Sven Sauvé hears the clatter of rain on the roof of the head office at the Media Park in Hilversum. “Good for us,” says the chairman of RTL Nederland casually, as he leads his guests to the exit after an interview in which he just didn’t call his commercial television company a tech company. Buienradar, RTL’s weather app, always starts to glow when the Netherlands is weighed down by a low pressure area. “The visit is then mega.”
Sauvé has always been a technophile. The 44-year-old CEO of RTL Nederland rose to work as a dealmaker at producer Eyeworks and as business operations director at RTL, but his preference for ones and zeros started in 1999. The recently graduated business administrator became a digital project leader at Big Brother and saw how reality TV online exploded with servers barely attracting visits to the live streams. In the media world, “everyone still wrote the Internet with a ‘d’,” he says.
Partly due to the online success of Big Brother, the Spanish Telefónica paid more than 5.5 billion euros for Endemol in 2000. The fact that Sauvé, as a young online project leader, made his boss John de Mol a billionaire is “a claim that I will certainly not make”.
If the competition authority agrees, RTL and De Mols TV company Talpa will merge. How does it feel to be his boss?
“I have learned an incredible amount from him and owe a lot to him and I am genuinely very much looking forward to working together now. But I’m not going to be his boss.”
In the pie ratio, yes. Talpa takes a 30 percent interest, RTL the rest.
“I may, possibly, lead this company, with RTL and Talpa. But Talpa is then represented on the supervisory board and that is how he also deals with my performance.”
In previous collaborations, producer De Mol was meddlesome.
Sauve shakes his head. “People apparently don’t believe it because it was brought into the world that there was a TV war, but we as RTL owe a lot to the creativity of John de Mol. Just look at the success of The Voice.”
In 2019, TV stars from Talpa and RTL were still arguing about formats. Linda de Mol of Talpa and RTL-prominent Chantal Janzen accused each other over and over again. But the popularity of ‘video-on-demand’ has condemned the two companies behind the channels RTL 4,5,7 and 8 and Talpa’s SBS, Net 5 and Veronica, in a battle against American parties such as Netflix and Disney. “So when we talk about war, it’s with them.”
The merger plans arose in the spring of 2020, during a corona meeting between delegations from Talpa and RTL Nederland. The RTL Group, owned by the Bertelsmann group, was engaged in a ‘strategic reorientation’ for its French, Belgian and Dutch subsidiaries. Around that time, Talpa and RTL people looked ‘deep in the eye’, Sauvé says. “If you look at how fast we can accelerate with Talpa on video-on-demand, this is a golden combination.”
Also read: What is The Mole? The broadcaster would rather be a producer
According to the merger announcement last May, a merged RTL/Talpa would have converted 909 million euros in 2020. RTL is good for 476 million euros, from which it can be deduced that the turnovers do not differ very much (Talpa does not share figures). The fact that Talpa is satisfied with 30 percent in the merged company follows, in the words of Sauvé, from “a valuation issue”.
In other words: RTL has it better.
“That shows that relationship. And that is called a valuation issue.”
Is the television world that Talpa has to rely on dead?
“That is much too harsh to say. Now look at the figures: the average Dutch person still watches TV for three hours a day. But when it comes to where the war is, it’s no longer about traditional television. The whole Talpa deal has nothing to do with the traditional branch of our business. It’s about making a fist against international players.”
The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets must assess whether there is market power. With Talpa, RTL will dominate the commercial TV market, even become bigger than the NPO. This is what you say then?
“This is how I see the market. Two things: ad revenue is shifting to international players: Google, which also includes YouTube, and Facebook. Why is that? Thanks to their data, customers can advertise with them in a more targeted way. The second is that the time people spend on television is shifting massively to video services. Coincidentally, there are all American tech players with huge budgets on both fronts. But we know the Netherlands best.”
Has an objection been lodged with ACM?
“By various parties. But we have a plausible story, because the world will look very different. With this dynamic, it was clear that there were not two independent commercial TV players for long. Consolidation is inevitable.”
The TV company has “completely turned around in recent years,” he says. RTL, traditionally aimed at advertisers, focuses on customer loyalty with sixty people, while 135 employees develop digital products and analyze which shows attract people to Videoland and which ones keep them. According to Sauvé, a local player has managed to be the number two behind Netflix in few countries. “We do. But more and more giga-players are added. Now again Viaplay [met Formule 1]. We already had Amazon, Disney, Netflix, Discovery. Am I missing one? Oh yes, Apple.”
For example, Videoland is “the lifeline for the long term”, according to Sauvé. RTL bought the video-on-demand service in 2013, and thanks to hits like Temptation Island (reality) and Mocro Mafia (crime) this has grown to 1 million subscribers and a turnover of about 80 million euros. Despite the fierce competition, RTL wants to more than double in five years. RTL Group recently set the goal that by 2026 its two streaming services Videoland and the German RTL+ should attract no less than ten million subscribers, against a turnover of 1 billion euros. Sauvé does not participate in beer coaster calculations, but it can be estimated that Videoland should grow to 2.5 million subscribers with a quarter of a billion turnover.
Peter R. cannot be praised enough. We are talking to his family about a form of memory
How? By throwing money. Due to the stock exchange listing, Sauvé is only allowed to talk about figures that RTL Group shares. The group wants to pump 600 million euros annually in RTL+ and Videoland by 2026, or three times more than now. Never before, Sauvé says, has so much been invested in talent, with budgets rising by tens of millions a year. “What a wonderful time to be a producer. The call for local content is only getting bigger.”
The slick posters of Videoland productions are lined up in the RTL building on the Media Park, two times to the left of the Familie De Mollaan. Outside in the rain are the weathered tiles of the star stable of RTL. Peter R. de Vries, table lord of RTL Boulevard murdered last July, is missing.
Will you still honor him?
“Peter cannot be praised enough for what he has done for journalism and how he has stood up for relatives and people who have been wronged. At his funeral you saw people who had really given a new life because of him, because he took up their business. What that man has accomplished… If anyone deserves a tile, it’s him.”
Is that still possible?
“We are not going to suddenly place a tile. We are discussing his memory with the family. Of course we donated to De Gouden Tip [de stichting van De Vries die 1 miljoen euro inzamelde om een doorbraak te forceren in de vermissingszaak van Tanja Groen]. More important is something permanent. This can be financial, but also program content in the area of cold cases and are fighting injustice. We are looking at that.”
After De Vries was shot after shooting at Leidseplein in Amsterdam, the police received signals that the RTL Boulevard studio was also a target. The program has since been recorded elsewhere. Has the threat subsided yet?
“New. I am not allowed to say much about it substantively, but the security situation is still very serious with measures that remain undiminished. Whether that will ever decrease, I dare not say.”
Also read: If RTL and Talpa merge, almost all commercial TV channels will be in the hands of one company
Is that what you hear from the police? Or does RTL not want to take a risk as a precaution?
“We rely on information from the authorities, which indicate that there is currently no reason to lower the security level. We have entered a new phase as media. In this case, this cost the life of a highly valued colleague, and the threat has spilled over to Boulevard. But this can happen to any program. Free speech is really under attack.”
Why is RTL Boulevard still a target?
“I can only speculate. And I don’t because it’s about the safety of colleagues. I notice that you are reacting somewhat surprised, as if we are back to normal. But we never went back to normal. I think this can easily spread to other media parties, we are really crossing a border.”
How do you look back on the plans to have Delano R., aka Keylow, make a Videoland documentary? He is now on trial in the liquidation process Eris.
“We stand for creative freedom. But based on the facts, we have of course said: we should not do this.”
During the production, summer 2018, there were signals that motorcycle club Caloh Wagoh used violence. Crime journalist John van den Heuvel, who also works at RTL Boulevard, said that if he had been asked, he would have immediately advised against this project. During production, which ran through Vice Studios, Keylow was arrested on suspicion of organizing liquidations for Ridouan Taghi, the prime suspect in the Marengo trial. Keylow insists he was a documentary filmmaker.
“We have learned, we also make mistakes,” says Sauvé. “You have to act carefully in this domain. It’s good that we live in a world where those facts come out, and we make different choices in the future. But you are still looking for entrances. Of The hunt for the Mocro Mafia [van Van den Heuvel], but also [tv-maker] Ewout Genemans who visits places that are not visible to everyone. So: we do make relevant programmes, but we have to be careful within which frameworks.”
#RTL #boss #Sven #Sauvé #merger #Talpa