“Big stunts, flying cars, big explosions, German autobahn with no speed limits.”
Stephan Schmitter, CEO, RTL Deutschland
That’s the pitch of Alarm für Cobra 11, a 30-year old German hit and Stephan Schmitter’s bet was that today’s young men would still want exactly that from an action series. RTL put around 200 of its old episodes on YouTube, a catalogue that had been rerun 40 times and, in Schmitter’s own words, had “no value anymore in our ecosystem”. In a year, he says, they drew around 30 million views.
This week on The Media Odyssey Podcast, Evan Shapiro is on stage at MIPCOM with Stephan Schmitter, CEO of RTL Deutschland, and Pedro Pina, Vice President of YouTube EMEA, to dissect the RTL x YouTube partnership as a case study for legacy media thinking like a creator.
Three years ago, RTL had no relationship with YouTube, today it is a key part of the RTL flywheel as a platform to breathe life into older content, discover new audiences and build fandom. Stephan Schmitter describes RTL’s YouTube presence as an additional channel that brings together the power and legitimacy of Germany’s leading entertainment company and YouTube’s undeniable reach and ability to bring in new audiences.
Monetizing on YouTube directly is not enough on its own, so relying just on the programmatic ad fill is not the business model here. RTL’s Ad Alliance sells YouTube inventory bundled with RTL+, RTL and Sky, to advertisers who now get RTL+’s female-skewing streaming audience and YouTube’s younger male one in a single package. Schmitter says revenues from the combination are near double-digit millions and sees a path to incremental revenue through 2030.
Pedro Pina gave this year’s MacTaggart Lecture in Edinburgh, arguing that broadcasters and platforms are natural partners. Evan asked him what a “third golden age of television” actually means. For Pedro it is the combination of broadcast and media. Companies like RTL make great content and understand their audiences, and YouTube delivers that content on any device, at any moment, and brings creators and fandom with it. He’s careful to say it isn’t YouTube replacing anything: linear TV is still a big part of the business, and he says “it takes a village.”
Schmitter told DWDL in March that a whole new generation is discovering Cobra 11 through YouTube but in this session he gives out a lot of data points you don’t want to miss out on.
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WHY BROADCASTERS ARE PARTNERING WITH THE PLATFORM THEY ONCE FEARED | The Media Odyssey Podcast
That’s it for today but before you go: