CTAM Eurosummit’15, Amsterdam. Rolling out Netflix in the US and Canada was relatively easy, but Europe is very different, according to Veed Analytics Bernd Riefler.
“Netflix empoys the one-size-fits-all model, but in Europe there are big differences in pay-TV acceptance and free-to-air television is very strong.” Also, because of rights issues the content portfolio is different for every market.
Germany and France were part of a six country launch about a year ago and in Germany they knew they started with a weak content portfolio, but “one year after launch, they certainly improved in terms of quality, not in terms of quantity.”
At Veed Analytics they benchmarked the different SVOD services, and according to that they moved to second position. “They put a strong effort on originals, they now start leveraging this content.”
Because of rights issues, a series such as House of Cards was not available on Netflix, but already airing on Sky Deutschland. The competition in various countries is different; in Germany and the UK they have to face Amazon Prime, in other markets other players such as MyPrime from UPC in addition to the traditional cable product. And there is competition from broadcasters as well as stand-alone services.
