Play Suisse

Streaming has redrawn the media landscape. No broadcaster, public or private, can stand apart from this shift. By 2018, SRG SSR faced the question of how a national broadcaster can stay relevant in its own right alongside global platforms with budgets a hundred times its size. Two particularities of the Swiss context defined the picture. First, a federal governance structure across four language regions, where any national initiative touches distinct regional interests, mandates and business models. Second, a long-standing partnership with the Swiss film industry, whose model for rights and financing had to be reworked for the digital era without straining the relationship.

As Director of Development and Offering and member of the Executive Board, Bakel Walden oversaw the development, launch and operation of the national streaming platform Play Suisse, together with an interregional team drawn from all language regions. In parallel, he served as SRG’s chief negotiator in two multi-year processes to renew the foundational content agreement with the film industry. Both tracks were strategically intertwined. No new rights, no platform. No platform, no future-proof national content offering.

• Strategic groundwork: market analysis to position the platform in the streaming landscape, building an internal stakeholder structure across the Board, the language regions and partners, defining the platform profile as a curated national offering
• Building an interdisciplinary team with internal and external expertise across content, technology, research and marketing, with responsibility for budget and interregional coordination, reporting to the Executive Board and Board of Directors
• Leading negotiations with the film industry to fundamentally renew the content architecture and extend digital rights, as a strategic precondition for the platform
• Iterative platform development closely aligned with audience needs and market testing, combined with a marketing plan for launch and growth as well as strategic partnerships, including Swisscom as launch partner
• Continuous feedback loops for ongoing improvement of the offering, with Play Suisse laying the foundation for the next generation of SRG’s national platform

Play Suisse established a curated national content offering in Switzerland where none had existed in this form before. Within four years, the platform reached more than one million registered users, with measurable use across language regions. In parallel, the content architecture with the Swiss film industry was fundamentally renewed against the backdrop of a group-wide cost-cutting programme.

• A new platform category for Switzerland: a national content offering that connects language regions and had no equivalent before
• A renewed partnership with the film industry: two multi-year negotiation processes engaging the entire Swiss film industry produced viable solutions that expanded contract volume, digital rights and mutual trust
• A foundation for the next platform generation: Play Suisse demonstrated that a cross-regional platform can succeed in Switzerland, opening the path to the consolidation of SRG’s national platforms