Streaming, Gaming and Betting: How Europe Divides Its Entertainment Wallet

Deloitte’s Digital Media Trends research keeps landing on the same observation: entertainment time in Europe no longer flows in one direction. Audiences, and younger audiences in particular, now spread their hours fairly evenly across television and film, streaming video, social platforms and gaming, rather than committing to a single format for the evening. The money moves the same way. Three digital leisure categories, subscription streaming, video games and online betting, have each grown into markets worth tens of billions of euros, and the way Europeans allocate spending across them offers a clear read on how post-pandemic habits settled rather than snapped back.

What makes the picture interesting is that these categories increasingly compete for the same finite pool of attention and discretionary income. A household that adds a second streaming tier, a battle pass and a weekend betting account is drawing from one budget, not three separate ones. That competition is starting to shape how each industry prices, packages and retains its customers.

Streaming remains the anchor of the digital leisure economy. Data compiled by the European Audiovisual Observatory and reported by Variety put the wider European audiovisual industry at roughly 165 billion dollars, with subscription video on demand accounting for around 60 percent of all pay-service subscriptions in 2024, against 40 percent for traditional pay TV. Notably, most of that growth now comes from price increases and ad-supported tiers rather than a rush of new subscribers. Futuresource Consulting recorded streaming revenue climbing 16 percent in Spain, 14 percent in Italy and 12 percent in Poland across the same year, a sign that the maturing markets of Western Europe are being joined by faster movers further east.

Online betting has become a larger slice of that wallet than casual observers tend to assume. According to the European Gaming and Betting Association, total European gross gaming revenue reached 123.4 billion euros in 2024, of which online play contributed 47.9 billion euros, or 39 percent of the total, up from 37 percent the year before. The association expects the online share to cross 40 percent in 2025 and to approach parity with land-based gambling by the end of the decade. That national fragmentation is easy to lose behind the headline totals, though. A detailed article about online casinos in Europe sets out how the market divides country by country, from Sweden’s licence-based framework to Germany’s tight slot restrictions and Italy’s ADM regime, which explains why the online segment behaves less like a single European bloc and more like two dozen separate markets sharing a continent. For a household choosing where its leisure spend goes, the local licensing picture often matters more than any pan-European figure.

Gaming completes the trio, and it is closing the gap. Figures from VideoGamesEurope and the European Games Developer Federation valued the European video game market at 26.8 billion euros in 2024, a 4 percent rise on the previous year, with digital distribution now making up 90 percent of sales. Mobile accounts for close to half of that revenue, and roughly 54 percent of the European population plays in some form, a base of about 127 million people. Gaming’s monetisation model, built on free entry points, in-app purchases and recurring season passes, mirrors the shift toward smaller, repeated payments that streaming and betting have also adopted. The old model of a single upfront purchase has quietly given way to ongoing spend.

Set side by side, the three markets tell a consistent story about consumer behaviour after the pandemic. Households are not cutting entertainment; they are recalibrating it. Deloitte’s surveys have logged elevated subscription cancellations driven by price sensitivity, yet total engagement has held up because viewers rotate between services and formats instead of leaving them behind. The same instinct shows up across entertainment media: consumers keep the categories they value, trim the ones they do not, and expect flexible, session-based access whether they are watching a series, loading a game or placing a bet. Ad-supported tiers, pay-as-you-play mechanics and licence-driven local offerings are all answers to the same underlying question of how to keep a share of a wallet that everyone is competing for.

The through-line is that digital leisure in Europe has stopped being a set of separate hobbies and started to behave like a single, contested market. Streaming set the template for on-demand access, gaming normalised recurring micro-spending, and online betting adopted both while remaining shaped by national rules that vary from one border to the next. For anyone tracking where European entertainment money goes next, the movement between these three categories, rather than the growth of any one of them, is the number worth watching.