TRO | The Premier League Launches Its Own Streaming Service, Starting In Singapore

Plus, Qwen Becomes The World's Most Downloaded AI Model and Stripe Acquires OpenRouter For More Than US$7 Billion

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Meliora Company
August 24, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

 Subscribe | 24th August, 2026

In this fast-moving Vertical AI economy, headlines are everywhere but optimism is rare.

Here’s our take on 3 stories that will help you be relentlessly optimistic about the future.

1. The Premier League Launches Its Own Streaming Service, Starting In Singapore

The Premier League has launched Premier League+, its first direct-to-fan streaming service, beginning in Singapore in partnership with long-term broadcast partner StarHub. Subscribers get access to all 380 live Premier League matches alongside multi-camera viewing, live data overlays, dedicated club hubs, and a 24/7 channel from Premier League Studios featuring live football, documentaries, and original programming. Flexible subscription options include 24-hour, monthly, and annual passes. The service launched globally as the new Premier League season kicked off last week.

Here’s why this matters: Sport is the last category that has resisted streaming's disruption of traditional broadcasting, and the Premier League has been the most valuable holdout of all. Launching its own direct-to-fan platform is a significant strategic signal: the most watched football league in the world is beginning to build a direct relationship with its global audience, bypassing traditional broadcast intermediaries for the first time. Singapore is the test case, but the direction of travel is clear. For broadcasters, rights holders, and telecoms companies with sports streaming assets, the Premier League moving toward a direct model raises an important question about the long-term value of third-party sports rights in a world where rights holders can reach fans themselves.

2. Qwen Becomes The World’s Most Downloaded AI Model

Alibaba's open-weight model family Qwen has accumulated more than 3 billion global downloads in the past six months, overtaking Meta and Google to become the world's most downloaded AI model. Google recorded 418 million downloads and Meta 227 million in the same period. Qwen has open-sourced more than 460 models and its ecosystem has spawned over 300,000 derivative models, making it one of the largest foundations of the open AI ecosystem. Alibaba has bolstered adoption by distributing Qwen through its cloud platform to enterprise customers across Southeast Asia and Africa, giving it a reach that most rivals lack.

Here’s why this matters: Downloads are not revenue, but in the open-weight AI race they are a meaningful proxy for influence. The models developers choose to fine-tune and build on top of today become the default infrastructure of tomorrow's products. Qwen reaching 3 billion downloads, while Meta and Google sit at a fraction of that figure, suggests Alibaba's strategy of open-sourcing prolifically and distributing through cloud and enterprise channels is working at scale. For the broader US-China AI race, the data provides important context for the debate over restricting Chinese models. The brief ban on Anthropic's Fable 5 this summer did not slow Chinese competitors. In the open-weight layer of the AI economy, China is already ahead.

3. Stripe Acquires AI Start-Up OpenRouter For More Than US$7 Billion

Stripe has finalised a deal to acquire OpenRouter, the AI model gateway start-up that helps developers and enterprises select and switch between different AI models depending on their needs and budget, for more than US$7 billion. OpenRouter was valued at US$1.3 billion just three months ago after raising a US$113 million Series B backed by Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, and Alphabet's CapitalG. The platform provides a single access point to more than 400 AI models and has 8 million global users. OpenRouter's CEO had described the company as the Stripe for AI, making the acquisition a case of Stripe acquiring its own analogue.

Here’s why this matters: Stripe built one of the most valuable fintech businesses in history by solving a specific but universal problem: making it easy for any developer to accept payments regardless of the underlying complexity. OpenRouter has been solving the equivalent problem for AI: making it easy for any developer to access any model without being locked into a single provider. The acquisition signals that Stripe sees AI infrastructure as the next layer of the developer economy it wants to own. The combination of Stripe's payment rails and OpenRouter's model-agnostic AI gateway is a powerful one. The businesses that can sit between AI models and the applications built on top of them, handling routing, billing, and compliance, are quietly becoming some of the most strategically valuable in the stack.

Upcoming Keynote: Radio Workshop 2026

Meliora Managing Partner, Clive Dickens, is joining the RW26 line up in Budapest, Hungary, to present:

Disruption As An Enabler - How AI Can Transform Your Stories, Engagement and Value

Register now and join us as we discuss the future of radio, at Radio Workshop.

30th September
10:10am CEST / 9:10am BST / 6:10pm AEST

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The Pursuit of Better, Together

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