DLA Piper, the international law firm and regular contributor to TVBEurope, has released the latest in a series of market insights from its global Media, Sport and Entertainment Hub, that seeks to provide intelligence on the various legal and commercial issues impacting the respective industries.
Its focus on the German broadcast media market has unearthed a number of trends that it perceives to be accelerating change domestically.
“One particular recent trend we have seen in Germany is the convergence of the broadcast media sectors,” it states. “There has been a massive growth in the use of internet-delivered catch-up services, such as (i) Mediathek, from ARD and ZDF, (ii) MyVideo, from ProSiebenSat1 and (iii) Clipfish, from RTL.
“Online streaming and video-on-demand platforms such as Netflix, which entered the German market in September 2014, and its competitors Watchever, Maxdome and Amazon Prime complement the classical TV formats but also cause a certain cannibalisation. Furthermore, IPTV offered by telecom operators such as Deutsche Telekom is expected to become a strong competitor to the existing means of TV distribution. However, according to the 2014 Digitisation Report by the media authorities the percentage of IPTV users has, for the first time in years, not increased, meaning that five per cent (1.9 million TV households) used this means of transmission.”
You can read more insights from DLA Piper’s Media, Sports and Entertainment practice here.
