The German television market is one of the most difficult in the world for new players to break into and for existing businesses to make new movements in.

There are a number of reasons for this, the first major issue being the strength of the public broadcasting industry in Germany. Free TV is still the dominant force throughout the region, meaning that the force of external innovation can be neutered, as it’s difficult to gain a foothold and make significant change.

A second major challenge to services looking to gain a foothold in the space is that the pay-TV space sees Sky as the absolute king, while streaming only services are all crushed under the combined weight of Amazon and Netflix - services so large with budgets so bottomless that they smother anyone else in the streaming arena.

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A recent Strategy Analytics study, “TV’s Transformation: A Unified TV and Video Market Perspective”, predicts that consumer and advertising spend on TV and video is going to increase markedly - and that this increase, from USD 490 billion in 2017 to USD 559 billion in 2022, will happen in large part due to over-the-top services (translating, according to the research, into up to 90% of the growth).

The entertainment - and particularly television - landscape was undoubtedly ripe for disruption before streaming video became a fact of life. A number of consumer surveys from the last 20 years concur: Americans (in particular) hate their TV subscriptions, and moreover, hate the cable companies that offer them. Across multiple industries, year after year, cable TV and internet providers rank near the bottom of customer satisfaction polls.