Take a Peek Inside Streaming’s New Playbook
A couple weeks have passed since the halls of Amsterdam’s RAI were ‘a-buzz’ with plenty of energy and more than a few trending topics, but one conversation from IBC 2025 still stands out. It’s not one dominating the headlines. But, it should be.
While many of media & entertainment’s major players from Netflix to Warner Bros. Discovery and Amazon Prime were celebrated across featured keynotes and various discussions, some of the most thought-provoking insights emerged from one panel session in particular: “Fast and Local Beats Big and Global: The New Streaming Playbook.” That first-day conversation, featuring TV3 Group CTO Ausra Sidaraviciene, Google Cloud’s Head of Media Solutions Anshul Kapoor, and Evergent Founder & CEO Vijay Sajja, challenged the industry’s assumption that scale alone always wins.
“It's really impossible to compete with Netflix,” shared Sidaraviciene, from the stage. "So we always had the approach that we look at them as someone with whom we want to work with."
By way of this approach, Go3, TV3’s streaming service and largest streamer in the Baltics, achieved 20% household penetration and surpassed Netflix in regional subscriptions by partnering with such global platforms, not competing against them.
From Competition to Cooperation
While legacy players often see competition as a zero-sum game, regional operators have the nuance to see things differently.
Go3’s partnerships with Netflix, HBO Max, and other global providers demonstrate that, as the session title so aptly states, “fast and local” isn’t about fighting against the giants—it’s about working with them to serve regional audiences better.
This cooperative model, built on agility and deep local insight, is what’s driving a new wave of regional success stories.
As Google’s Kapoor noted, “It’s not about outspending the global players. You can outsmart them. You can outspeed them.”
What’s the Real Competitive Advantage?
In this new 'playbook' for streaming, speed really is everything. Sidaraviciene described “fast” not as a single metric, but as a mindset. A mindset that starts early.
She described that 'fast' mindset as noticing change quickly, validating it, and launching a new product before your next quarter starts.
"It’s the whole way of how you work,” Sidaraviciene said.
Whether it’s responding to audience shifts, launching a new sports package, or reconfiguring bundles mid-season, the ability to act on data and execute in days, not months, defines who wins.
Evergent’s Sajja put this ideal quite succinctly: “Once you have an idea, can you execute at speed?”
Speed, paired with personalization - the right product, price, promotion, and payment - has become the formula for competitive advantage.
The Great Equalizer
The cloud has turned agility into a democratizing force. As Sidaraviciene explained, migrating Go3’s systems to the cloud was transformative:
“What used to take weeks or months, we now do in a day or two,” she said. “It’s configuration instead of development.”
Scalability for live events, flexible deployment of new features, and rapid product experimentation are no longer luxuries - they’re expectations.
And, as Kapoor added, cloud-native infrastructure now allows regional players to not just “punch above their weight,” but offer "more like a one-two punch."
This ideal capability combines the foundational reliability of global infrastructure with AI-driven personalization, adapting content, pricing, and user experience to local tastes.
Super Aggregation and the Power of Partnership
The panel also explored the rise of super aggregators, that is, operators who combine their own local offerings with global content under one seamless experience.
Managing such ecosystems introduces complexity, which can take the form of multi-partner integrations to dynamic packaging, but, as Sidaraviciene shared, the right technology partners simplify such complexity. Platforms such as the Evergent Monetization Platform orchestrate offers, partnerships, and billing so that operators can focus on what matters most: delivering relevant, personalized value to each viewer.
Sajja illustrated this with the example of Shahid in the Middle East, another Evergent-powered provider that launched in 33 countries, tripled its subscriber base to over 5 million, and surpassed Netflix in paying subscribers by using real-time data to experiment, iterate, and scale successful offers.
“Fire bullets before you launch cannonballs,” he said in describing this critical function by way of analogy. “You first need to understand, test, learn, and then double down on what works.”
How Evergent Powers Streaming’s New Playbook
Evergent’s suite of solutions, a handful of which were launched ahead of the 2025 IBC Show, is built precisely to help operators—regional or global—compete on such execution efforts:
- Captivate 2.0 uses AI-driven insights to predict and prevent churn with enterprise-grade precision, without the need for a massive data science team.
- An expanded Evergent Monetization Platform enables rapid testing of pricing, bundles, and promotions in days instead of months.
- Evergent Payments, a powerful new module in collaboration with Adyen, supporting 25+ local payment methods across more than 50 regions, to deliver instant access to multiple global regions and maximize recurring revenue.
- Subscription Hub, co-developed with Tata Elxsi, empowers super aggregators to build collaborative ecosystems while maintaining control of local relationships and relevance.
Each of these capabilities enables operators to experiment, adapt, and grow faster, turning infrastructure into a true competitive weapon.
Watch the entire panel session from IBC 2025
The Real Story from IBC 2025
There were a lot of stories to come out of IBC. Yet, the real story - the building blocks for lasting success - wasn’t about who has the biggest budgets or the flashiest global launches. It was about a new generation of regional operators proving that success in streaming isn’t reserved for the giants.
It’s for those who move fast, know their audiences intimately, and build partnerships that amplify, not dilute, their local strengths.
The future of streaming isn’t big and global winning everywhere.
It’s fast and local winning where it matters most.
Set up some time with one of our monetization experts to learn more about how our solutions are helping to make this present a reality, and build upon this success for a future of possibilities.
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