RTL Group does not intend to accept ProSiebenSat.1’s invitation to participate in the latter’s joint German streaming venture with Discovery for the time being.
The collaboratoin offered by the competitor is currently not an option, CEO Bert Habets said at the presentation of RTL Group’s 2018 annual report in Berlin. “We are very confident that we can develop this as an independent entity that successfully achieves growth and economies of scale,” Habets added. “We want to be among the top three streaming platforms in each of our markets.”
ProSiebenSat.1 has so far gained ZDF, Sport1 and WELT for its streaming venture which is to launch in summer 2019, aiming to become the central German OTT platform for live and on-demand TV.
According to Habets, RTL would lose too much time by entering a joint venture with ProSiebenSat.1: “These are complex negotiations. A lot of elements have to be negotiated.”
In France, however, RTL subsidiary M6 has agreed to set up a joint streaming platform together with its competitors TF1 and France Télévisions, dubbed Salto.
Originally, RTL and ProSiebenSat.1 wanted to create a joint streaming portal in Germany. The Amazonas project, however, failed in 2012 following objections from the Federal Cartel Office, which considered it to be an unacceptable concentration of market power.
