12/01/2026 - Outside the United States, broadcasters show slightly greater resilience, with many maintaining broadly stable investment levels

Global content investment is forecast to reach $255 billion (€218.38 billion) in 2026, marking a 2% year-on-year increase, according to new projections released by British firm Ampere Analysis. While overall growth remains modest, the figures point to a continued rebalancing of the global audiovisual market, driven primarily by the sustained expansion of international streaming platforms and their growing dominance in content spending.

According to Ampere’s estimates, global streaming services —across both ad-funded and subscription-based models— are expected to invest $101 billion (€86.5 billion) in content in 2026, accounting for around 40% of total global spend. This makes streamers the main driver of market growth, further consolidating their leadership position as traditional broadcast models face mounting financial constraints.

In contrast, pay-TV operators, commercial broadcasters and public broadcasters are projected to experience stagnant or declining investment levels over the same period. Ampere attributes this trend to ongoing pressure on advertising revenues, coupled with rising production costs, which continue to limit broadcasters’ capacity to scale content output. The result is a widening gap between globally operating streaming platforms and locally focused broadcasters, particularly in markets where advertising recovery has been slow following the pandemic.

The divergence is most pronounced in the United States, where commercial broadcasters are increasingly reducing content spend as studio parent groups redirect budgets toward their proprietary streaming services. Outside the USA, broadcasters show slightly greater resilience, with many maintaining broadly stable investment levels through 2026. However, Ampere cautions that this relative stability does not amount to renewed growth, but rather reflects a defensive effort to sustain output amid increasingly challenging market conditions.

Despite these pressures, 2026 is expected to benefit from a cyclical uplift in content spending linked to major global sporting events, including the football World Cup and the Winter Olympics. Historically anchored within broadcast television schedules, premium sports rights are now increasingly contested by streaming platforms, which continue to integrate live sports into their long-term audience-growth strategies. Services such as Amazon Prime Video have already secured major rights packages, including long-term NBA agreements extending into 2026, underscoring the strategic importance of sports content within the streaming ecosystem.

Commenting on the findings, Peter Ingram, Research Manager at Ampere Analysis, said: “Spend in 2025 was in line with Ampere’s expectations, marked by streamers overtaking commercial broadcasters for overall contribution to the content spend landscape for the first time. In 2026, we expect streamers to further build on this, seeing 6% growth in expenditure. The accelerating shift in content investment toward streaming underscores a structural rebalancing of the global TV market, with scale and reach emerging as the central competitive differentiators for operators to remain buoyant.”