RTL Group said its premium streaming service RTL Plus grew to over 6 million subscribers by the end of June.
The figure represents a 34 percent growth compared to the second quarter of 2022, helped in part by the company’s agreement with Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) to offer some of its TV series and original movies to German streamers through the service earlier this year.
RTL also credited its subscription growth to a partnership between it and Deutsche Telekom in Germany that allows subscribers of the pay service Magenta TV to access RTL Plus content as part of their service. The agreement also allows Magenta TV subscribers to get a discount to a more-premium version of RTL Plus.
In addition to Germany, RTL Plus is offered in Austria, Switzerland and Hungary. The company has a partnership with Vodafone in Hungary that is similar to its pact with Deutsche Telekom in Germany; in that country, RTL said it had more than 285,000 streaming subscribers.
The company’s streaming ambitions helped generate €3.1 billion (around U.S. $3.4 million) during the first half of the year, a 5.1 percent drop compared to H1 2022 blamed in large part on a soft ad market in the region. Net income was €132 million (around U.S. $145 million), a drop of more than 50 percent on a year-over basis.
Executives at RTL Group say they have a goal of cultivating 10 million streaming subscribers by 2026, at which point RTL Plus will begin to turn a profit on its own.
