News

End of 2018 the news has been dominated by the mega mergers’ announcement among US media companies and the launch of their VOD services.

Over the first few months of 2019 Europe is back in the news with a wave of mergers that if they do not have the magnitude of their US counterpart are signs of the very same consolidation phenomena. The most prominent one is Vodafone / Liberty Global. Recently we have seen the emergence of what could become a German Studio building on the KKR acquisition of Universum, Tele München, i&u Wiedemann & Berg.

There is a popular believe that everything is available on line. The sheer magnitude of content accessible through the different VOD services (Add, Transaction, Subscription, Free) seems to prove the point but is it the really the case?

To limit the scope, the purpose is not to deep dive in the fascinating topic of regional licensing or windowing but to focus on the reality of viewer consumption and the basic economics of a VOD service.

I wrote quite a few posts on the necessity for European media organization to team up in an OTT landscape that changes the multinational and where scale is a more significant success factor then regionalization. Many initiatives describe themselves as the French, Spanish, German or British Hulu. It is mainly because similarly to Hulu they are joined ventures of existing broadcast media organizations.

For those of you not familiar with the IBC trade show in Amsterdam many of the following references will sound cryptic. Every year over 55.000 broadcast media professionals from around the world gather in Amsterdam for a massive 5 days trade show with 1.700 exhibitors the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC). Since 2012 despite a continuous wave of M&As the floor space requirement growth has pushed the organizers to create an extra hall 14 in form of an oversized tent.