November 7, 2016

Germany

General Information:

• 38.75 Mln TV Households

 German Market – Key Facts (source: DTVP, November 2022):

• January – April 2022: around 1.6 million TV sets sold in Germany
• More than 25.4 million smart TV sets sold since 2014
• Smart TV share of the overall market grows by two percentage points to 96 percent
• Market share of UHD TV sets sold in 2021 grew to 74%
• Trend to large screens continues: 44 percent with diagonals of 55 inches or larger sold
• The Addressable TV Initiative (ATVI) was founded by German media companies RTL Deutschland and Seven.One Entertainment Group on August 2022; ATVI wants to achieve full technical interoperability of the HbbTV-TA and ADB2 specifications in smart TVs and set-top boxes across Europe. The initiative is open to all interested broadcasters, platform operators and hardware manufacturers, stressed Andre Prahl (RTL), co-managing director of the new venture, at the HbbTV Symposium and Awards 2022. Details on German Addressable TV market down here below.

HbbTV – Key Facts (source: HbbTV internal elaboration, June 2020):

• Over 90% of Smart TV sold support the HbbTV standard (i.e. interactive services via the “Red Button” on the remote control)
• No HbbTV certification regime but self-certification by the CE-vendors using HbbTV Test Suites
• HbbTV standards currently in use: HbbTV 1.0/1.5/2.0
• ARD’s 24/7 replay function via HbbTV 2.0 is enabled via a whitelist only on devices on which it is actually working. This refers to around 20% of the HbbTV-capable Smart screens connected to the internet (appx. 15 million).

All HbbTV services related to TV channels are distributed by satellite television, cable networks or digital terrestrial networks.

The broadcasting market is shared in Germany by public and private broadcasters based on Free-TV (funded by fees and/or advertisement) and Pay-TV.

All German public and most commercial broadcasters offer a vast variety of HbbTV based services like 7 days catch-up TV, EPG (Electronic Program Guide), restart (arte), weather services, portals and many more.

Addressable TV Market Status (source Dataxis, April 2023)

Germany is the second biggest addressable advertising market in Europe. Local advocates have been pushing for addressable advertising campaigns to be rolled out on HbbTV standards very early on. The two main commercial broadcasters’ ad sales houses, SevenOne Media and RTL Ad Alliance, have launched commercial offers with addressable capabilities on this technology as early as 2016. By now, more than half of the country’s TV households are equipped with connected HbbTV devices that can be addressed based on advertisers’ audience target needs. With the progressive deployment of TV sets equipped with the latest HbbTV standards, addressable campaigns are slowly moving from legacy L-shaped banners to seamless dynamic ad insertion (DAI) in the linear content stream, providing publishers with the opportunity to sell premium video ad inventories in an addressable ecosystem on the big screen (source: Dataxis, ” Addressable TV in Europe: where do we stand one decade after AdSmart?”, April 2023).