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Joyn partners aim for winter premium launch and international expansion
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Joyn, the German streaming joint venture between ProSiebenSat.1 and Discovery, will likely add its premium SVOD tier to the existing free offering over the winter with over 10 original shows, a “vast library” and next year’s Olympic Games, with plans for international expansion next year, according to ProSiebenSat.1 chief executive Max Conze.
Max Conze
Speaking on ProSiebenSat.1’s latest quarterly earnings call, Conze said that Discovery was “fully committed” to the project and that the pair would “begin to look at expansion beyond Germany in 2020”.
Conze hailed the success of the free advertising-supported version of Joyn that is currently available, noting that the 3.8 million monthly active users recorded for the first month of operation was four times the base of the previous 7TV service. He said that he was hopeful that Joyn would surpass its target of 10 million users in two years “much faster” than anticipated, noting that that the Joyn app had been downloaded 2.5 million times.
The Joyn partners plan to expand the availability of the service imminently with launches on Chromecast and additional smart TV portals through the autumn.
Conze said that Joyn was a “mobile first experience” with current consumption evenly split between live and library content.
Conze said that ProSiebenSat.1’s digital revenues for the quarter had already been “meaningfully impacted” by Joyn.
Asked by an analyst whether Discovery’s deal with sports streamer DAZN to sublicense 45 Bundesliga matches to the latter, including matches on Friday night, Sunday, Monday and relegation play-off matches from the 2019/20 and 2020/21 seasons, could have a detrimental impact on Joyn, chief financial officer Rainer Beaujean said that ProSiebenSat.1 and Discovery had jointly agreed that the matches represented “too thin a slice” of the overall Bundesliga proposition “relative to the cost to make a big difference” to Joyn.
He said that the Joyn partners had instead agreed to “use that money” to “double down on original content creation” and work on increasing advertising revenue ahead of the Olympic Games next year.
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