The CEO of German broadcaster RTL spoke in Cannes about an action series in which cars fly through the air. Old episodes of Cobra 11, which no longer had any value for RTL, are bringing young viewers on YouTube to subscriptions to the RTL+ streaming service, he says. RTL had already exploited them in reruns and on RTL+. It then uploaded around 200 of them from its archive to YouTube.
RTL CEO Stephan Schmitter backed up the success on someone else's platform mainly with figures from RTL's own service. In October 2026, at the MIPCOM television trade fair, he linked the episodes on YouTube to growth in first video views on RTL+ and in subscriptions that RTL attributes to the series. Reports from MIPCOM do not say over what period. On YouTube, he says, the series is being discovered by a younger, mostly male audience. For new episodes and more flying cars, those viewers have to go to RTL+. Yet only three years ago, according to Schmitter, RTL had no relationship or partnership with YouTube.
As recently as February 2024, at a debate in Berlin, Schmitter criticised the German public broadcaster ARD for uploading content to YouTube. Putting lots of content there had, in his view at the time, no value whatsoever, and ARD was also making a competitor stronger. RTL could not even do it, because there was no monetisation there for it. He offered ARD cooperation on RTL+. By this year's MIPCOM, he was sharing the stage with Pedro Pina, YouTube's vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, in the Redefining Broadcast session on the partnership between RTL and YouTube.
Even the Czech public broadcaster Česká televize (Czech Television) puts documentaries from its ČT2 channel on YouTube, and last year it launched a documentary channel for them. “It doesn't mean that young people spend less time with public service media. They just spend it elsewhere,” Milan Fridrich, programme director of Czech Television, said back in November 2025. In February this year, Fridrich said those documentaries are watched mainly by older viewers on television and by younger viewers on YouTube.
What broadcasters get from YouTube and what it costs them
On YouTube, RTL is monetising a catalogue that was collecting dust, Pina says. In a LinkedIn article, he puts media companies and broadcasters alongside the millions of creators who receive the majority of the revenue from ads on their videos. They can also sell premium ad slots to advertisers themselves. Viewers can pay them for exclusive perks and content through channel memberships.
From standard ads on the video watch page, YouTube pays partners 55% of net revenues. The platform keeps the remaining roughly 45%. In March 2026, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) counted this among the costs of a partnership with YouTube, which in its view costs broadcasters both money and visibility.
According to the EBU, distribution through YouTube can also weaken the direct relationship between public service media and their audiences. Data, discoverability and user journeys are increasingly mediated by the platform, it says. Its algorithms are not designed to reflect public service obligations. In June, the EBU added that YouTube now sits at the centre of many TV screens and competes with broadcasters for attention.
Who picks the archive episodes for YouTube
Broadcasters first have to pick the episodes for those screens from their archives. “The practical limit on this for most European broadcasters is not strategy, it is supply,” Manoj Saraswat wrote under Pina's article; on LinkedIn, he describes himself as the founder of Deepgrip, a company that builds search for video archives. The RTL series worked, in his view, because somebody could say which episodes were worth putting up. In most archives, according to Saraswat, that question takes weeks and ends with whoever has been there longest.
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