BR Expert Tanja Hüther: “Our Mission is a Program for Everyone”

Linear television reaches the 55+ generation, digital offerings the younger target groups – this assumption is widespread. But is it still true?

Tanja Hüther: Both are actually true. You can no longer reach younger people well with linear television. With really traditional television via cable, satellite, or terrestrial, we mainly reach older audiences. However, we also appeal to a younger audience with our linear offering in the media center. Linear television programs can also be accessed there as streams.

User analysis: “We now work much more data-based”

How difficult is it as a public broadcaster to manage the balancing act and do justice to everyone?

Hüther: This is not something new for us. It has always been a challenge to make a program for everyone. We take this very seriously, it is the core of our mission. But what is changing a lot is the market environment. Digital platforms are ideal for making targeted offers and reaching specific target groups. But we have a completely different competitive situation. Because globalization came with digitalization, we have a much broader range of professional media companies, but also user-generated content or offers from small, independent publishers.

How do you deal with this strong competition?

Hüther: We are working more closely with the other ARD regional broadcasters to get a clear picture of who we are reaching well. Who uses our content – both the linear radio and television channels as well as our digital platforms such as the Mediathek, the Audiothek, and tagesschau.de. We use data a lot more than we did in the past. We analyze where we have a good offering and where there are still gaps. We then strategically target these gaps and develop targeted program offerings.

In contrast to private streaming providers, as a public broadcaster you have a mandate under the Interstate Broadcasting Treaty that you have to fulfill. Do you see this as a challenge or an advantage?

Hüther: This has been a great advantage for us during the market development of the last ten or fifteen years. We have a very specific positioning due to our mandate. This gives us a distinctiveness that now helps us in a very competitive and globalized market. We differentiate ourselves from commercial offerings through the range of our content, but also through our high quality standards and the degree of local content.

But we can’t rest on our laurels. When Netflix launched in Germany in 2014, the long-established TV providers liked to say: “They’re doing something completely different to us, so we can coexist wonderfully.” In fact, that’s not the case. Commercial companies do what is successful, and if you are successful with documentaries, children’s content, entertainment, or sport, that’s where they’ll focus. As public broadcasters, we then have to make sure that we continue to fulfill our quality standards.

Major competition for findability and perceptibility on user interfaces

The arrival of streamers a few years ago triggered a major revival in the industry. Has the market consolidated to some extent today?

Hüther: Yes, the market has seen a certain amount of consolidation, although this has less of an impact on the user offering. There are still many platforms, apps, and individual offerings. Consolidation took place one step earlier in the value chain: Studios have merged, for example. So there is a lot of content power behind many offerings. The fact that the market has not yet streamlined toward users was not foreseen. There is currently one issue in particular that is keeping us busy: Many platforms such as Sky, Magenta, and the device manufacturers are trying to find joint solutions for users so that they don't have to spend ages searching for what they want to watch.

To what extent is this relevant for public broadcasters?

Hüther: There is a great deal of competition to be seen and noticed on user interfaces. This is a challenge for all market participants. We have to make sure that we understand the various platforms, that we have the necessary technology available, that we maintain good cooperation with the platforms and build good relationships. We have been able to hold our own very well in recent years. The ARD Mediathek has grown enormously and is one of the top 4 streaming platforms in Germany.

In an interview with XPLR: MEDIA in 2020, you said that you were working on the personalization of your offerings. How much has happened since then?

Hüther: A lot has happened, but it’s still a long road and a big challenge. The personalization of our content is one of our major long-term projects. The prerequisite for us to be able to offer personalized content at all is user registration. This is a matter of course for paid platforms, but it’s different on our platforms. A major task for us is to convince people to register with us voluntarily, and we naturally handle user data very carefully. We have made good progress here. On the other hand, we have been working on the necessary data management, incidentally also in partnership with ZDF. In order to offer personalized content, we need usage data and metadata. They currently allow us to make recommendations and create personalized watch lists for our users.

“We also see gaming as a strong competitor to video and audio”

Which distribution channels are currently the most relevant for you? Which will play a greater role in the future?

Hüther: We are in the middle of the digital transformation and are still an important player. In radio, for example, we still see a lot of FM and DAB+ usage. In streaming, we adopted our so-called “Big Five Strategy” a few years ago. Here we decided that we would focus on five of our own platforms for playing out our content in the digital sector: the ARD Mediathek, the ARD Audiothek, tagesschau.de, sportschau.de, and – together with ZDF – KiKa.

How will the streaming behavior of Gen Z, Gen Alpha, etc. develop in the future?

Hüther: We already have quite a high level of streaming usage if you look at how many hours young people in particular spend with media or on the internet. However, we also see that completely new forms of use continue to emerge that no longer have much to do with the linear channels of “the past.” Social media platforms are a good example of this: TikTok works very differently to Instagram, and Instagram works very differently to Facebook. This development will not stop. The next platform with its own type of use will come.

We also see gaming as a strong competitor to video and audio. This is a huge field in which we as a media company have to think very carefully about how we position ourselves. We have pilot projects on Twitch, for example. The Apple Vision Pro, on which the ARD media library is integrated, has just been launched on the German market, and I can imagine that there will be a lot of developments in this area in the future. What is certain, however, is that media usage will become highly personalized, especially as it is becoming much more AI-driven. People will get used to being provided with very individual and situation-specific media offerings by personal smart assistants that know your usage behavior very well. We need to keep a close eye on this so that we can continue to be relevant in the future.