbTV set, and that is projected to reach over 50% in 2026.

HbbTV essentially combines television and video services with a well-defined web browser environment that uses HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It can enable interactive applications and richer viewing experiences. It can also support service discovery, addressable advertising and audience measurement.

www.hbbtv.org

The Public Media Alliance has published research from a comparative analysis of Public Service Media in the Age of Platforms. It provides an illuminating analysis of the difference between the promotion of programmes by genre in the ‘prime space’ on online video platforms compared to their prevalence in the prime time schedules on the main channel of their respective broadcasters.

The research is based on an analysis of the presentation of the online video services of ten public service broadcasters in six countries, including the United Kingdom.

They looked at what they called the ‘prime space’ on the home page of the respective online services that is visible without scrolling. The aim was to compare this to the ‘prime time’ scheduling of the main channels of each organisation.

The study, based on data from November 2023, suggests that most of the services appeared to follow services like Netflix in terms of genre profile, featuring fiction, entertainment, and documentary programmes.

Fiction was prominent on all the services surveyed, together with entertainment and documentary programmes.

News was notably absent from the ‘prime space’ on the BBC iPlayer and ITVX, although it was represented on the 4 service from Channel 4, the only service to feature news.

The study suggests that the limited ‘prime space’ on screen represents a challenge for balancing new programming and curating an archive. This is a particular problem for public service media if their online video platforms are supposed to work as a ‘front door’ to their entire portfolio.

In seeking to compete with the fiction catalogues of well-funded online video subscription services, public service media providers are limiting the promotion of other genres, like news and current affairs, on which their public service credentials are supposedly based.

The report makes a number of recommendations, including greater use of personalisation and using strategies that set public service media apart from global online video subscription services.

Public service media organisations should be incentivised to implement personalisation based on articifial intelligence to meet public service obligations and user expectations in an on-demand driven media culture. Personalisation should be regarded as part of their basic functionalities and not as a threat to the core values of universality, diversity and quality. However, they should strike a balance between editorial curation and personalisation to drive up viewing and to broaden choice of programming.

The study recommends that public service media organisations should employ programming strategies that set them apart from global players, employing a broader mix of genres in what they call ‘prime space’. They should also exploit the cultural-political and linguistic benefits of being a native television company with a deep knowledge of the everyday life, taste segments and agendas of its users in a specific national or regional context.

www.publicmediaalliance.org

There are over 12,700 audiovisual media services available in Europe. One in four of them is an on-demand service. Television channels still represent the majority of services available, with 9,434 available across Europe. Average television viewing time has remained remarkably consistent across Europe over the last 10 years, at 3.5 hours a day, plus or minus three minutes.

The European Audiovisual Observatory has published its Key Trends for 2025. The 10th edition was launched at a forum in Lille.

Nine out of ten of the most widespread television and video groups in Europe are ultimately based in the United States. Major brands like Warner Bros Discovery, Disney, Netflix, and Amazon have a significant presence across multiple European markets.

However, more than four out of ten television channels in Europe are regional or local services. These are particularly prevalent in countries like Italy, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands, which all offer more than 200 services.

Average television viewing time has started to decline slightly, following a recovery during the pandemic, but remains significant at an average of over 3.5 hours a day across Europe. It has remained remarkably consistent at that level, at plus or minus three minutes over the last 10 years. That varies by country, from less than two hours a day in Nordic countries to over five hours a day in Portugal.

The audience share of public service television also varies considerably across countries. It is over 40% in Germany and the United Kingdom but below 10% in Greece.

The report says that while subscription television services are stagnating, that is in comparison to the rapid development of online video subscription services, which one might have expected to have more impact. It suggests that so far these have not proved to be complete substitutes, partly because they are often bundled with subscription television services. It says it remains to be seen if the subscriber losses seen by television operators in the United States will eventually reach Europe.

While the traditional subscription television market has lost 10% of its traditional subscriber base over the past five years, it has grown overall to reach 146 million subscriptions across the European Union and to 192 million across the wider European area. The growth comes from services delivered online, but these deliver only about 40% of the average revenue per user compared to traditional platforms.

Overall, the coexistence of subscription television and online video services has led to a continuous increase in the share of consumer spending in the total revenues of the European audiovisual sector, compared to advertising and public funding of public service broadcasters.

The observatory provides a valuable source of data from across over 40 countries in the Europe region. Inevitably, much of the data is trailing, but it provides a rational response to the narrative that no-one is watching television anymore.

www.obs.coe.int