What’s just happened?

RTL Group is to acquire Sky Deutschland from Comcast in a deal that will bring together two of the largest media brands in the DACH region, (Germany, Switzerland, Austria). The transaction values Sky Deutschland at €150m upfront, plus a further sum of up to €377m depending on the future performance of RTL – this brings the potential overall deal value to an upper ceiling of almost €530m.

The deal is set to combine RTL Group’s portfolio of free-to-air channels, news and fast growing SVoD platform RTL+, with Sky Deutschland’s premium sports rights, Pay TV service and SVoD platform WOW. If approved by regulatory bodies, currently expected in 2026, the combined business will serve a total of approximately 12 million paid subscribers across RTL+, WOW and Sky, making it the third largest group in the region behind Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

What’s Comcast’s strategic rationale for selling Sky Deutschland?

Despite Sky making some progress with the German business over the past few years – Ampere believes Sky grew its combined pay TV and streaming base by 5.5% between Q1 2023 and Q1 2025 – it is understood that overall, the DACH business was not profitable. In 2023, Comcast reported a £1.2bn write-down on loans used to support its German and Italian operations in addition to a prior write-down on the overall value of Sky in 2022. It has been rumoured to be looking for a buyer for Sky Deutschland for a number of years. This seems to mark a turning point for Comcast, with the company rethinking its approach both to the Sky footprint it acquired and its overall international aspirations and strategy. If Germany (and the wider DACH region) is no longer core to its planning, it will cast some uncertainty over Sky's Italian operations too. Comcast will look to turn its focus to its JV operations and is likely planning a longer-term change of direction either through acquisition or the build out of a new international proposition in other markets with growth potential.

What’s RTL Group’s strategic rationale for the acquisition?

For the RTL Group, the acquisition is a major play to diversify its revenue streams and further solidify its position in the German speaking market in both traditional TV and streaming. The deal represents a comparatively efficient way for RTL to access further scale in the paid market. A key pillar of RTL Group’s rationale for the deal is the chance to strengthen its position in live sports. RTL currently holds the rights to the UEFA Europa and Conference Leagues via its free TV channels in Germany. Taking on Sky’s premium sports rights, which includes Bundesliga, DFB Pokal, the English Premier League and Formula 1 as well as various golf and tennis tournaments, gives it a significant lock over sports rights in the region with the ability to diversify its live sports portfolio across free, pay TV and subscription OTT.

The acquisition would provide a huge advantage for RTL Group, with live sports a known, reliable driver of subscriber acquisition and retention, particularly in a fragmented media rights market such as Germany. A combined entity will give RTL much more negotiation strength for the acquisition of sports and entertainment content and give it a range of options via which it can utilise the content across advertising and subscriptions. If it has one eye on its local competition, the wider view will be how it scales to meet the global streaming challenges ahead.

The deal will similarly scale RTL Group’s streaming offer, allowing it to better compete with the global streaming giants Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+. RTL+ is already the fastest growing service in the German market, reaching 6.25m subscribers in Q1 2025. Ampere anticipates that RTL will look to consolidate streaming under a single brand over time, combining RTL+’s catalogue of German titles, with WOW’s library of international content and live sport.

How did we get here?

In a twist of fate, this also marks RTL’s return to the pay TV sector after a long absence. CLT-UFA (which later became RTL when it merged with Pearson TV) was a founding investor in the German Premiere satellite pay TV service back in the mid 1990s. Premiere was later to become Sky Deutschland through Sky’s acquisition in 2009.

More recently, RTL Group and Sky Deutschland have had a series of partnerships, starting with RTL+ launching on Sky Q pay TV in 2021, a deal which later expanded in 2024 to include customers using Sky Stream. As well as the streaming partnership, the two companies have also collaborated in the sharing of content, co-broadcasting select live sport events like Formula 1 and the Premier League across RTL’s free TV platforms, and the UEFA Europa League on Sky. This existing partnership has set the stage for this acquisition, providing a good test ground to see how the potential integration could work.