MediaForEurope becomes the largest commercial European broadcaster

This summer, ProSieben’s ownership became the topic of a new M&A saga in the European TV and video market. Back in December 2024, Italian group MediaForEurope announced its plans to accelerate its expansion across Europe. Acting on this strategic goal, it made a bid to increase its 30% share in ProSiebenSat.1 last March. In May, the Czech group PPF also announced its intention to raise its 15.4% stake in an effort to push for dual control of the German broadcaster. In August, PPF eventually withdrew its bid and announced it would sell its shares to MFE, effectively granting it control of ProSieben’s operations through a 75.61% majority ownership.  With this move, MediaForEurope now controls three of the largest European domestic TV broadcasters. The group reported 2.9 billion EUR revenues for year 2024, mostly coming from its activities in Italy and Spain. This was a 4.7% increase from 2023 results, largely driven by a strong rebound of the Italian advertising market last year.  According to Dataxis estimations, 2.5 billion EUR came from TV advertising sales and BVOD services alone. With ProSieben’s acquisition, we expect that MFE will generate 4.3 billion EUR in revenues across its TV and video assets alone in Italy, Spain and German-speaking markets in 2025. The group is very well positioned in resilient linear TV markets. It is the market leader over commercial TV in Italy, and stands head-to-head with Atresmedia in Spain, where audiences spent respectively 93.9% (Auditel figure) and 84.7% (Kantar Spain) of their total watch time on broadcasters' content offers instead of OTT services' platforms in 2024. Last year, MFE reported that TV advertising accounted for over 81% of its total revenues. Nonetheless, the shift toward video streaming is a strong aspect of the group’s strategy. MFE recently rebranded its OTT services in Italy and Spain as Mediaset Infinity to capitalize on its strong legacy brand. Meanwhile, Joyn is already presented as the key asset for ProSiebenSat.1’s entertainment segment’s prospects looking forward.