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ARD and ZDF network their media libraries: »Common world of experience«?
Photo: Soeren Stache / picture alliance / dpa
The initiators are very enthusiastic.
The ARD chairman Tom Buhrow raves about a "shared world of experience" for the audience of ARD and ZDF and makes a "huge quantum leap".
The ZDF director Thomas Bellut celebrates the joint project as the "best of public service system".
On Monday, the two public service front men announced at a joint digital press conference that the media libraries of the institutions will be closely networked from now on.
There will be no joint super media library under one Internet address, but the platforms of both institutions will be linked algorithmically to one another, so that a uniform representation on the Internet will be created.
First »Bad Banks«, then »Tatort«?
ARD and ZDF will undoubtedly get a larger, brighter shop window through the digital merger. Specifically, the alliance affects, for example, the suggestion system of the respective media library site: Anyone who calls up the thriller series "Bad Banks" on ZDF, for example, could in future receive the "Tatort" recommendation from ARD. Anyone who has watched the ARD satirical program by Carolin Kebekus is advised to watch the ZDF “Magazin Royale” with Jan Böhmermann.
The cooperation plans come at a time when the Prime Ministers are discussing a new draft of the State Media Treaty, which is to regulate the powers of the public broadcasters. Essentially, it is about enabling ARD and ZDF to react faster and more flexibly to the requirements of digitization and the increasingly confusing television market. The broadcasters, as the broadcasting commission of the federal states responsible for the amendment put it, should preserve their "journalistic competitiveness and sustainability".
With the merger of the media libraries, a first step in this direction has been taken.
Bellut made it clear that the data merger would also be about competing with US streaming services such as Netflix.
With the digital alliance, which should not incur any extra costs for the broadcasters, the public broadcasters, which have recently been heavily driven and counted, are once again proving a certain ability to act.
Chasing young audiences
A major renovation is currently taking place in the local television landscape. RTL and ProSieben have poached prominent younger news professionals such as Pinar Atalay or Linda Zervakis from ARD and ZDF. At the same time, the public broadcasters have to think about how they can get their content conveyed to those audience segments who are now putting together their desired program primarily using streaming services such as Netflix. The private broadcasters in Germany want to become more political, the public broadcasters are trying to become younger.
The joint media library offensive is the first milestone to get away from the eternal image of the 60-plus institutions.
In the Corona year 2021, the number of hits on the platforms of both houses should have almost doubled.
Now they obviously want to use the dynamic to address young people who no longer look linearly.
It remains to be seen whether the celebrated Kebekus-Böhmermann link can actually create the “public ecosystem” that was dreamed of at the press conference on Monday.
Even if ARD and ZDF find a kind of super algorithm to attract viewers under 40 - if their young faces keep running away to RTL and ProSieben, it won't do them any good either.
