Orange will remove ARD and ZDF from its line-up because of their free-to-air coverage of all Euro 2016 games and replace them with Einsfestival and ZDFneo during the tournament.
The regular ARD and ZDF channels are part of the German language bouquet of Orange and the two channels are popular because of the free-to-view coverage of major sports events. However, in France Bein Sports has live rights to the Euro 2016 tournament, hence the decision of Orange to replace the two major German public channels during the event, starting June 10 and ending on July 10.
In France, just 33 Euro 2016 games are broadcast in the clear. Bein Sports has paid close to EUR60 million to broadcast 18 games exclusively on its premium sports channel, in an effort to boost its number of subscribers to three million. So far, the pay broadcaster has reached 2.8 million paying subscribers.
In Germany, by contrast, all Euro 2016 games are broadcast free-to-air on the two main public channels, ARD and ZDF, while a number of games is sub-licensed to ProSiebenSat1. This coverage is available Europe wide on the Astra satellite at 19 degrees east.
