RTL Group’s CEO Guillaume de Poche is reaching out to cable operators to cooperate creating opportunities in the changing world of television.
The broadcaster is meeting the challenges with a number of new initiatives including creating branded premium channels, S-VOD services and platforms for short-form videos.
“We have the know how to create new channels and brands,” said De Poche, naming the joint venture with CBS in South-East Asia as an example of creating new channels for cable with content from CBS and RTL Group’s Fremantle.
In the nonlinear world, RTL also has VOD rights and digital brands across platforms. “SVOD portals are a new competitor for us,” so the broadcaster needs to be part of that game as well.
RTL Group also heavily invests in Low costs short form videos. In Germany, the broadcaster is active with its Clipfish portals.
Last year, the company acquired an US company, SpotXchange, which specialises in auction-based sales based on real-time bidding, now processing billions of transactions a day.
In this field, De Posch also expects to work together with cable operators, “Cable companies have consumer data on managed platforms, we can bring targeted advertising with worldwide programmatic exchange to the venture, so
we can build additional business together.”
With Netflix the RTL Group has a schizophrenic relationship, “We are competitors for the distribution side with them, but on the production side Freemantle just sold a TV series for SVOD to them.”
