ProSiebenSat.1 and Discovery have won ZDF as a participant in their joint German streaming portal.
“We have just signed an agreement with ZDF,” ProSiebenSat.1 CEO Max Conze said at the company’s Capital Markets Day in Munich. In around one month the channels ZDF, ZDFinfo and ZDFneo will become available on the current platform 7TV as live-streams.
ZDF is the first public broadcaster to join the platform. The broadcaster recently said that it would approach the Federal Cartel Office in order to determine whether a participation was legally possible after similar attempts – the projects Germany’s Gold and Amazonas – had previously been blocked by the anti-trust authority.
Further partners are Axel Springer with news channel WELT and documentary channel N24 Doku as well as Constantin Medien with sports channel Sport1.
In June 2018, ProSiebenSat.1 and Discovery announced their intention to expand 7TV into a joint streaming platform of all major German TV broadcasters, which could turn out to become the German equivalent of US portal Hulu. They invited ARD, ZDF and RTL to participate.
ProSiebenSat.1 will contribute its video-on-demand-service maxdome and Discovery subsidiary Eurosport its Eurosport Player to the platform launching in the first half of 2019. Both services will then no longer be offered as individual stand-alone products.