International media giant Disney has announced a new deal with German public-service broadcaster ZDF’s studios division, which will see a curated collection of ZDF’s films and TV series hosted in a dedicated section on Disney+ in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The partnership, which goes live today, will include over 3,000 TV episodes and films by the end of the year, bringing thousands of hours of German-produced content to the Disney+ platform.
ZDF Studios has previously licensed several series to Disney+. But this new deal will bring a much larger set of ZDF’s content to the platform, presented under ZDF branding with a ‘ZDF Films and Series’ banner.
“This deal marks an exciting new milestone built on our collaboration with leading European broadcasters,” said Karl Holmes, GM for Disney+ EMEA. “We’ve long admired the distinctive storytelling of ZDF’s films and series, and we’re delighted to bring even more local content to Disney+ customers in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, offering an even richer variety of stories to enjoy.”
The announcement adds to a spate of tie-ups between European broadcasters and international streaming services over the past summer, as the US-based giants seek to bolster their supplies of local content across Europe.
Searching for Growth in Europe
The nature of the deal places it somewhere between the partnership which France’s TF1 announced with Netflix at this year’s Cannes Lions, and an agreement Disney itself struck with ITV in the UK last month.
As with Disney’s ITV deal, Disney+ will host a curated selection of ZDF’s content. This is in contrast to Netflix’s partnership with TF1, which will see all of TF1’s content, including its linear channels, made available on Netflix in France. That’s clearly not the case here. Disney says that in the future, it will get access to some new seasons of select ZDF series (suggesting the initial batch of content will mostly be older content), but those shows will only arrive on Disney+ months after the linear TV broadcaster. The ITV deal meanwhile runs both ways, with ITV hosting Disney+ shows on its own streaming service, which isn’t the case with the ZDF partnership.
While the exact workings of these deals are different in each case, there’s a shared logic running across them all.
Aside from the financial arrangements in each case (which haven’t been disclosed), the European broadcasters benefit from essentially marketing their content offering to a wider streaming audience. While there will be a significant overlap between ZDF’s audience and Disney+’s subscriber base in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, there will also undoubtedly be audiences on Disney+ which don’t really engage with ZDF. If these audiences like the ZDF content they find on Disney+, that might attract them across to ZDF’s own service or linear channels (hence the importance for broadcasters maintaining their branding within the streaming interface across these deals).
For the international SVOD services meanwhile, these agreements help them quickly grow their libraries of local content, helping attract more subscribers. The major streaming services have tended to invest heavily in producing local content in international markets already. Disney lists ‘An Interpreter of Silence’, ‘Sam — A Saxon’, and upcoming series ‘Call my Agent Berlin’ among its original German productions.
The benefit to the streaming services for creating content themselves is that it’s then typically easier to distribute that content internationally, and in doing so, shows and films made specifically for one market can find global audiences.
But the downside to this strategy is it takes time, as well as significant resources, to grow a significant library of local content in multiple major international markets. This summer’s spate of deals perhaps suggests that the big streaming services are keen to step up the pace of their growth in Europe. This makes sense given that Nielsen’s data shows that the streaming wars have largely stagnated in the US — YouTube is the only company which has consistently grown its share of total TV viewership over the past year.
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