Russia’s Gazprom-Media has announced plans to create a Shared Service Centre (SSC) for all its assets.
They will be implemented in 2021-2022 and see its subsidiary GPM Partner become a unified service company for the assets, starting with the GPM Entertainment TV sub-holding (GPM RTV, the sports sub-holding GPM Match and digital projects).
The SSC will be headed by Ekaterina Yurchenko and will, according to Alexander Zharov, the general director of Gazprom-Media, “help relieve the creative team from routine back-office functions and give asset managers the opportunity to focus on their main tasks – production, marketing and promotion of high-quality multi-genre content that will be in demand in all environments by a multi-million audience in Russia and in the world”.
Separately, Gazprom-Media has provided an update on the performance of its channel Match TV, which made its debut five years ago. Since its launch, the volume of sports broadcasts on the channel has increased by 34% and currently stands at around 60%. On average, around 9 million people watch Match TV every day and the channel produces more than 2,000 sports broadcasts and over 5,000 hours of sports premieres per year.
The total volume of sports content in the last five years amounted to 35,179 hours, of which 9,726 hours were live broadcasts. All told, the channel showed 94 kinds of sports. It produced over 170 series, almost 100 documentaries and around 1,000 special reports. Match TV’s coverage continues to expand and it is now available in about 70 Russian cities, as well as over 33 countries, including Brazil, South Korea and the UAE.