According to Omdia, the Eastern European media and entertainment market is forecast to grow to $20.1 billion by 2025, expanding at an impressive 7% annual growth rate, outpacing global industry averages. While traditional TV remains the cornerstone of media revenues in the region—generating $9.1 billion—the most promising growth opportunities are found in digital transformation, including streaming video services and connected TV (CTV) advertising. Besides, with SVOD penetration at just 34%, Eastern Europe represents a significant growth opportunity for streaming services.
Rua Aguete report showcased that in CEE, the advertising in traditional television is higher than the ads in the CTV, that remains underdeveloped at just 3% of total TV screen advertising. "Advertisers are still using media mix and spending their money," asserted Karina Rompa, from Rakuten TV. "It can be sometimes cheaper to use traditional TV to have a huge reach, but it should be combined with digital ads, when using Meta, Google, or smaller, or regional, local media to have a reach to all age range, from very young people to older people," she explained. "In Eastern Europe, the streaming video ad is still more expensive than the TV ad, and in the same time, one minute, TV is still delivering a higher reach than even the master format of YouTube, " explained Lucyna Koba, from Nielsen Media.
Denis Oštir, Editor-In-Chief, VIDAA, describes that there's no real big AVOD players in Eastern Europe. "In this reegion the SVOD are dominante, and itis cheap, so there's not really incentive to ads in AVOD," he expressed. On the other noted, he said "the only cost in advertising is eyeballs. How many eyeballs I can deliver," he added.
Michal Stefanski, Head of Partnerships, CEE at Google mentioned that YouTube YouTube is professionalising because there's just so much content available in general. "The number of videos that are uploaded into YouTube are just skyrocketing. The same thing is happening with news publishers, the same thing is happening with news. And in order to actually catch the attention of users, you need to start making better content and also deliver this content on the platforms where the users want to watch it," he commented. He also revealed how YouTube is helping also broadcasters to monetise their content. "We allow them to sell ads on their YouTube channels by themselves," he noted. "This control of monetisation is a huge incentive to move more professional content to the platform," he added.
