Sky purchase: RTL seizes the last chance

At first glance, it's a real elephant wedding: The largest private television company is acquiring the pioneer of pay TV, and there's talk of a "national champion." If you narrow your perspective enough, everything seems big.

But even together, RTL and Sky lag far behind Netflix and Amazon Prime in the German-speaking streaming and subscription market. The US companies invented the future of television, and they dominate this market, which operates according to different rules than the familiar linear television.

The takeover of the German Sky division may have been RTL's last chance to at least play a part in this new game. The advertising business in traditional television is shrinking, and its own streaming service, RTL+, is nowhere near able to make up the deficit. Without the deal, the Bertelsmann Group's television group threatened to slide from stagnation into decline.

The RTL Group is acquiring Sky's German subsidiary. The streaming services RTL+, Wow, and Sky are becoming sister companies. What does this mean for viewers and the TV industry? Key questions and answers.

The purchase has a lot of appeal. The price is reasonable—at least compared to previous years. The programs complement each other, and so do the user groups. The Sky brand is established, especially among sports fans. And a total of more than ten million subscribers represents a real step forward in this size-dependent business.

There's no need to worry about program diversity either. Quite the opposite: The new size should make it easier to acquire content or produce it for the domestic market. The foreseeable disruption of the business brought about by artificial intelligence will also be easier to manage. Thus, the Sky acquisition could be a liberating move for RTL – just in time.