Korea & Japan

Warner & CJ ENM Deal; Lessons From Levies; YouTube At Mipcom

Liz Shackleton

20 Oct 2025 — 9 min read

Bargain

I was hoping to write about my recent trip to China for Pingyao International Film Festival and what I learned there for this edition of Streamlined, but other events need addressing first. Last week, Warner Bros Discovery announced a major deal with Korea's CJ ENM, Streamlined published the first part of its Streaming Levies report and MIPCOM took place and heralded the end of TV as we know it. That may be hyperbole, but for sure this industry is changing so fast it's difficult to know if there will still be an industry this time next year...

Warner Bros, CJ ENM Deal Looks Like A Win-Win

Last week, Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) and Korea’s CJ ENM announced a deal to jointly develop, finance and distribute both English-language and Korean-language remakes of each other’s films.

The deal sees WBD take the lead on English remakes of titles from CJ ENM’s library, while CJ ENM leads on Korean remakes of Warner Bros Pictures films. CJ ENM already has some track record in the latter, co-producing Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, a remake of its 2003 cult classic Save The Green Planet!, with Focus Features and other partners.

Warner Bros Pictures will distribute the films globally, while CJ ENM will handle its own remakes in territories where it operates cinemas, which is currently South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia and Turkey.

Also on the distribution front, hundreds of hours of K-drama produced by CJ ENM and streaming platform TVing will be offered as a branded hub on HBO Max in 17 markets across Asia Pacific. The two companies will also co-finance and co-produce original K-dramas for global distribution on HBO Max.

It makes a lot of sense for WBD and CJ ENM to work together this way. CJ ENM and TVing (co-owned by CJ, JTBC, KT and Naver) badly need a leg up in the international arena to compete with Netflix, which has spent billions on K-drama, many of which have been commissioned from CJ ENM’s own Studio Dragon and other group companies.

Rather than simply be a vendor to a global streamer, this deal gives CJ a partner who will share IP, co-distribute, co-create and not just dominate. The deal also enables CJ to keep its TVing branding on HBO Max.

As for WBD, it has never really made significant inroads into the highly lucrative but competitive K-content space, where Netflix and Disney+ are commissioning exclusive shows, and streamers like Prime Video and Viu are acquiring international rights to dramas produced by Korean broadcasters outside of Korea. WBD was making some interesting Taiwanese and Southeast Asian series through HBO Asia a few years back but hasn’t made any big swings in Asian local-language content since that team was disbanded.

Of course, CJ ENM had a similar partnership with Paramount Global in 2021 that yielded shows such as Bargain, Pyramid Game, A Bloody Lucky Day and Queen Woo. But that deal fell by the wayside when Paramount was put on the block and subsequently sold to David Ellison’s Skydance.

Now the chatter is that Ellison will also swallow WBD or least put in an offer that would bring the studio under the same roof as Paramount, a deal that would also bring CJ’s international partnership full circle. But then we’re still a ways off seeing anything concrete happen yet.

How Streaming Levies Protect Public Broadcasters & Minority Language Programming

Also last week, Streamlined published the first part of the Streamlined Guide to Streaming Levies & Content Investment Obligations, an epic piece of research into how the EU and some of its member states are regulating global and local streamers. We try to keep the Streamlined Guides as objective as possible, while the newsletters like this one (which we’re rebranding as Streamlined Insights) contain more opinion and are intended to ask questions and open debate.

So my personal thoughts on the EU legislation (and how it might relate to other parts of the world considering similar measures) is how important it is to protect the public service broadcasting ecosystem in each territory, and how that relates to the production of content in minority languages.

Left to their own devices, the global streamers focus on languages with large global audiences (English, Spanish, Hindi, and now Korean due to the popularity of K-drama) but are unlikely to invest in content made in languages perceived to have a small audience, let alone regional or endangered languages, which in Europe includes Catalan, Basque, Galician, Frisian and Irish.

That task is left to Europe’s public service broadcasters, which also have a remit to train new talent, produce special interest programming and generally contribute to building a sustainable production ecosystem. Levies and investment obligations ensure that funding continues to flow towards these broadcasters in a world in which global streamers increasingly dominate. Such legislation also ensures that funding flows to independent film producers who are then able to retain IP rights.

Of course, global streamers would argue that they contribute significantly to training and building local infrastructure, but there’s a huge difference in the way in which an individual profit-motivated company might build out that ecosystem, as compared to how a public service broadcaster might be obliged to do it (Part Two of the report, coming soon, will touch on the big debate in the UK over Netflix show Adolescence).

There’s also the issue that the number of gatekeepers in the commissioning process is shrinking in most territories. Legislation might not look market friendly on the surface, but it’s a way of ensuring that the market stays competitive. Here's a link to Part One of the report:

YouTube & Creator Economy Take Centrestage At MIPCOM

This year’s MIPCOM (October 13-16) was all about YouTube, the creator economy, brand-funded content, micro-dramas, AI and how the new wave of tech is going to replace the traditional TV industry. The messaging was clear; first the streamers, and now YouTube creators, micro-drama producer ReelShort and AI-generated Turkish TV shows are going to turn the industry on its head.

Or are they? While the hype was infectious, attending journos also noted that the age-old business of commissioning and selling formats and completed programming might only be “75% of Peak TV”, but is still driving the industry. And while the biz is inevitably changing, there needs to be more focus on who exactly is going to make money in the new landscape and how.

Still MIPCOM and the giants of the legacy TV industry were happily jumping on the creator bandwagon in Cannes. YouTube EMEA vice president Pedro Pina delivered a keynote, and the platform made its market debut with a branded space in the Palais.

Banijay signed a new pact with YouTube to launch an Entertainment Creators Lab in France and announced that it had acquired a majority stake in Dutch creators’ label Werktitel. BBC Studios also announced partnerships with YouTube to co-develop content that combines digital-native formats with BBC’s more traditional (read expensive) production infrastructure. And Fremantle announced a deal with social media specialist Viral Nation to team on a series of shows led by YouTube creators.

But the business models driving the creator space remain unclear. For sure, very few actual creators make money on YouTube – it’s a long-tail business model with around 1-2% of channels becoming whales and making decent money, while millions of tadpoles are slaving away uploading videos but not making enough to pay the rent (other platforms including TikTok, Instagram, Substack etc are not much different).

As for legacy content creators like Banijay and the BBC, YouTube might provide a distribution channel, but it doesn’t commission or acquire content – it’s a revenue-sharing model where YouTube takes a 45% cut of ad revenue. That’s not going to replace all the other declining forms of revenue, so perhaps the best way to think of the platform is as a promotional channel that leads to other ways of generating income.

As for AI, that’s another field where nobody has really figured out how to make money despite the billions being invested. So far the business model for companies like OpenAI appears to be copyright theft on a grand scale, hoping to get users hooked on Pikachu mashups and equally hoping to avoid a bunch of copyright litigation (Deadline recently had an excellent analysis of OpenAI’s Sora 2 release – it’s a fascinating if also terrifying read). Meanwhile, an AI stock market bubble is forming that will take us all down when it pops.

At least micro-dramas have a clear business plan – users are already hooked; happily pay for the next episode, and are spending more in a month than they do on all their streaming subscriptions combined. Vertical drama may not be high art but it is making money. Who knows where the industry will be when MIPCOM rolls around again this time next year.

**MIPCOM 2025: where even the BBC was jumping into bed with YouTube**

IN THE TRADES:

Warner & CJ ENM Deal; Lessons From Levies; YouTube At Mipcom

Liz Shackleton

Warner Bros, CJ ENM Deal Looks Like A Win-Win

How Streaming Levies Protect Public Broadcasters & Minority Language Programming

YouTube & Creator Economy Take Centrestage At MIPCOM

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