ZDF’s Thomas Bellut

As Germany’s national public-service broadcaster, ZDF has an obligation to offer programming to all segments of the audience. Its efforts have been rewarded as ZDF was once again market leader in 2016 with a 13-percent share of the total viewing audience, ahead of a slew of rival commercial channels. In January of this year, ZDF saw that share climb to 13.9 percent. Viewers come to ZDF for its high-end drama series, entertainment shows and sports coverage, but equally for its news and information programming. ZDF Director-General Thomas Bellut began his career as a journalist and is keenly aware of ZDF’s responsibilities when providing comprehensive and impartial news, especially in today’s complex world.

WS: What were the strengths of ZDF’s programming schedule in 2016, and how are you building on those strengths in 2017?
BELLUT: ZDF’s core output has kept us at the forefront of the German TV market for five years. The program schedule is obviously working well. We focus on continuity and reliability. Within the program schedule, we are also optimizing our range of offerings and are always developing new formats. Our daytime programming consists of a mix of TV series reruns, current information, and entertainment formats. TV movies, magazine programs, documentaries, talk shows and comedy formats are popular in the prime-time slots. Live sport is an important addition, but it’s not critical to our overall success. There is still some room for improvement in terms of major evening shows. We are continually testing new formats, but we’re not quite there yet.

WS: What has been the strategy behind ZDF’s drama offering?
BELLUT: That’s one of our particular strengths. Our expert editorial teams at ZDF and creative German producers work well together here. We have extensive experience and outstanding relationships with our producers. This also applies to our international partners, such as those in Scandinavia or the U.K. We know what our audience wants and its preferences, and we offer a broad spectrum of content to match. This ranges from event TV movies to crime series, comedies, family movies, and a [variety] of German series. We are simultaneously expanding our stock of programs. This allows us to successfully fill a lot of time slots with a mixture of premieres and reruns.

WS: Tell us about ZDF’s new youth online channel, funk.
BELLUT: Funk is an experiment. For the first time, we are offering a wide range of programming for a defined target group without broadcasting it on a TV channel. There is no blueprint here. We have put together a young team and given them a lot of creative freedom. Working together with a large number of players who have been putting their own offerings on video platforms for some time, we have established a content network. The platform launched with 40 formats, and another 30 are currently in development. The spectrum includes services, information, comedy, and a knowledge-based format that centers on a selection of school subjects—mathematics, physics, chemistry, German and history. Funk is important to us because it enables us to close a gap between our children’s TV channel and [our information channel] ZDFneo. But the other thing that makes funk so important is that it allows us to try out something different. By doing so, we’re learning more about what makes young people tick and how we can reach them with our content.

WS: What is the impact of SVOD platforms like Netflix on the German market?
BELLUT: We are monitoring these services with interest but are relaxed about them. YouTube, Netflix and Amazon haven’t yet had an influence on traditional TV consumption. It was always possible to watch movies or TV series outside the scope of traditional broadcasting, such as at the cinema or on DVD. The range of German productions available on global platforms is quite modest and cannot at all compete with what TV broadcasters are offering. A lot of content that typically shapes TV, like live sports, news reports and talk shows, are practically non-existent on these platforms. And with our new online media library, we are well positioned for nonlinear distribution of our content.

WS: In what ways does ZDF Enterprises support and enhance ZDF?
BELLUT: Since 1993, ZDF Enterprises has been successfully acting as an independent market player that interacts with its shareholder, ZDF, based on an arm’s-length approach. The company has vast experience and an outstanding international reputation in two main areas of business: trading rights and managing its corporate investments as a shareholder of an efficient portfolio of media companies. Its long-standing international activities, global network and experienced staff with deep knowledge of international markets and industries allow ZDF Enterprises to inform us very early on about the latest global programming, production and economic developments. As a private company, it can also operate more flexibly and take higher risks in the marketplace than we can as a public broadcaster. Thus, ZDF Enterprises is often our co-production partner in the realization of important projects at both a national and international level, acquiring additional rights at its own risk. At the same time, the company is free to do business with any partner worldwide. Its global success also strengthens ZDF’s reputation as an innovative and high-quality broadcaster. And finally, ZDF Enterprises is economically successful and its profits contribute to the fulfillment of our mission as a public broadcaster.

WS: With so much upheaval going on in Europe—refugees and immigrants, terrorism, the rise of populism, the crisis of the Eurozone—do audiences want to see some of these stories told in series and TV movies? Or does the German audience want to “escape” from serious issues when it watches drama?
BELLUT: Major events and developments in recent history tend to start appearing in fiction once a certain amount of time has passed. Over the New Year period, the first motion picture covering the integration of refugees premiered in German cinemas. Back in autumn 2016, we showed the first TV movie on this topic, Der Andere (The Other), but viewing figures were below average. First and foremost, the subjects you mentioned are all things that our audience wants to learn more about. At more than 40 percent, our proportion of informational content is the highest among all general-interest broadcasters in Germany. We recognize that demand for our news and information-based programs is increasing, especially in turbulent times such as these.

WS: In what ways and on what platforms is ZDF providing news and programming in addition to the linear channels?
BELLUT: We use every distribution channel to present our content to our audience in a meaningful and efficient way. That said, it is still the case that classic linear TV services exhibit by far the greatest usage figures. Every German watches on average more than 200 minutes of TV every day. This high level has been quite stable for years. Nonlinear use via smart TVs and mobile devices is a supplementary channel that is yet to replace linear consumption. Our most important platform for nonlinear distribution is ZDFmediathek, our online media library. It was completely relaunched a couple of months ago. We receive 1.8 million visits a day; in addition to live streams of our TV stations we also offer a broad selection of videos on demand for all common stationary and mobile receivers.

WS: How are ZDF’s digital channels serving different segments of the audience?
BELLUT: We had to close down a digital channel last year: ZDFkultur. In media policy terms, that was the price that had to be paid for the new youth-focused offering, funk. But I am delighted that the other two channels, ZDFneo and ZDFinfo, continue to do very well. ZDFneo, which is directed at an audience aged between 25 and 50, gained half a percentage point in its market share in 2016. No private broadcaster in Germany achieved anything on that level. ZDFneo is now at 2.1 percent and is about to move up into the top ten most successful channels in Germany. That is a huge success. ZDFinfo is a pure information channel with lots of documentaries. Here we achieve the same market share of 1.2 percent among viewers aged between 14 and 49 as among the general audience. That’s also a tremendous performance.

WS: In some countries, established news organizations are losing credibility. What is ZDF’s connection with its audience when it comes to news and information programming?
BELLUT: There has been a debate going on in Germany about the general credibility of the media for about two years now. This has its origins in social groups that tend to be rather on the right of the political spectrum. Catchphrases like “Lügenpress” (lying press) or “Mainstream-Medien” (mainstream media) sow great mistrust. It is an attempt to discredit established media sources. I wanted to know whether that is really the case, so I commissioned a representative study back in the summer of 2015. We’ve conducted it three times since—the most recent one being in November 2016. The results are clear. People’s confidence in the traditional media is stable and at a high level. The news programs of Germany’s public broadcasters, ZDF and ARD, are at the top. These are followed by regional and national daily newspapers, and then by weekly journals. Then there’s a big gap before you come to the tabloids, and right at the very end you find social media. It is interesting that even with all the crises you mentioned, the results have stayed the same. Whenever anything happens, people turn to the public broadcasters, because they know that’s where they’ll find reliable information.

WS: Bundestag elections are coming up; what type of coverage will ZDF provide?
BELLUT: 2017 will be a year of politics. In September, the elections to our federal parliament, the Bundestag, will decide whether Chancellor Merkel remains in power. In addition to this, we will have three elections to regional state parliaments. Germany’s new Federal President was elected in February. It is our job to provide people with independent information so that they can form their own opinion on politics and the positions held by the various parties. We will cover all topics extensively in our regular magazine programs, documentaries and reports. We will discuss matters with politicians, experts, stakeholders and the audience in talk shows and discussion panels. We will include even more of this in our prime-time coverage than in previous years.

WS: How can an established news organization like ZDF guide its viewers through the election season and help them understand the difference between real news and fake news?
BELLUT: By explaining what’s happening. We should not simply ignore fake news; we need to counter it with facts. The media are facing a challenge. We are all observing an increasing brutalization in social media, in the form of the conscious spreading of lies and the mental isolation of the echo chambers and filter bubbles created by our social networks. We work against this by providing true and fact-based reporting. This must not be dictated from above but shared with the audience on equal footing. This also includes more transparency. We must make more effort to explain how we work and be transparent about our own mistakes.

WS: ZDF and ARD decided not to acquire the rights to the Olympics for the next several years, I believe from 2018 to 2024. How did that decision come about?
BELLUT: That is correct. The decision wasn’t an easy one. But the price Discovery Communications [the rights holder for Europe] asked was much too high. It was well above the maximum we would be prepared to pay, even at a push. We regret this because live broadcasting of the Olympic Games would have been a perfect fit for our profile as a public broadcaster. We have invested a lot of work into these broadcasts. We also dedicated a lot of time in our program schedule to the Olympic sports between the games. Of course, we had a strong focus on German athletes. We brought our viewers closer to the countries where the games were taking place with documentaries and reports. And, last but not least, we have also consistently been critical of negative developments in the world of sport. It remains to be seen whether Discovery/Eurosport will cover these things in a comparable manner.

WS: What are the biggest issues impacting the German TV market in general? What challenges and opportunities will ZDF face in the next 12 to 24 months?
BELLUT: 2016 was a year that put journalism in general to the test, and also at ZDF: New Year’s Eve in Cologne, the media’s actions in response to the shooting in Munich, and the extensive coverage and speculation surrounding the Berlin Christmas market attack. Care, prudence, transparency and an open attitude to mistakes are more important than ever before. The viewers need to understand why we are reporting on certain things. They must also be able to understand a given situation, even if we don’t yet know all the facts. We must try hard to reach all groups in society, even those who have a certain level of general skepticism regarding our reporting. The TV market as a whole is quite stable here in Germany. The public broadcasters are successful. At the same time, commercial broadcasters are generating considerable profits. Television continues to be an extremely popular advertising platform.