Wolfram Winter

World Screen Weekly, January 31, 2008

Managing Director

Premiere Star

Cracking the complicated German pay-TV market has been a challenge for many channel operators, but a recently launched offering from Premiere is aiming to provide new opportunities for niche, special-interest services.

Premiere Star GmbH, majority owned by German pay-TV giant Premiere, with minority stakes held by EM.Sport and Unicredit, distributes two packages: Premiere Star, a dedicated satellite offering, and Premiere Thema, which is also made available to cable services. The preexisting Thema package, focusing on documentaries, action, crime, adult entertainment and music, has more than 1.6 million subscribers. The new Premiere Star, meanwhile, launched in September 2007, has notched up more than 140,000 subscribers and is on track to reach 200,000 customers within its first year of operation, according to the company’s managing director, Wolfram Winter.

Winter says he devised the platform in part to offer carriage to “those channels that found a home in cable but couldn’t find a home in satellite.” Last month, for example, MTV Networks tapped into Premiere Star to expand its reach in the market, rolling out MTV Entertainment and Nick Premium. Other major international brands on the two packages include Turner Classic Movies, AXN, Cartoon Network, Toon Disney, Discovery Channel and Jetix, alongside independents such as e.clips–the entertainment channel and Lettra, devoted to the world of literature. The major German free-TV giants, RTL Group and ProSiebenSat.1, have also made offerings available on Premiere Star, including kabel eins classics and RTL Crime.

Premiere Star and Thema are each aiming to offer up to 20 channels, Winter says, noting that both are close to capacity. However, that doesn’t limit the company’s growth, he says. “In a year’s time I would be rather surprised if we only had Premiere Thema and Premiere Star. I’m convinced we will have at least one more if not two additional packages in addition to the existing two we are offering today.”

One area being explored, Winter explains, is high-definition content. “People tend to buy only flat screens now, mostly HD. They take it home and figure out they have this fantastic screen but they see an analog cable picture and it looks worse than it did before! That’s what happened in ’07.”

In addition to ramping up its high-definition offerings, Winter is also looking at devising a package targeted at female viewers. In a bid to expand its reach among this demographic, Premiere Star has added RTL Group’s Passion network, featuring soaps and telenovelas, to its slate, and next month the service will launch Romance TV.

Going forward, growth for the Premiere Star package lies in cable and other distribution platforms, Winter says. “Premiere Star’s home in the future will not just be the satellite universe. I’m pretty confident we will [soon] be able to announce our first cable deal. We have also been approached by IPTV operators. Premiere Star [is becoming] more and more the home for the multichannel universe.”

Building brands in the multichannel arena is something Winter is well acquainted with. Prior to devising the plan for Premiere Star—initially known as Stargate—and securing Premiere as a partner, Winter built NBC Universal’s presence in the German market, rolling out the free-TV offering Das Vierte and the pay-TV channel 13th Street, among others. Like so many German television executives, Winter got his start at the Kirch Group, before moving on to ProSiebenSat.1, DSF and then DF 1.

His experience in both free- and pay-TV is helping Winter adapt to the shifting trends in the German media landscape. “We see a shift of content from the free-TV universe into the pay universe,” he says, noting that terrestrial giants are making significant forays into the digital TV arena. “We are at the [point] where pay-TV is taken seriously by the whole market and not just by one or two parties. This is why I believe we have a chance to add more subscribers in total to the market than we’ve seen in the past. ProSieben and RTL advertise [their digital channels] on their free-TV networks in prime time. If you had imagined four years ago that RTL would have a spot in prime time to promote a Premiere-owned subsidiary, you would have been called a pioneer.”

—By Mansha Daswani