Sky Deutschland bullish over growth

Sky Deutschland is on-target to become EBITDA positive for the first time this year, benefitting from an increasingly “down-market” free-to-air market in country, according to vice president of on-demand programming Peter Schulz. 

Speaking at the Connected TV World Summit in London, Schulz said that Sky Deutschland still has a lot of potential to grow, with 3.4 million households subscribing to the service out of 38 million pay TV households, adding that Sky’s on-demand services are adding value to its core linear product and are helping it to “speak to a new type of customer.”

“For the first time in history, we’re confident that this year on a yearly basis we will become EBITDA positive. So we’re on a turning point and we’re right in the middle of that new era of television,” said Schulz.

“As many of you will know, for many years pay TV has struggled in Germany and there’s still a well established universe of free-to-air channels, operated by public broadcasters – two major private channel groups and of course a big variety of independent channels on top of that. These channels are all fighting each other for market share, but in that respect they seem to be placing their bets on volume, not so much on quality programming,” he added.

Schulz said that while ad spend has not increased over the last couple of years, channel numbers keep increasing meaning that “content is spreading thinner across more channels.”

“The trend is obvious. Free-to-air is even more down-market than ever before. And even though there are more channels to choose from, the value perception of the proposition of free-to-air television seems less compelling, which drives even more people to quality pay services,” he said.