Germany’s Video Entertainment Market Reaches €9 Billion

The German video market reached annual spend of around €9 billion ($10.4 billion) in 2018, up 6 percent year on year, according to the latest Video Insights country report from Futuresource Consulting.

Germany ranks as is the fifth largest video market in the world. Driven by SVOD and transactional digital video services, annual consumer spend is on course to exceed €10 billion ($11.5 billion) by 2022.

Futuresource points to SVOD as the “key element” of the German video market. There are now more than 10 million households subscribing to one or more services, which means that a quarter of German households are actively engaging with SVOD. “Amazon Prime Video remains the market leader, but Netflix continues to make strong gains, with 50 percent growth of subscriptions in 2018,” said Tristan Veale, market analyst at Futuresource. “The two services are mostly complementary and there is room for both to thrive.

“Moving forward, we expect multiple subscriptions per household to drive the market and, outside of these two streaming giants, there is a growing number of specialist services available directly, or via aggregators such as Amazon Channels. We also expect major D2C launches such as Disney+ in the longer term, along with broadcaster led initiatives in the near term, which will help maintain strong subscription growth. In 2019, the German SVoD market will have doubled in two years and is forecast to exceed €1 billion in 2020.”

Veale added: “Consumer spending on pay-TV accounts for two-thirds of the video entertainment market and growing, even though many European markets are seeing stagnation or even declines. However, in Germany, there is increased dynamism in the market, with an increased number of providers offering low cost, “pay-TV lite” services as a viable alternative to the entrenched Free-to-Air/basic cable plans and premium subscriptions from Sky which are currently available.”