The last six months have seen a wave of distribution announcements from European broadcasters, as they seek to expand their digital footprint in order to offset declines in linear TV viewership. Today German broadcasters ProSiebenSat.1 and Deutsche Telekom announced an extension of their distribution partnership, which will integrate the Joyn PLUS+ SVOD service into the telco’s TV offering.
The companies already collaborate on distribution in Germany, having struck an agreement in 2024 to make all of Joyn’s ad-supported content available on the MagentaTV streaming service. In addition, MagentaTV subscribers can watch all of ProSieben’s free and pay-TV linear channels on the streaming service.
The new five-year partnership extends those agreements, while enabling Telekom customers to subscribe to Joyn PLUS+, the ad-free version of ProSieben’s streaming service, directly through the telco at a discounted rate for a 12-month subscription.
The broadcasters are also collaborating on making ProSieben content more visible on MagentaTV, according to the partners, including shows that arrive on Joyn PLUS+ before they are broadcast on TV. These include Die Landarztpraxis (The Country Doctor’s Office), Wer stiehlt mir die Show? (Stealing the Show) and The Voice of Germany.
Ad sales for ProSieben content running on MagentaTV will be handled by ProSiebenSat.1’s sales house, Seven.One Media. The media unit will market addressable TV spots across its own channel portfolio, including on MagentaTV. The partners are working closely together on the technological side to facilitate this integration, according to the businesses.
“The close cooperation between ProSiebenSat.1 and Telekom beyond the distribution of our linear channels is already a tradition,” said Nicole Agudo-Berbel, Managing Director and Chief Distribution Officer at ProSiebenSat.1. “Now we are taking this partnership to the next level. As a first step, our SVOD offering Joyn PLUS+ can now be booked directly through Telekom. In addition, we are working closely together to market our content on the MagentaTV platform and are continuing to develop this cooperation over the long-term. As ProSiebenSat.1, we are thus securing maximum reach for our content – and creating innovative sales opportunities for Seven.One Media.”
Joyning forces
The partnership sees ProSieben move to bolster its position in the face of mounting competition from global streaming services, as well as domestic rival RTL Deutschland. Last month, RTL announced that its streaming service RTL+ will exclusively bundle Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD) HBO Max, as the US-owned SVOD service rolls out across Europe.
RTL Group and WBD are also close collaboraters on the advertising front. RTL’s sales house Ad Alliance already handled ad sales for HBO Max, and this year, the media groups are joining forces to form a joint ad sales company called El Cartel Brothers. The joint venture sees WBD and RTL Zwei, a German broadcaster owned by RTL Deutschland, jointly sell their TV and digital inventories in Germany.
And with RTL Group’s acquisition of Sky Deutschland on track to receive regulatory approval this year, ProSieben’s new owners MFE-MediaForEurope are seeking partnerships that can bring scale to the German broadcaster’s offering – though that scale may be limited by the slow customer growth of MagentaTV, argues François Godard, Media and Telecoms Analyst at Enders Analysis.
“This was overdue,” comments Godard. “The new MFE management is rightly moving to make the ProSieben content available on more platforms and MagentaTV is an obvious place to start as it poses no strategic threat. However, note that Magenta has low penetration with only 4.7 million subscribers (barely about 11 percent of German homes) and is growing very slowly, with only 135,000 subscribers added in the past four quarters.”
And from MFE’s perspective, the merger between RTL and Sky Deutschland poses wider threats from the SVOD giants, given the availability of Netflix and Paramount+ on Sky platforms in Germany.
“RTL has geared up its platform strategy as it just became an aggregator with HBO now available on RTL+, and if its merger with Sky Deutschland is approved (as appears likely), RTL will find itself in partnership with other major streamers like Netflix and Paramount+,” adds Godard. “Let’s be clear: alone, in a very competitive digital world, without consolidation of alliances, ProSieben may be sub-scale.”
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