On March 30th a historic agreement between Sky and Mediaset was announced. After years of never-ending legal and commercial disputes, the two biggest players in the TV market have come to terms in order to achieve a stronger position on the pay-TV market.
The main objective of the operation between the two giants of the Italian TV is to counter, or at least to compete on an equal footing with the new platforms on demand, American but also non-American (Tim Vision, among others) that are getting themselves a big slice of the market pie. Thanks to this agreement, Sky and Mediaset will gain power in both their commercial and industrial fields. In fact, they are already seeing the positive effects of the agreement in Piazza Affari: the Mediaset share rose by 6.4% on the stock market. This will undoubtedly be a major change for the Italian market, as several leaders of the TV world have positively expressed.
Giancarlo Leone, president of the Television Producers Association (APT), has defined it as a win-win situation. Both key TV players will benefit from this commercial agreement: “The satellite platform will be reinforced with the arrival of nine cinema channels and TV series currently available only on Mediaset Premium. […] On the other hand, Mediaset group’s EI Towers will lend to SKY band its own movie theatres for the distribution of a pay-per-view offer specifically created with SKY and FOX products on digital terrestrial TV.”
The main challenge would be that the two giants teamed up and exclude other platforms in the market, but according to Leone, there is no need to worry about that. Even Carlo degli Espositi, president of Palomar, the producer of Montalbano, declared, while hoping that “the Antitrust will not stand in the way”, that what we are facing now is a strategic agreement that will increase competition and will eventually bring SKY and Mediaset to the level of the newcomers: Netflix and Amazon.
Probably this “peaceful agreement” is just the beginning of other changes in the Italian television scene, both for the paid-TV and for the free one. Changes that will also force Rai to adapt and strengthen its offer.
