Bedrock’s Jonas Engwall Talks Streaming Innovation

The Connected TV Festival kicked off today with a keynote Q&A with Bedrock Streaming CEO Jonas Engwall, who highlighted how the company’s technology solutions are helping broadcasters scale their streaming capabilities.

In a conversation with World Screen’s Mansha Daswani that you can view here, Engwall discussed how Bedrock worked with M6 on the rollout of M6+ and weighed in on AI tools and innovation.

Part of the broader Bertelsmann organization, Bedrock powers Videoland in the Netherlands and recently partnered with M6 Group on the rollout of M6+. The 500-person organization has a footprint across ten European countries.

“We have 45 million users across 60 kinds of devices,” Engwall said. While dating back to 2008, the company’s evolution into what it is today began in 2019, when Bertelsmann and RTL Group “decided to double down on streaming. We quickly came to the conclusion that we need to do this in a more organized way and centralize our resources much more.”

As such, while the back-end technology is largely the same across its client base, “for the end user, everything is so configurable. Each partner will choose how the platform should engage and its content and business models.”

Being part of Bertelsmann has been key for Bedrock in scaling its business. “This is a symbiotic relationship,” Engwall said. “The whole basis for Bedrock is scale. We need scale to compete with the global giants. The user’s expectations are set by global giants, even if you’re a small player in one country. To be able to play in that league, you simply need scale. We reach that scale across the countries. This is what we offer to our partners. We can create a platform that is way better than they can do themselves at a cost that is lower than they would spend doing it themselves. It’s a good setup—better product and lower price, what’s not to like?”

Engwall then discussed M6’s journey in France as it rebranded 6play into M6+ with a host of new functionalities, courtesy of the Bedrock tech stack and informed by the company’s previous experience with Videoland in the Netherlands. The relaunch saw the service become available on a host of additional devices, among a raft of other enhancements. Engwall highlighted the success of short-form vertical videos. “This was a little bit of a test,” Engwall said. “Both Bedrock and M6 were gung ho about the idea, but it was still unproven. It turned out to be super successful. The short-form is linked to the long-form content. The conversion rates are between 20 and 30 percent—people watch the short-form and then go and watch the long-form. It’s a good funnel to find content.”

Bedrock also enabled M6+ to launch podcasts and a range of interactive features around the EUROs last year in partnership with Ease Live. Next up for Bedrock will be becoming the home of RTL+ in Germany. “We target to have that migration done in the first half of 2026,” Engwall said. “It’s a pretty large project. We’re migrating by then, probably, 7 or 8 million paying subscribers and several million AVOD users.”

As broadcasters look for new ways to engage with audiences, Bedrock is ensuring that it offers its clients a broad range of experiences and business models to operate in. “We have podcasts, audiobooks, music and radio. Our clients are doing AVOD, SVOD and somewhere in the middle. We have pretty much all devices—it’s 60-plus by now. We can help pivot their streaming. We can make them operate in a cutting-edge environment, at a cost level that is lower than they have today.”

For tracking innovation happening around the world, Bedrock offices in Paris and Lyon have “streaming walls,” which Engwall describes as “rooms full of lots of devices. The whole idea is to give access to the world. We want to have fairly sophisticated research capabilities that are not just ad hoc. Often, when you travel, you anecdotally discover things. Here, we can do it in a structured way. We have access to 40 or 50 platforms around the world, across China, Asia, Australia, the U.S., South America and Europe. We can look at those on different devices. It is a window into the world.”

The conversation then moved to AI, and how machine learning is being used in a range of ways at Bedrock to drive efficiencies. The greatest potential, Engwall said, is in its AI’s ability to reshape discoverability and personalization tools. “As an industry, we haven’t tackled that challenge well. With the AI tools, we can make it better for the end user and make content discovery easier. It’s going to be your AI friend helping you find content.”

On the KPIs he’s focusing on in the months ahead, Engwall noted, “We look at the same KPIs as our clients. We want content to be discovered fast. We obviously want subscriptions to increase and time spent to be high.”