In mid-July 2026, ProSiebenSat.1 announced a new linear channel: Sat.2, launching in early 2027, with the motto “Reunions are a joy,” and programming including “The Bull of Tölz,” “Inspector Rex,” and “In Love in Berlin.” It sounded like the perfect summer news filler. Just six weeks earlier, RTL had completed its acquisition of Sky Deutschland—pay TV, WOW, and premium sports combined with RTL+ to create a provider with 12.3 million paying subscribers.
A nostalgia channel here, a multi-billion-dollar ecosystem there: To understand these two trends, one shouldn’t start with the corporations, but with the audience. Because both strategies are—you read that right—responses to the same finding: Viewers have long since decided to no longer behave uniformly.
Outside-in: How audiences really watch TV today
Looking at the leading US market, which Europe is following with a few years’ delay, reveals the extent of this transformation. According to Nielsen, streaming now consistently accounts for around 47 to 48 percent of total TV viewing; cable TV has fallen to 20 percent. YouTube alone, with over 13 percent, is the largest single “TV provider”—ahead of Disney, Netflix, and every traditional media conglomerate. Connected TV advertising is expected to overtake linear TV advertising by 2028.
Behind these average figures, however, lies the truly relevant insight: the audience is fragmenting into cohorts with fundamentally different behaviors.
Those under 30 are largely lost to traditional television; they have grown up with YouTube, TikTok, and on-demand content and are no longer familiar with a program schedule. Those over 50, on the other hand, continue to spend many hours a day in front of linear television—they have significant purchasing power, are brand loyal, and are surprisingly neglected by global streaming services. A hybrid middle ground is growing in between, switching between media libraries, subscriptions, and channel surfing in the evenings, and whose tolerance for advertising is increasing, as evidenced by the success of ad tiers from Netflix, Amazon, and Disney.
Three behavioral patterns deserve particular attention. First, live sports and events remain the last bastion of linear television – when the Super Bowl and Winter Olympics aired in February 2026, traditional TV briefly overtook streaming again. Second, “comfort viewing” is booming; reruns are among the most reliable drivers of viewership across all platforms. Third, ad-supported, curated FAST channels are growing rapidly worldwide – Pluto TV, Tubi, and the Roku Channel together sometimes achieve more viewing time in the US than any single broadcast channel. Viewers apparently want both: limitless choice and the liberating feeling of not having to choose.
Two strategies, two cohorts
Against this backdrop, the two summer announcements become a lesson, as each company has effectively targeted a different cohort.
RTL is following the hybrid and younger viewers into the non-linear realm.
he Sky acquisition – initially for just €68 million plus earn-out, because Comcast wanted to offload the struggling business – bundles precisely those assets that still drive payments in the new user behavior: live sports as a shared experience (Bundesliga, Formula 1) and a subscription ecosystem of RTL+, Sky, and WOW with critical mass to compete with the US platforms. It’s a gamble that the erosion of linear television will continue and that only national scaling will sustain the subscription business – capital-intensive, risky to integrate, but with genuine upside potential. The vulnerability: Sky is being acquired at a time when Warner Bros. Discovery has already migrated its content to HBO Max. The product promise needs to be redefined.
ProSiebenSat.1 is following the established demographic.
Sat.2 is precisely tailored to the behavior of female viewers aged 45 to 65: linear-oriented, nostalgic, and underserved. Archive content with rights held in-house, minimal programming costs, combined marketing with Sat.1 – effectively a FAST channel disguised as a traditional broadcaster, translating the international comfort-viewing trend into the media consumption reality of this target group. The fact that the group’s clearly positioned target-group channels have recently gained market share supports this logic. At the same time, Joyn, as a free, ad-supported streamer, serves the hybrid middle ground – with growing reach, but without advertising revenue yet being able to replace the billions lost in linear television. It’s a harvest strategy: capital-efficient, high-margin, but without an answer to the question of what comes after the last linear-oriented generation.
Conclusion: The viewer dictates the strategy.
Both approaches are rational – they simply price in different speeds of the same behavioral shift. RTL is betting on the speed of the exodus, ProSiebenSat.1 on its slowness. Sat.2 may sound like a slow news day story; In fact, this summer marks the moment when the German TV market ceased to be an industry with a strategy.