Copenhagen TV Festival 2026: “We don’t perceive other platforms as competitors”

Inside Copenhagen TV Festival, the conversation moved from commissioning to creators, YouTube, financing and the fight for attention.

CPH TV Festival 2026

Copenhagen felt less like a celebration of television than a room full of people trying to work out what television is now.

The same tensions kept resurfacing: broadcasters building on YouTube while protecting their own platforms; streamers talking more openly about shared financing; creators being treated less like marketing and more like media businesses; AI everywhere, while commissioners still insisted taste and judgement were human.

The mood was not panic. More recalibration.

Everyone still wants the same thing, a show people care about. The uncomfortable part is that making one is no longer enough.

The Lowdown

• Owning the audience is getting harder. Even the BBC, with a huge iPlayer base, is putting more energy into reaching people on YouTube and third-party platforms.

• Creators are becoming media companies. They own the audience relationship, distribution and often the format too. The festival treated that as a structural shift, not a social-media sideshow.

• Streamer money is becoming more flexible. Netflix, Prime Video and HBO Max all talked about partnerships, licensing and financing models beyond fully funded exclusives.

• Nordic size can be an advantage. Smaller teams and budgets make it easier to test formats in one market and move quickly if they work.

• AI was everywhere, but human judgement still had status. The programme was full of AI sessions while the streamers continued to stress local taste and creative decision-making.

• Young audiences are not necessarily avoiding serious content. Channel 4 reported a 59% year-on-year rise in digital views among young audiences when journalism was made for the platforms they actually use.

“We don’t perceive other platforms as competitors.”

— Dan McGolpin, BBC

That line gets to one of the stranger positions broadcasters now find themselves in.

The BBC has around 20 million regular iPlayer users, according to McGolpin, but that is not enough reason to stay inside its own walls. It is increasingly working with YouTube and other third-party platforms to find people where they already spend time.

The awkward bit is what happens next.

There is no guarantee someone who watches BBC content on YouTube eventually becomes an iPlayer user. A broadcaster can build a relationship with an audience without owning the place where that relationship happens.

That changes the job. Distribution is no longer what happens after the programme is made. It starts affecting what gets commissioned, how it is packaged and who is likely to front it.

“Personality increasingly trumps format.”

That was the premise of a festival session on the creator economy, and it cuts against decades of TV logic.

Traditional broadcasters like formats because formats can survive talent. Creators tend to build the other way around: the audience arrives for the person, then follows them into different formats.

Danish creator Rasmus Søndergaard has more than 170,000 YouTube subscribers and has turned that audience into a business spanning interviews and original entertainment.

What broadcasters are looking at is not simply someone with reach.

Creators can hold development, talent, distribution and audience knowledge in the same operation. They know quickly what works because the feedback loop is direct.

Søndergaard described the relationship in unusually plain terms during the festival: “You spend so much time with a person that, on a parasocial level, they end up becoming a friend.”

That closeness is difficult for a broadcaster logo to reproduce.

It is also where the power sits.

“There is a growing appetite among Scandinavian viewers for watching each other’s shows.”

— Jenny Stjernströmer Björk, Netflix Nordics

The streamer conversation in Copenhagen sounded noticeably less territorial than it once did.

Netflix, Prime Video and HBO Max all talked about greater collaboration, more flexible financing and Nordic shows moving further across the region.

Netflix acknowledged it cannot fully fund every project it wants to be involved in. Prime Video described everything from fully funded originals to broadcaster partnerships and local investments where international rights are handled separately.

That is a different tone from the first streaming boom, when the cleanest model was often: one global platform pays, owns and keeps.

The economics now require more sharing.

There is also something useful in Stjernströmer Björk’s point about Nordic audiences watching each other’s work. The industry spends a lot of time wondering whether a Danish series can become a global hit. There is a less glamorous question sitting closer to home: can it first become a Scandinavian one?

That may be the more realistic route to scale.

“We operate on smaller budgets, which is a strong engine for creativity.”

— Karin Lindström, Warner Bros. Discovery

Nobody in Nordic television needs reminding that the budgets are smaller.

The more interesting argument in Copenhagen was that this can make the region quicker.

Lindström described smaller teams and budgets as an environment where people learn fast. A format can launch in one Nordic market, be adjusted, then move across Denmark, Sweden, Norway or Finland without the machinery required for a global rollout.

There is a useful tension here.

Nordic producers want international scale, but part of their advantage comes from not operating at international scale.

The danger is trying to make work more exportable by making it less specific. Nordic formats have historically travelled because the idea was strong enough to survive translation — not because the original pretended it came from nowhere.

“Creative decisions… are based on human intuition and local expertise.”

— Zire Schucany, Netflix Nordics

For all the industry's fascination with algorithms, the streamers in Copenhagen were keen not to sound algorithmic.

Netflix, Prime Video and HBO Max all made versions of the same point: data can tell you what happened, but it does not simply decide what story to commission or who to cast.

That sat next to a programme packed with AI: agents, production tools, language models and debates around synthetic material. The festival even grouped sessions under The Big AI Monster.

The practical use cases are obvious. AI can remove labour, speed up workflows and potentially cut cost.

But the more revealing part was how quickly executives still reached for words like intuition, local expertise and judgement when talking about creative decisions.

Efficiency is becoming easier to buy.

Taste is still harder.

“The problem is that the media industry rarely manages to deliver serious journalism in the formats and on the platforms where young people actually are.”

— Louisa Compton, Channel 4

One of the more useful conversations in Copenhagen challenged a familiar industry complaint: young people do not care about news.

Compton's argument was that the problem is often delivery, not interest.

Channel 4 reported a 59% increase in digital views among young audiences in one year, with journalism including Untold and Dispatches reaching people on YouTube and other digital platforms. The behaviour is familiar from the creator conversation too.

Young audiences often build trust around people before institutions. Channel 4 is responding with more personality-led and platform-native work rather than assuming its existing brand carries automatically into a new generation.

This is less about making journalism “younger”. It is about removing the expectation that a 20-year-old should adopt the viewing habits of a 50-year-old before the journalism counts.

“Projects will enjoy longer lives on different platforms.”

— Emilia Widstrand, Prime Video

For years, streaming rewarded exclusivity. Now the language is shifting towards longevity.

Widstrand said she hopes the industry becomes more open to collaboration and that projects can have longer lives across different platforms.

For producers, that matters.

A programme can take years to develop and months to make, then disappear into a service after its initial launch window. More licensing and co-financing could give titles several chances to reach an audience rather than one expensive weekend. It also shows how streaming economics have matured.

Platforms still want exclusives. They are simply becoming less ideological about owning everything forever.

What’s Next

The festival programme made clear that the next argument is not television versus streaming, or television versus YouTube. Those divisions are already messy.

Broadcasters are on YouTube. Creators are running production companies. Streamers are partnering with broadcasters. Shows can move between platforms. AI is entering workflows while executives continue to protect human judgement as the thing that makes the work distinctive.

The companies are converging faster than the labels.

The audience has already moved on.