Article on German TV in the weekly newspaper The Economist. The last redoubt

The Economist, Jul 29th 2010. Another push to sell pay-television to the Germans  (based on an interview with the Managing Director of Goldmedia Dr. Klaus Goldhammer)

THERE are plenty of things to buy in a German supermarket, but little that is truly appealing or expensive. So it is with German television. Dozens of free channels carry a mixture of home-grown stuff and dubbed Hollywood imports. They strike most people as good enough. As many investors have painfully discovered, it is perhaps harder to sell pay-television in Germany than in any other rich country. Yet they keep trying.

In a sense, Germans do pay for television. Public broadcasters levy compulsory fees of €18 ($23) per month on every TV-owning household, a quarter more than Britain’s BBC. Many viewers also receive free television via satellite or cable. Analogue cable connections are cheap—about €10 per month—and often bundled into apartment rents. Only 5.4m households plump for true pay-TV, according to Goldmedia, a consultancy. That works out to less than 15% of all television-owning homes. In America, it is more than 85%.

It is difficult for a pay-TV distributor to monopolise sports rights—the battering-ram that was used to push satellite television in Britain and Italy. The Bundesliga, Germany’s football league, sells cable, satellite and internet rights separately. And if Germans cannot get live games for free, they simply wait for the highlights.

Pay-TV firms are oddly optimistic in the face of repeated defeat. A year ago Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation acquired a controlling stake in Premiere, an ailing satellite television network, and relaunched it as Sky Deutschland. A few months later John Malone’s Liberty Global bought UnityMedia, a cable firm. Deutsche Telekom, which offers pay-TV over internet connections, said this spring that it planned to sign up 2.5m-3m paying customers by the end of 2012 (it now has 900,000). Three different pay-TV technologies are thus competing for viewers. A single hope underlies all of them: if Germans will not pay for caviar, perhaps they will buy a nice tin. [...]

Complete article in The Economist