Everyone's got their knickers in a twist over Comcast/NBCUniversal spin-off.
One layer down, there's a better economics story.
Distributors - Sky/ITV, MFE - MediaForEurope/ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE.1, RTL/Sky Deutschland, now two American giants - are scaling up to buy content cheaper before producers can charge more for it.
Producers - Banijay Entertainment/All3Media, Fremantle, ITV Studios taking Love Productions out of Sky’s hands as soon as the carve-up allowed it - are scaling up so no single distributor's contract can dictate their price.
Both sides are building leverage against each other, over the same margin, at the same time.
Paramount's EU concessions capture the mechanism from the other direction. To win approval, it's talking about shedding United International Pictures, its joint venture with Universal - unbundling to get permission, while everyone else is bundling for leverage.
The mid-sized studio pays for all of it.
No capital to consolidate, no scale to negotiate, squeezed between bigger buyers and bigger rivals until it has no pricing power left.
Probably why, at RTS Cambridge last year, Channel 4, a broadcaster with no production arm by design, reportedly floated building one. Maybe those gasps in the room weren't justified after all.
Then there's BBC Studios, pricing itself like a commercial super-indie, backed by a library and commissioning pipeline no competitor can replicate. Charter renewal is really a question about whether that's a fair fight or a structural advantage dressed as independence.
So what’s the play for the middle now?
Stay independent, lock in long-term supply, or accept that the next buyer is already circling?