Thinker's posts

International Presentation

That's somewhat the point I made. The RTLs in different markets have very little in common. Yet they are now trying to harmonise everything into "one RTL". It doesn't make sense to unify something brand-wise if there is nothing to unify content-wise. There should be some sort of deeper strategy behind this that goes beyond changing a bunch of logos. There are various efforts to increase cooperation within the RTL Group so having a "one RTL" brand could perhaps communicate this to employees, but these recently announced changes seem to target viewers.

I don't know what RTL wants, but they are under pressure to change their business model as linear TV inevitably declines. The only clear change so far is that TV Now is being renamed RTL+, which makes RTL the brand for their streaming offering in Germany. If they follow the press release, similar changes could be made in other markets. But, as you say, its not obvious at the moment how having a unified brand would help them make that transition as a group.

International Presentation

There never really was a need to have consistent logos in different countries before. The different RTL channels have always been entirely made for their respective markets, so the fact that they used different logos made little difference. RTL have historically been fairly utilitarian in their branding, using the RTL name to launch into new markets, reusing logos when suitable, but rarely imposing a corporate standard for the sake of having a corporate standard. Channel 5 would never have been renamed "RTL5", as speculated on this forum 15 years ago.

The major change now is that RTL appears to want to become a streaming company. If they want a streaming service that is common for its five markets, with the same appeal as Netflix, then I suppose a common RTL brand is needed.

One problem for RTL has always been that the synergies in owning major national broadcasters are limited. People in the Netherlands aren't magically interested in watching the Hungarian version version of Farmer Wants a Wife just because RTL happens to own channels in both countries. The operations in different countries have mostly been run independently and they haven't really bothered with making original content that appeals to people in many countries. For a unified RTL brand to make sense they would have to overcome that problem, but the press release doesn't really go into that.

'1" branding

If the first channel has a distinct colour, it is generally red or blue.
Blue: Das Erste, TVE La 1, NRK1, YLE TV1, TVP1, Rai 1
Red: BBC One, DR1, SRF1, Nederland 1

Many of the the first channels that have used or are still using blue as their main colour have a legacy of that colour going back to the 1970s when colour became widespread. It appeared to be the default backdrop colour for clocks etc., partly for technical reasons, and ended up sticking.

I know red can look bad on VHS because that colour has less space allotted for it on the tape, but ISTR red tending to bleed more on regular analogue as well. Nonetheless, it became a popular TV brand colour in the 90s, perhaps because the technical people had less influence. It also helped that some countries like Switzerland, Denmark and Austria have red and white flags.

I imagine many of the "blue 1s" have opted for a sober colour in an effort to appear more authoritative. Some blue first channels also share that colour with the broadcaster itself.

Some honourable mentions:
SVT1 was blue for several decades, becoming orange in 2001 (red was already "claimed" by TV4 at that point), before mostly dropping colour coding a few years ago.
France 2 and ORF2 are essentially the equivalents of BBC One in their respective countries, both using red as a distinctive colour.

End of the road for UTV?

For those interested in knowing what was consolidated when as regards to ITV Broadcasting:

Anglia Television Ltd became ITV Broadcasting on 29 Dec 2006. (It swapped names with another company called ITV Broadcasting, which itself became the now dissolved Anglia Television).
Most broadcasting assets (presumably including staff) of the ITV plc-owned ITV companies were transferred in two chunks on 1 Jan 2007 and 1 Apr 2007, as detailed in the annual report: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/00955957/filing-history/MTgyNzM3NzE5YWRpcXprY3g/document?format=pdf&download=0 Production assets were consolidated into ITV Productions.
The broadcast licenses were consolidated into ITV Broadcasting in October 2008: https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20090904002603/http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/ifi/tvlicensing/tvupdates/monthly/200811

German Television and Presentation

German TV shows seem to generally be about 50 percent longer. A 60 minute drama becomes 90 minutes when made in Germany. The big two-hour Saturday entertainment show spreads across three hours.

Personally, I get somewhat bored with the stand-alone 90 minute dramas like Tatort and Polizeiruf where the main story rarely needs those 90 minutes. On the other hand, one good aspect of German scheduling is that they also have 45-50 minute dramas where the story moves on at a good pace, making shows like Charité and Weissensee really enjoyable.

The big three-hour shows are a slog. The main problem is that they rarely have content to fill those hours, especially if you don't care about the featured celebrities. I was once tricked into watching Verstehen Sie Spass? where the main draw is candid camera-like skits. But they can obviously not film enough skits to fill three hours, so there was a lot of unrelated filler between each skit.

Wer wird Millionär? with Günther Jauch is probably one of the best versions of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? so the programme itself is perfectly enjoyable. But the fact that it is two hours long with very long ad breaks makes it feel disjointed.

German Television and Presentation

Back in the analogue days there was a function in many TV sets that would sort your channels in a logical order. I'm not sure how it worked, it's possible the analogue channel IDs were stored in the TV set and accessed once you told it which country you were in.

Anyway, I once did a channel search on analogue cable in Berlin and the TV set automatically placed ProSieben on channel 6. Channels 3, 4 and 5 were RTL, Sat. 1 and possibly RTL II.

I distinctly remember thinking it was weird that ProSieben was on channel 6. But I reasoned that you were actually supposed to move your local Dritte channel to channel 3, which would shift the others upward and place ProSieben on channel 7.

The LCNs on DTT in Berlin didn't make much sense. Das Erste and ZDF were on 1 and 2, followed by the some of the major private stations in no particular order. The lowest placed public station other than the the two main ones was, quite randomly, Arte on LCN 8. RBB Fernsehen, which should have been LCN 3 was placed on LCN 22 or something. (I haven't seen the LCN list after the T2 switch.)

European Equivalents of Legacy (ex-analogue) UK channels

I think it's more a case where the ORTF breakup was a necessity back in the 70s but that the market changed over the next few years (launch of new channels, sale of TF1) so that it made sense to merge Antenne 2 and FR3 again.

Imagine if back in the 70s there had never been an ITV, only BBC 1, 2 and 3. The existence of ITV was a huge factor in the BBC becoming as great as it was. Without it, the BBC could have grown dull and complacent after decades without competition. In France, there was also a problem where the ORTF was seen as speaking as one voice, more state broadcaster than journalism, and that the institution was marinated in gaullism, like all other aspects of the French government.

If the BBC was a monopoly in the 70s, there would have been (stronger) calls to break it up (like France or Germany) or make arrangements for pluralism within the BBC (like Sweden or Italy). In the 80s, the BBC would probably have had one of its three channels revoked and sold to the highest bidder.

The sale of TF1 and the launches of Canal+, La Cinq and M6 changed the market completely so that the viewing share for government-owned channels shrunk from almost 100 percent in 1975 to about 35 percent in 1989. They were no longer as dominant as they once were and a merger was less problematic.



Channel 4's ad funding predates the TV2 state aid rulings, so they are unlikely to be related. Channel 4 is funded by ads because they can operate sufficiently with that as their main revenue stream and subsequent governments have been satisfied with that.

The entire state aid thing for TV2 makes little sense to me and there have apparently been some rulings in favour of TV2. There have also been multiple charges and multiple cases, possibly being decided in different directions, so its hard to get an overview of the matter.

European Equivalents of Legacy (ex-analogue) UK channels

I'd say a straight equivalency is impossible, although the role filled by ITV in the UK is mostly filled by TV2 in Denmark. You could try to break it down by different aspects:
Programming profile: Like ITV
Market position: Like ITV (but even stronger)
Exists to make money: Less than ITV but not as little as C4
PSB commitments: Hard to compare
Ownership structure: More like C4
History: Unique to TV2, but parallels can be drawn to both ITV and C4

TV2 being a pay channel doesn't really matter here, since there aren't really any free commercial channels in Denmark. The need to go pay TV arose from the fact ad breaks aren't allowed in Denmark, making it hard to run a free commercial channel. The last straw was when the EU decided that the portion of the license fee allotted to TV2 was illegal state aid and they had to pay back all the license fee money they received 1995-2004 (TV2 stopped receiving license fee payments in 2004). That placed the channel in immediate financial crisis and politicians were faced with either allowing ad breaks or changing the PSB commitments to allow TV2 to go pay.

European Equivalents of Legacy (ex-analogue) UK channels

TV2 Denmark is also a bit of a special case, hence the qualifier "arguably". When it launched in 1988 it was more like a traditional public broadcaster, received a large portion of its funding from the license fee and had advertising handled by a separate company. It still differed substantively from DR, but they were closer to the ARD/ZDF situation than they are now. In the '90s TV2 started transitioning to a more typical commercial PSB, sold its own advertising and stopped receiving license fee money, with the intent of eventually going completely private.

It is now very similar to its Nordic colleagues or ITV or TF1. The only difference is that it is still owned by the government. TV2 has been for sale for almost two decades now. They themselves have repeatedly expressed that they would be happy to get sold and are mostly going about as if they were a private PSB. The problem is that selling a major broadcaster is hard and no Danish government has been able to pull the trigger yet.

European Equivalents of Legacy (ex-analogue) UK channels

This is a fun exercise, although it is obviously hard to establish firm equivalents. One can spot similarities between broadcasters, but should also be aware that their relative position in each country is affected by the history and structure their TV markets.

First off, both ITV and Channel 4 are special cases shaped by UK broadcasting history so there are few direct equivalents in other countries. The only thing resembling an equivalent to Channel 4 would be SBS in Australia.

There's no real equivalent to ITV in terms of its regional history, but in terms of being "the undisputedly largest legacy commercial PSB channel", then MTV Finland, TV2 Norway, TV4 Sweden and arguably TV2 Denmark fit the bill. TF1 is a special case, for reasons stated above.

Some countries like Spain and Portugal launched multiple private networks within a short timeframe, meaning they each don't have the broader (commercial) audience for themselves like ITV does. Saying Telecinco is Spain's Channel 5 doesn't work for this reason.

Many European countries had a successful rollout of cable in the 80s. Some (Germany and the Netherlands) never got into licensing full scale commercial terrestrial TV networks for this reason. But RTL Germany and RTL4 in the Netherlands probably match ITV in terms of their firm positions as the leading commercial channels. The wide availability of cable also blurred the line between terrestrial and cable, meaning it is hard to say TV3 and Kanal 5 in Sweden and Denmark are equivalents of Channel 5 or Sky One in the UK.

Channel 5 should probably be defined by its late entrance into a maturing market. Nelonen in Finland and to some extent M6 in France fit that position. TVNorge wasn't as late an entrant, but has some similarities.

Italy and Greece are special cases, taking a more "wild west" approach to terrestrial broadcasting.

As for state-owned PSBs and equivalents to BBC One and Two: You can either have one unified company that coordinates its channels (if they have more than one) or have two or more more autonomous channels. The latter has historically been the case for TF1/A2/FR3 in France and arguably for DR/TV2 in Denmark and TV1/TV2 in Sweden.

ARD/ZDF in Germany is still organised this way. ARD and ZDF are different organisations, but they are completely equal as channels. Saying ZDF is Channel 4 is arguably wrong. If anything, they are both BBC One. Historically, this structure meant that both channels were a mix of BBC One and Two, although much of the "Twoier" content has been shifted to the Dritte and satellite channels.

Many European PSBs have emulated the BBC One/Two dichotomy, with various asterisks. One is Austria, where the situation is flipped so that ORF2 is the closest equivalent to BBC One and ORF1 targets younger viewers. The Dutch used to have mixed-up channels, but recently organised them so that NPO1 and NPO2 are clearly similar to BBC One and Two, respectively.

Availability of other national broadcasters

The Nordic public broadcasters have a long-standing agreement making much of their in-house productions available to each other for free. It's called Nordvision (a bit like Eurovision, but with fewer countries and deeper cooperation):

https://www.nordvision.org/om-about/english/

The Nordic broadcasters realised early on that free exchange of programming was better than having to sell to each other.

Another part of this cooperation is that the fees each broadcaster collects for retransmission in other Nordic countries is pooled into the "Nordvision Fund", which helps finance expensive programming like drama.

As for general availability of neighbouring channels on cable, it is largely determined by what customers expect. When cable was rolled out in the 80s, SVT became nationally available in Norway in Denmark, but NRK and DR were only available in the parts of Sweden that were close to Norway or Denmark. With the switch to digital cable, NRK and DR have largely been relegated to special add-on packages in Sweden, while SVT and TV4 are available in basic packages in Norway and Denmark.

I suspect this is because Copenhagen and Oslo are located close to the Swedish border and have been watching Swedish TV for a long time. Stockholm has never been able to receive NRK and DR terrestrially and there is very little interest in getting that reception there. As TV packages are mostly uniform across each country, what goes for the capital goes for everyone.

Eurovision 2021 - Netherlands - NPO/AVROTROS/NOS

While not necessarily "off-air", there are some programmes that only exist as consumer-grade tapes recorded by the broadcaster. One example is the first half of Melodifestivalen 1975 which only exists because SVT was required to record all its output so that it could be reviewed later on. These tapes were only kept for compliance and never intended for rebroadcast, so quality wasn't an issue.