Posted on Nov 5, 2021 8:49 AMUpdated Nov 5, 2021, 8:52 AM
Faced with the giants Netflix and Amazon Prime, Bertelsmann has taken a new step in streaming. The German group is promising an all-in-one entertainment app for next spring. Announced Thursday by Thomas Rabe, CEO of Bertelsmann and Chairman of the Executive Board of RTL, this unprecedented offer called RTL + will bring together on a single platform all of Bertelsmann’s media assets, from television to audiobooks, including music, podcasts and the press is shopping.
Developed from RTL’s TVNOW streaming platform, it will be exclusively available in Germany. “We want to offer a new service but also a new user experience,” Henning Nieslony, RTL vice-president in charge of product development, told the Berlin press. Faced with the fragmentation of streaming offers – each German household has an average of four subscriptions – the objective is to offer entertainment “a home”.
“Watch more, listen more, read more”
To do this, the group will use artificial intelligence in order to offer each subscriber a series of targeted and easy-to-access products according to their consumption profile. The novelty is that the recommendations will be cross-media and that they can accompany the subscriber throughout the day, or even at the same time if he wants to read in music. “The motto is watch more, listen more, read more”, summarizes Stephan Schäffer, co-managing director of RTL Deutschland and Grüner + Jahr.
Bertelsmann thus concretizes the logic of the announced merger of its subsidiary RTL Group with its publisher Gruner + Jahr, which must be completed at the beginning of next year. In addition to the latter’s press titles and more than 50,000 hours of RTL TV programs, RTL + will offer audio books from Bertelsmann’s publishing subsidiary Penguin Random House. RTL also signed a long-term agreement with Deezer to distribute the catalog of the music platform. In the music industry, Bertelsmann owns BMG, which is primarily a copyright publisher but has started building up a catalog of recorded music again by buying labels.
Objective of ten million subscribers in 2026
RTL, the German number one in audiovisual streaming, also intends to triple its annual investments in programs to reach 600 million euros by 2026 and offer on average one new in-house program per week. By the end of 2026, he hopes to have convinced ten million people to subscribe to his RTL + and Videoland platform in the Netherlands, against 3.4 million currently, including 2.4 million for RTL +.
Its distribution agreement signed a year ago with Deutsche Telekom is an asset: RTL + will be integrated into the telecom group’s TV platform, Magenta TV, which has more than 4 million customers. Enough to make Thomas Rabe hope to achieve profitability and a billion euros in turnover in streaming in 2026, against 162 million euros in 2020.
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