Former Enders Analysis senior analyst Francois Godard today described the wave of European television consolidation as "glacial but unstoppable," a phrase that captures the arc of a multi-year industry restructuring that has produced three major deals in under twelve months and left French broadcasters as the primary holdouts in a continent-wide shift toward scale.

The remark was made today, June 26, 2026, in a LinkedIn post responding to the Sky-ITV deal first reported by Reuters on June 24. Godard, who spent 21 years as a global video and sport industries analyst at Enders Analysis before leaving the firm in March 2026, has been one of the most cited observers of European television's structural transformation. His comment crystallises what has become the defining theme of European media in the first half of this decade: a set of transactions that individually look incremental but together represent a fundamental reorganisation of who controls video audiences and the advertising revenues that flow from them.

The wave of deals driving consolidation

Three transactions form the backbone of the current consolidation cycle.

The first and largest in structural terms was MFE-MediaForEurope's takeover of ProSiebenSat.1. MFE, the broadcaster controlled by the Berlusconi family's Fininvest Group through a Dutch-registered holding company, launched a voluntary public takeover bid for ProSiebenSat.1 on March 26, 2025. After increasing its offer in July 2025 - raising the share component from 0.4 MFE ordinary A-class shares to 1.3 MFE A-shares per ProSiebenSat.1 share while keeping the cash consideration at EUR 4.48 - MFE secured 75.61% of the German broadcaster's share capital by September 4, 2025. ProSiebenSat.1 has been consolidated in MFE's accounts since October 2025. According to Enders Analysis, once fully consolidated, MFE claims the title of the biggest free-to-air broadcasting operator in Europe, with revenues of EUR 6.8 billion. MFE's most recent quarterly results showed net consolidated revenues of EUR 1,463.1 million in the first quarter of 2026, down 4.5% year-over-year on a reported basis but compared against pro-forma figures assuming full consolidation of ProSiebenSat.1 from January 1, 2025.

The second transaction involved RTL Group and Sky Deutschland. RTL Group, the Luxembourg-based broadcaster controlled by Bertelsmann, announced in June 2025 that it would acquire Sky's German-market pay-television operations for an initial EUR 150 million in cash, with a variable consideration linked to RTL Group's share price performance capped at an additional EUR 377 million. The European Commission cleared the deal without imposing any conditions in April 2026. RTL Group then closed the transaction on June 1, 2026 for EUR 68 million in upfront cash - materially below the originally stated EUR 150 million figure, reflecting the variable structure of the agreement and the performance of RTL Group's own shares in the intervening period. The combined entity has approximately 12.3 million subscribers across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, creating Germany's largest streaming company. PPC Land covered the European Commission's unconditional clearance of the transaction and the deal's closing at the significantly reduced price in separate pieces.

The third, and most recent, is the potential acquisition by Sky of ITV's Media and Entertainment unit for GBP 1.6 billion. Reuters reported on June 24, 2026 that terms had been agreed, with sources saying lawyers were finalising the deal and an announcement could come within two weeks. The GBP 1.6 billion figure covers ITV's linear television channels and the ITVX streaming platform but not ITV Studios, the production arm, which will continue as a standalone entity. As PPC Land reported, Reuters also reported a performance earn-out of approximately GBP 200 million, meaning the total price could approach GBP 1.8 billion if ITV's broadcast business meets financial targets. Sky acquired Love Productions - the production company behind programmes including "The Great British Bake Off" - from ITV Studios as part of the settlement, with that asset valued at between GBP 80 million and GBP 120 million.

The advertising market as the real battleground

What binds these transactions is not simply scale for its own sake. The competitive pressure comes from the advertising market as much as from the subscription wars.

RTL Group's digital advertising revenue surged 27.1% to EUR 230 million in the first half of 2025, while traditional television advertising at the same company fell 6.9% to EUR 1,018 million. The trajectory is consistent across European broadcasters. Streaming platforms and YouTube have taken a meaningful share of the video advertising market that commercial television used to dominate. According to a Boston Consulting Group study from September 2025, streaming platforms and social video had captured 64% of weekly viewing time across the UK, France, Germany, and Switzerland.

MFE Advertising, the commercial sales arm of the MFE group, launched a self-serve ad manager platform for small and medium-sized businesses in May 2024, initially in Spain. Mara Negri, SVP of global media agencies at MFE Advertising, participated in IAB Europe's Virtual Programmatic Day in April 2026, where she identified three historical barriers that had previously kept smaller businesses off television: the minimum audience size required for addressability, the high cost of creative production, and the complexity of execution. Connected television and programmatic buying have progressively removed each of those barriers. PPC Land's coverage of the IAB Europe 2026 programmatic event noted that Negri's contribution came in the context of a broader industry conversation about unlocking the SMB advertising segment for broadcaster inventory.

The RTL-Sky Deutschland combination gives RTL Group a materially expanded programmatic inventory. RTL's AdManager platform, launched in March 2025, is a self-service system that enables agencies and brands to purchase digital television and video inventory across multiple European markets. That inventory pool has now grown substantially with the addition of Sky Deutschland's sports audiences and subscriber base. The Smartclip and Virtual Minds adtech collaboration, built jointly by RTL and ProSiebenSat.1 in early 2024 as a European alternative to US-dominated programmatic infrastructure, now has access to a combined audience considerably larger than either company held individually.

Where France stands

Godard's observation that consolidation is "glacial but unstoppable" carries a specific resonance when applied to France, which has been the most conspicuous absence from the consolidation wave.

According to Enders Analysis research cited in Reuters reports from January 2026, Godard said: "For 20 years there's been consolidation in the United States." He described France as "completely blocked while opening the doors wide to Netflix." French broadcasters face domestic ownership rules that analysts say make cross-border or domestic consolidation difficult. An attempt by TF1 and M6 to merge in 2022 was abandoned after the companies concluded that antitrust remedies would hollow out the deal's strategic value.

The French Senate approved an amendment that would reduce the broadcast licence lock-up period from five years to two, potentially allowing M6 to pursue acquisitions by 2028 rather than 2032. MFE CEO Pier Silvio Berlusconi confirmed publicly that MFE had held unsuccessful talks with TF1 and reiterated interest in the French market, having previously made an offer valuing RTL's stake in M6 at approximately EUR 1.4 billion, or EUR 22 per share. Whether French regulatory and legislative reform comes in time to matter is an open question.

MFE's Portugal stake and the scale of ambition

MFE's expansion has not been limited to Germany. On March 10, 2026, MFE subscribed to 82.5 million newly issued shares in Impresa, the Portuguese media group that runs SIC and multiple thematic channels, at EUR 0.21 per share. The transaction gave MFE a 32.934% stake in Impresa for approximately EUR 17.3 million - a modest outlay that follows an agreement with Impreger, the Balsemão family holding company that retains control with a 33.738% stake. Following the transaction, the remaining 33.328% is held in free float on Euronext Lisbon. Impresa reported consolidated revenues of EUR 181.8 million and EBITDA of EUR 18.8 million for the year ending December 31, 2025. MFE has described the investment as part of its strategy to build growth across the pan-European entertainment and media sector.

That stake follows MFE's broader geographic logic. The group now holds leadership positions in Italy, Spain, and Germany, has a minority stake in Portugal, and has held discussions about France. According to MFE's own history page, ProSiebenSat.1 has been consolidated in MFE's accounts since October 2025, establishing MFE as a pan-European broadcaster with significant operations across four major television markets. The group held its annual shareholders' meeting on June 24, 2026, at the Sheraton Amsterdam Airport Schiphol hotel, with Fedele Confalonieri, the statutory chairperson of the board of directors, presiding.

What Godard's career context adds

The significance of Godard's comment is partly a function of who is making it. His LinkedIn profile, captured in the documents attached to this article, shows he worked as a global video and sport industries analyst at Enders Analysis from November 2004 to March 2026 - a 21-year tenure at the London-based research firm. Before that, he spent nearly 14 years as a freelance journalist, writing for FT Media and Telecoms, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter from January 1991 to October 2004. He studied at Sciences Po in Paris, graduating in 1987. He holds a doctorate awarded in 2020 from the University of Geneva. He lives in Procida, off the coast of Naples.

His long track record of commentary on precisely this set of industry dynamics - MFE's approach to ProSiebenSat.1, Comcast's difficulties with Sky Deutschland, the Italian media market, French regulatory constraints - gives his framing of the moment added weight. When Godard comments that Italy's proposed MFE-Sky IT scenario "is very speculative," preferring the idea that "Sky IT buying Discovery IT would be a more likely development, but at a much lower scale," he is drawing on years of analysis of the Italian pay-television market. Sky Italia is presently Comcast's remaining major continental European television asset after the sale of Sky Deutschland. According to Grokipedia's profile of Sky Italia, the division holds around 5 million subscribers, making it the largest pay-TV operator in Italy, and holds a 22.5% audience share as of the first half of 2025, compared to RAI's 27.3%.

Why the advertising and programmatic community should pay attention

For professionals operating in programmatic advertising and connected television, the structural reorganisation of European free-to-air and pay television carries direct practical implications.

Inventory consolidation changes buying dynamics. When MFE controls Italian Mediaset channels, Spanish Cuatro and Telecinco, and German ProSiebenSat.1's portfolio, its advertising sales operation - MFE Advertising - has the scale to structure pan-European packages. Whether a programmatic buyer operating through DSPs encounters that inventory as a single unified supply path or as separate national silos depends on decisions MFE has not yet fully finalised.

PPC Land has tracked how programmatic CTV is evolving in European markets, including the IAB Europe guide to programmatic CTV from April 2026 that mapped DSP-SSP interactions, SSAI implementation, and regulatory requirements. Programmatic CTV budgets grew to 26% of media spend in 2026, up three percentage points year-over-year, according to that guide. The RTL-Sky Deutschland deal and the potential Sky-ITV combination each produce entities with the audience scale to negotiate directly with DSPs and set terms for how their inventory is traded. The combined RTL-Sky Deutschland entity, with 12.3 million paying subscribers in the DACH region, is larger than it was in terms of programmatic addressability in Germany.

The Sky-ITV deal, if completed, would restructure the UK television advertising market in a way that the Competition and Markets Authority will need to scrutinise carefully. Sky and ITV have competed for the same pool of UK television advertising budgets. Folding ITV's linear channels and ITVX under Sky's ownership removes internal competition between two of the largest sellers of premium video inventory in the UK market. Viewers who previously saw ITV and Sky as separate supply sources would encounter them through a single commercial organisation.

The question of how agentic buying systems will interact with consolidated broadcaster inventory is not yet settled. PPC Land covered IAB Tech Lab's work on agentic advertising standards, including discussion at the April 2026 programmatic day of how AI buying systems need guard rails before they are deployed at scale against premium broadcast inventory. Larger broadcasters, better resourced and with stronger negotiating positions, may be better placed to define the terms under which agentic systems access their inventory.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Francois Godard, a former senior Enders Analysis analyst with 21 years of European media research experience, who left the firm in March 2026 and has continued to comment publicly on industry developments. The companies at the centre of the consolidation he describes are MFE-MediaForEurope, RTL Group, Sky, and ITV.

What: A LinkedIn post in which Godard characterised European television consolidation as "glacial but unstoppable," responding to the Sky-ITV deal agreed on June 24, 2026. The post reflects on a cycle of transactions that have included MFE's acquisition of a 75.61% stake in ProSiebenSat.1, RTL Group's EUR 68 million acquisition of Sky Deutschland, and Sky's GBP 1.6 billion agreement to buy ITV's broadcast and streaming unit.

When: The post was made today, June 26, 2026, roughly 48 hours after Reuters reported that Sky and ITV had agreed terms on the ITV deal. The consolidation cycle it references has been underway since at least March 2025, when MFE launched its ProSiebenSat.1 takeover bid.

Where: The post appeared on LinkedIn. The transactions it references span multiple European markets: Germany (MFE-ProSieben, RTL-Sky Deutschland), the United Kingdom (Sky-ITV), Portugal (MFE-Impresa), Italy and Spain (MFE's existing operations), and, speculatively, France. MFE's registered office is in Amsterdam; its operational headquarters are in Cologno Monzese, near Milan.

Why: European commercial television operators have concluded that individual national scale is insufficient to compete against US streaming platforms - Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and YouTube - that operate with international content budgets and subscriber bases no single European broadcaster can match independently. The advertising market, where streaming has taken share from linear television, reinforces the pressure. Godard's framing of the movement as "glacial but unstoppable" suggests the process will continue despite its slow pace, as the underlying competitive dynamics make consolidation a strategic necessity rather than an option.