The German VOD market is set to grow fast during the next few years, according to the latest research from Goldmedia.
During 2013 four million German were active users of VOD services with an average of eight rented titles and a further six bought titles (Download to Own).
The market is expected to grow to EUR449 million by 2018, excluding advertiser funded and free VOD services from the public broadcasters.
During the past year, the total turnover of VOD platforms was EUR163 million, of which EUR73 million was for transactional VOD services. The Download-to-Own market was good for EUR57 million, and S-VOD around EUR33 million.
At the moment, the German VOD market is very fragment with around 50 platforms. These include the so-called Mediatheken from public broadcasters ARD and ZDF, Maxdome from ProSiebenSat.1, RTL now, iTunes from Apple, Amazon’s Lovefilm, Videoload from Deutschen Telekom, Snap by Sky and Watchever from Vivendi.
Gold Media CEO Klaus Goldhammer said, “The VoD market in Germany is in transition in 2014. The basic conditions for mass market are now in place: connected devices are in the market, the bandwidth is available, the users have now experienced and the number of VoD providers is growing continuously.
“However, conditions are more difficult than elsewhere. The television channels have relatively few commercial breaks and there seems to be a low affinity for the so-called “binge viewing” providing less arguments for the all-you-can-watch- offers of Hulu or Netflix from the US. But the industry offers are now are slowly gaining momentum. Watchever is already invested millions of euros in advertising to establish VoD services in the market . The battle for the eyeballs is now wide open.”
