Nova Television and the entire CME Group are increasingly focusing on the digital service Voyo. In the two years since the new team and the new concept of the service, it has managed to become one of the top streaming platforms in the Czech market, helped in particular by the deployment of original series such as Případ Roubal (The Roubal Case) and Iveta. "This segment will double in five years and Czechs will have a total of three million subscriptions to the service," predicts Daniel Grunt, Chief Digital Officer of CME Group.
The CME Group outlined an ambitious plan early last year that Voyo would have one million subscribers within five years. How is that plan coming to fruition?
Early last year we started to relaunch Voyo with a completely new team, I joined last March, with marketing chief Jakub Strýček about a month before me. CME boss Didier Stoessel and I agreed that we would start building the new Voyo in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, that it wouldn't make sense to start everywhere at once. We will try the change in the markets where it makes the most sense, and what we learn we will try to apply gradually. And it has worked and we really see Voyo internally as a success now.
What does that mean in numbers?
Last January we started with less than 70,000 subscribers in the Czech Republic and Slovakia and today we have tens of thousands of subscribers, over 400,000. And we're talking about purely paying customers, we don't include trial versions.
Just to be sure: the declared one million subscribers by the beginning of 2026 is also the Czech Republic and Slovakia combined?
Yes, that's together. It makes sense, they are culturally close countries with the same historical experience, similar language and our teams here are very intertwined. And going back to the numbers, we're one year ahead of our own schedule so far.
Of course, we know that we cannot grow like this forever and we expect a slowdown in growth. On the other hand, I would like to stress that we are growing purely B2C in the Czech Republic, i.e. purely through our own sales and we are not using any operators. That too will come, of course. But now we see that we have managed to turn the brand perception around and it is already growing on its own.
Where do you stand in the Czech streaming services market?
Based on the data we have and the surveys we regularly take, we know that we are number two in paying accounts in the Czech market. First is Netflix, third is HBO Max, and the Disney+ service launched this year is quickly growing somewhere towards HBO.
We have estimates that the total number of subscriptions in the Czech Republic is 1.4 million, with many households having multiple services, while at the same time some households in turn share services. So we estimate that at least one million households have paid for at least one service. So now that proportion is roughly 1.4 services per household used to paying for streaming.
And what do you see as the potential for the next three years, when you yourself want to grow to a two-and-a-half-fold multiple?
If we look at Scandinavia, for example, which is about seven years ahead of us, the ratio is about three services per paying household. And penetration is roughly 60 percent of the market, here it's roughly a quarter. The UK has similar numbers, America is quite different, penetration there is about 85 per cent of the market. There, the possibility of growth is almost non-existent. We estimate that by 2027 the Czech market will more than double, with over three million paid services, on average over two services per paying household. And we consider this to be a soberly pessimistic estimate.
Was the recipe of the Czech and Slovak rebooted Voyo the same?
Partly, yes. In both markets, we started mainly to strengthen the brand, because until then the Voyo brand was too much associated with "old Nova content". No one could actually imagine what was really there. De facto, we started to build Voyo on a greenfield and target it in the new logic of streaming services, not TV.
What do you mean?
So you've got Netflix streaming services, HBO Max, and now Disney+, and of course we can't afford to put hundreds of millions of dollars into a single episode of a show like, say, HBO did for Year of the Dragon. We knew we wanted to go into local content and we went the route of quality local content with high production values. We created miniseries like Případ Roubal (The Case of Roubal), Guru and Iveta, which had higher budgets per episode than TV productions, including prime time on the main Nova channel. And audiences listened.
WE'RE PUTTING HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS INTO ORIGINAL SERIES FOR VOYO
And the specific amount?
I cannot say that, but we put hundreds of millions of crowns a year into original Voyo content.
In total, into original production and into buying shows exclusively for Voyo?
Exactly.
What else do you track besides subscriber numbers?
We are interested in user activity, i.e. how often they come to us and how much time they spend with us. I can say that in the autumn season, 90 percent of users come to us on at least a weekly basis, and on good days, maybe 70 percent of the base comes to us. On average, people have been with us for over 13 hours a week, so almost two hours a day. This is already close to the normal TV viewing figures.
And how do you measure the success of specific programmes?
Over a period of time, we track how many new users they've brought in, how active people are there, the amount of people watching all episodes, and we evaluate that at four points in that show's timeline.
And which series has been the most successful?
Roubal, which we mainly explain by the fact that it was first. And then Iveta. Jitřní záře (Morning Glow) did surprisingly well, which opened up an interesting social issue, which is also the direction we want to go in.
In his book No Rules Rules, Netflix founder and chief executive Reed Hastings described the moment when he realised that the desire to find new clients was starting to lead to existing clients dropping out. Isn't that what you're facing yet?
We allow customers to leave us at any time. But we try to keep them just as active as possible to prevent that. We think we're doing a good job at that, and we have a low churn rate, even approaching Netflix, which we have as a benchmark.
THE TURNING POINT FOR VOYO WAS THE DEPLOYMENT OF ORDINACE V RŮŽOVÉ ZAHRADĚ (THE ROSE GARDEN CLINIC)
In addition to Central Europe, CME also operates in other European countries. How is Voyo expanding there?
Slovenia has performed very well over the long term. There the whole market is pay-per-view, customers are used to it, Voyo has been building there since 2011 in a different way and they are currently the number one in the local VOD platform market, above Netflix. We have big plans for Voyo in Croatia, where we entered as a group last year. And we're thinking about going even wider into the former Yugoslavia.
And Romania?
We started to focus on Romania during this year and already this autumn it has started to pay off and we are adding tens of thousands of users. That's why we've decided to significantly increase our local content budget for next year.
What brought about the turning point in the Czech market?
I think it was moving Ordinace v růžové zahradě (The Rose Garden Clinic) from the main station past a paywall. The market realised that we were serious. Then followed the launch of Voyo Originals, the original strong series starting with Roubal, and now in December viewers can look forward to David Ondříček’s Král Šumavy (King of Šumava).
Users understand that they have a comprehensive entertainment package. A kind of premium television. Because in addition to the original stuff they won't see elsewhere, they can also watch the TV content there, but without commercials and sometimes with advance viewing. Advanced streaming in particular has huge acquisition potential. Which is also very paradoxical, because this particular service has been on Voyo for eleven years. It has shown how important communication to users is for success.
And the other countries?
In Slovakia, the success is mainly due to communication and the transformation of brand perception, as well as the technological change of the product. In Romania, the deployment of advanced streaming, which didn't work in Romania, was very successful, as well as two series projects.
OUR NEW RELEASE WILL BE THE IMPUDENT SERIES SEX O'CLOCK
Original content is a very important ingredient in the chemistry of success. Meanwhile, you're relying on familiar stories. Are you going in another direction?
Before that, I want to say that obviously the main content package on the service is coming on an acquisition basis. And thanks to that we have the most Czech and Czechoslovak films on the market. We are succeeding in being the local champion we want to be.
What about the rights to older Czech and Czechoslovak productions? Can some content be on Voyo and Netflix at the same time?
Theoretically, yes. The market is in relative chaos right now, with new potential buyers coming in and rights holders trying to make the most of it. Whole packages of rights are being sold, but also very specific windows, for example an SVOD window to someone, a TVOD window to someone else and an AVOD window to a third player. Then somebody buys an exclusive, for example, just for TVOD and for a month. And someone will buy everything for a year or more years. It's fragmented and it will take two or three years for the market to get into a clear order again.
We only buy exclusivity on content that we know will bring the most success. This brings us to the fact that we are coming up with the Voyo Film brand, which is our entry into original Czech filmmaking. The first was Vyšehrad: Fylm, which has become the biggest hit of the year so far. And we're going to deploy it exclusively at the beginning of December.
And the series?
In the next week after Vyšehrad, the first episode of the aforementioned Král Šumavy (King of Šumava) will be a three-part miniseries, with each episode deployed one week at a time. This method of deployment has worked well for us with previous series.
So what can we expect next year?
We've finished a sort of impudent series called Sex O'Clock about growing up, family, we're targeting families, but central to that are teenage issues. We've finished the second series of Iveta, which we'll be putting on in the first half of the year. And we've already secured a third series for 2024. So the story of Iveta will be three series of three episodes each, and we're also thinking of adding a big documentary.
Will you also attempt some other, shall we say, more spectacular genres?
The project Extraktoři (The Extractors), starring Jakub Štáfek, is currently being filmed in Turkey. It's going to be a spy thriller. Meanwhile, in the early stages is another one we call Hojer, which is again a true crime genre. We are preparing a miniseries called Matematika zločinu (Mathematics of Crime). The year 2023 will be about two Voyo Originals stronger than 2022. It's a gradual growth path. And the number of episodes is also growing. We started at three, now we're up to six episodes, eight, even ten episodes in some places. And we're also venturing into a genre that no one has really tried out here. But I'm not going to give anything else away just yet.
Global streaming services are coming up with big ambitious series that have many series, just like classic TV. Do you have those ambitions too, or is that the domain of Nova for now?
We certainly would like to, because we see all over the world that building franchises and characters is the key core of everything. There's nothing concrete in front of us at the moment, but it's the logical direction we want to go in. Creating one strong franchise and then building on that is just far more profitable than doing more and more individual one-offs, otherwise you're burning an incredible amount of energy and time building more and more brands.
EXPERIENCED CONTENT CURATORS ARE BETTER THAN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Let's stop briefly with the service itself. What changes are you planning to make to it? Let's start with the ability to watch shows in their original version with subtitles.
So we see dubbing as our priority because we know that's what our users want and seek. But yes, we want to offer the option to watch shows in the original version in the second half of next year at the latest, although we know that this will not bring us a substantial number of new users. But what we want to focus more on is recommending content to specific users.
Are you using curators or artificial intelligence algorithms?
At the moment, it's mainly curation or editorial teams, but we have a few windows within the service where we're engaging AI and testing how it works.
So how does it work?
It works quite well, yet I think the future lies mainly with editorial teams, who have the best and quickest insight into what is currently happening in society. But artificial intelligence will definitely have its place and will be a very important help to editorial teams.
Daniel Grunt: An experienced manager who has worked at Nokia Czech Republic, Centrum.cz and Sanoma. Between 2008 and 2010 he managed all online activities of TV Nova, and was also responsible for new media at the rival TV Prima. He returned to the CME Group in 2021, and as Chief Digital Officer is responsible for the development of Voyo and new media development.
Source: newstream.cz
