Advanced Television

MTG accelerates digital development

December 3, 2015

Following MTG’s investment in a number of scale new digital ventures and reorganisation into a country management structure over the past six months, the management of the Group’s digital businesses, including digital accelerator MTGx, are changing shape.

  • The online advertising video on demand operations across eight countries will now sit within the local country organisations, closer to the customer and local product offerings. Group AVoD revenues were up 42 per cent in the first nine months of 2015 and started streams were up over 100 per cent.
  • The MTGx central video on demand technical functions for both the Play and Viaplay services are being united under the leadership of Nordic digital streaming business Viaplay’s CEO Jonas Karlén, who will now report directly to Group CEO Jørgen Madsen Lindemann. Viaplay’s subscription video on demand started streams more than doubled in Q3 2015.
  • MTGx Ventures will continue to focus on the development of the exciting new Ventures Businesses comprising Turtle Entertainment (74 per cent owned), Zoomin.TV (51 per cent owned), Splay (81 per cent owned) and DreamHack (100 per cent owned), as well as a number of early stage start-ups, academies and hubs. These fast growing businesses together generate more than 2.4 billion monthly views globally and combined annual external sales of more than SEK 850 million. Arnd Benninghoff has headed up the Group’s digital ventures since joining MTG in November 2014 from his role as CDO of ProsiebenSat1, and will now become an MTG Executive Vice President as well as CEO of MTGx Ventures.

    Arnd will report to Mathias Hermansson, who returns to work on December 18th after his period of leave. Mathias will take on the new role of Executive Chairman of MTGx Ventures and adviser to MTG’s President & CEO on a number of strategic projects. Maria Redin’s role as acting CFO is now made permanent with immediate effect. As a result of all of these changes, Rikard Steiber, MTG EVP and Chief Digital Officer, is leaving MTG.

    “The group is transforming fast now and we have a scale and high growth digital business, with leadership in key complementary online video categories. MTGx has disrupted and catalysed the organisation as planned and we now have considerable momentum in the digitalisation of our existing businesses and addition of new ones.

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