Broadcasters need freedom to diversify revenues, says RTL’s Rudas

Free-to-air broadcasters need the freedom to develop new advertising models and also need to diversify their revenue streams by building pay TV windows and other opportunities, according to Andreas Rudas, RTL’s executive vice-president regional operations and business development CEE and Asia.

Rudas told attendees at Informa’s Digital TV CEE conference in Prague yesterday that it would be important for broadcasters including RTL to develop new sources of advertising revenue over the next few years. He said that it was often difficult to convince regulators and politicians to allow changes in the advertising model, but that it is imperative that these problems are resolved and that new models are given the green light, he said.

Rudas also said that it was increasingly important to deliver secondary revenue streams. He said that there was a need to retain distribution fees for carriage of free channels and a need to build pay TV services to complement free-to-air services. Examples of the latter include advanced pay TV-only releases of shows that will subsequently be aired on linear TV.

Other activities that can increase revenues from non linear TV activities include the development of online games, home shopping and e-commerce, said Rudas.

He said that the growth of non-linear TV consumption was also something that the industry had to embrace but that broadcasters had a need to retain control of what they produced.