2015 will undoubtedly go down as one of the most eventful years in the Polish broadcaster TVN’s history.
Following on from a major change in ownership that saw it acquired by Scripps Networks Interactive – initially a 52.7% stake in July, rising to total control at the beginning of this month, with delisting from the Warsaw Stock Exchange soon to follow – TVN is moving ahead on a number of fronts.
This was witnessed earlier this week through a number of announcements in and around MIPCOM and gave evidence, if it was needed, of its new owner’s strong focus on content.
Firstly, we saw TVN enter into an exclusive agreement with Disney Media Distribution CEE for free and basic subscription rights, as well as catch-up and SVOD rights, to the studio’s film and TV content.
This was followed by the news that the broadcaster will make its VOD service Player.pl available on Samsung smart TVs and mobile devices and that it will start producing a number of original series exclusively for the service.
The latter is being driven by the fact that local content is much more popular than that licensed from outside Poland. By adding more to its portfolio, it hopes to further strengthen Player.pl’s market leadership, with the service already claiming 1.3 million registered users and an average monthly viewing time of eight hours and 25 minutes.
Interestingly, a study by the media house MEC earlier this year found that viewers regarded TVN as offering the most interesting programming online. The 27% that held this view was a full 10 percentage points more than those who opted for Polsat.
On the other hand, viewers also had a more favourable view of ipla, the VOD service operated by Polsat, than TVN’s Player.pl. This was probably because ipla had a stronger brand name, and/or the services were not automatically associated with their respective owners.
What is clear from all this is that competition in the Polish TV marketplace is likely to become even more intensive, with on demand services such as those offered by TVN and Polsat one of the main battlegrounds of that competition.
