No sooner had the media market shaken off the covid downturn than the effects of economic development and rising costs began to show. Several print media outlets closed down, while VOD services developed as expected. 2022 brought that to the media as well.
The media market returned to growth in the year 2022 after the covid downturn, but this was replaced in the second half by concerns about the impact of global economic development caused by both the broken ties of the covid era and the war in Ukraine. Rising inflation and the increasing costs of running media companies put print publishers under pressure during the year, raising their selling prices several times in the space of twelve months, and several print titles also left the market. However, for other media companies too, rising costs, coupled with the constant search for efficient business models in the digital age, have become a matter of primary concern, especially with an eye on the new year 2023.
Already at the beginning of 2022, it was expected that this year would be marked by a boom in VOD (video on demand) services, and this was confirmed during the course of the year. The arrival of the global streaming services HBO Max and Disney+, together with the further development of the domestic Voyo platform (Nova Group), the establishment of a headquarters for Netflix's activities in Central and Eastern Europe, and movements in the domestic VOD market (the merger of Aerofilms and Kviff.tv, the launch of České kino and FamuFilms, the development of Edisonline, etc.) have brought additional competition to this segment, which is not yet closed. The launch of VOD services from the Prima TV group and the arrival of the multinational SkyShowtime service from Comcast and Paramount have been postponed until the new year.
The growing interest in on-demand content is not only in video, but also in audio, which in turn is being responded to by radio broadcasters. Czech Radio has therefore set itself an 'audio first' strategy for the coming years, and commercial operators are also seeing that interest in listening to audio-on-demand is outstripping interest in listening to live 'classical' broadcasts, particularly among younger recipients.
There has been a lot of talk this year about media legislation, both in relation to public service media and private media. Czech Television has announced a transition to a cost-saving regime, which includes the termination of the broadcast of the CT3 programme, a reduction in the filming of premiere programmes and sports broadcasts (this year the sale of the rights for the World Cup in Qatar to TV Nova) and a reduction in the number of employees. Both CT and Czech Radio have long warned MPs of the need to increase the licence fee, otherwise the reduction of activities will continue. A promise that the relevant laws could be amended in the new year leading to an increase in the fee for both public service media came at the end of the year from the parliamentary election committee and the Ministry of Culture.
The operators of news content on the internet, which include most publishers of print titles, in turn pushed during the year for the transposition into Czech legislation of the European Directive on copyright in the digital single market, which would help publishers to earn revenue from the production of content used by large technology companies such as Google, Facebook and others. But the adoption of the amendment to the Copyright Act by Czech lawmakers has provoked such a backlash from both Google and Facebook that it may in turn make the already difficult position of publishers even more difficult.
The legislation has also affected all online operators, including e-commerce players, due to the need to implement new cookie bars from the beginning of 2022, by which internet operators collect active user consents. Their deployment has led to significant declines in recorded traffic and collected data. The hardest hit were those operators that were fully compliant with the new rules. But publishers must also prepare for the forthcoming end of third-party cookies in Chrome, which has been pushed back again, this time to 2024.
At the end of the year, preparations for the merger of Seznam.cz and Borgis, which owns the daily Právo, stirred up the relatively stable ownership of Czech media. The sale of the daily, which has been owned by editor-in-chief Zdeněk Porybný since the early 1990s, to the strongest domestic internet company will further increase the concentration of the Czech media market.
Overview of selected media events in 2022 on mediaguru.cz
Source: mediaguru.cz
