Although much is written about streaming services in Central and Eastern Europe, their take-up figures are often hard to come by.
Some have nevertheless recently been published and are worth discussing. RTL Group, for instance, has just announced that its RTL+ service in Hungary, which also includes RTL+ Active, ended the first quarter with 277,000 paying subscribers.
RTL+ was launched last November, formed by the merger of RTL Most and RTL Most+ and employing the technology of RTL Group’s streaming tech company Bedrock. It effectively operates three services, using ad-free D2C subscription, TV subscription and ad-funded models.
Although RTL+’s subscriber figures are dwarfed by those of RTL Group’s steaming services in Germany and the Netherlands, which ended the first quarter with a combined total of 5.632 million paying subscribers, it is nevertheless making its mark in Hungary.
Meanwhile in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the streamer Voyo has reached the half-million subscriber mark and is now the most popular such service in the two countries. Operated by Central European Media Enterprises (CME), it made its debut as far back as 2011 and was re-launched two years ago with a strong focus on local content.
However, competition in both countries remains intense. Earlier this year saw Prima Group launch prima+, which is billed as the only flexible video service in the Czech Republic and offers viewers the choice of three tariffs. Canal+ has also just launched a streaming platform in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Elsewhere, CDA is one of the few operators of streaming services in Poland to publish its subscriber figures. Some of the most recent ones show that it ended Q2 2022 with a total of 423,000 active ones to its CDA Premium and CDA TV Start and Basic packages.
Streaming subscriber figures seem to be more readily available in Russia. We know, for instance, that Tricolor’s and Gazprom-Media’s services ended 2022 with 2.6 million and 3.6 million respectively. Up-to-date figures for leading platforms such as for Kinopoisk, ivi Wink and Okko may also soon be made public.
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