There was a time, not so long ago, when the phrase "streaming is now profitable" would have been greeted on both sides of the Atlantic with the same skepticism one might reserve for a claim that a new restaurant had opened in Times Square serving authentic local cuisine.

But Clement Schwebig, the chief executive of RTL Group, Europe's largest television company, is now making precisely that assertion — and with numbers to support it.

In first-half results released Tuesday, RTL reported that streaming revenue rose 27.2 percent, to $345 million, more than offsetting declines in its traditional television business. The company's streaming operations, Mr. Schwebig said, will contribute roughly $115 million to operating profit this year.

"Streaming is no longer an investment story for RTL Group," he said. "It is a profitability story."

The shift comes as European broadcasters have embarked on a consolidation spree that would have seemed improbable even five years ago. Last month, Comcast's Sky agreed to acquire ITV, the British commercial broadcaster, for $2.13 billion. MediaForEurope, the television group controlled by the Berlusconi family, has assembled a pan-European collection that now includes majority control of Germany's ProSiebenSat.1.

RTL, which is a subsidiary of the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann and owns the production company Fremantle, completed its own significant acquisition in June, absorbing Comcast's German pay-television operation, Sky Deutschland. The combined streaming platform now claims 12.4 million paid subscriptions in German-speaking Europe — enough, the company says, to place it third in the market, behind Netflix and Amazon Prime.

(Whether "striking distance" to those two constitutes a sprint or a marathon remains to be seen.)

Mr. Schwebig expressed continued interest in consolidation in France, where RTL owns the commercial channel M6 and has been a shareholder since the network's launch in 1987. A previous attempt to merge M6 with TF1 collapsed in 2022 after French regulators raised competition concerns.

"We remain convinced that market consolidation will also happen in France sooner or later," Mr. Schwebig said. "Otherwise, the global players will dominate the European markets."

That, of course, is the reasoning that has driven nearly every media merger of the past decade. Scale, the thinking goes, is the only defense against platforms that already have it.

Original story published in The Hollywood Reporter: "RTL Boss Clement Schwebig on the Hybrid Future of European TV: "Scale Is Essential"