Molotov, France's TV streaming pioneer, started selling its platform to other broadcasters

Molotov is a French streaming service — live TV, cloud recording and catch-up over apps instead of a set-top box — with millions of users.

Molotov launched as a Spotify-like client for French TV before YouTube TV or Hulu with Live TV existed. CEO Jean-David Blanc's team turned that stack into an internal service agency — 'we had to create a service company within Molotov' — headed by Francois Le Pichon.

At launch it already worked with a telecom client serving multiple countries and a media company consolidating several country services onto one platform, with early talks underway at other telecoms. Clients get their own branded apps with everything compartmentalised; Molotov expects multi-year contracts and provides ongoing support and updates.

The stack was already proven at consumer scale in a market Molotov entered before YouTube TV — the sales story is the product itself.

Multi-year B2B contracts diversify revenue for a consumer streaming business still building scale.

White-label with strict compartmentalisation lets it serve rival media and telecom brands without leaking strategy between clients.

Consumer products that solve hard infrastructure problems own a B2B business waiting to be unfrozen — run it as a separate service company inside, the way MLB spun BAMTech out of MLB.tv.

As of June 2020 the division had unnamed clients in pilot and expected multi-year contracts; Blanc said spinning it off with separate fundraising and international expansion was a longer-term possibility.