RTL II You

» see you.rtl2.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The target was fourteen to twenty-five. I was thirty-two, living in Ankara, and not in a country where RTL II is a channel anybody grew up with. RTL II You was a German answer to a German problem, which is the only kind of thing a national commercial broadcaster can build.

It launched on 31 May 2016, distributed only through digital platforms: a website at you.rtl2.de plus apps for Android and iOS. There was no transmitter and no slot in the electronic program guide. RTL2 Fernsehen GmbH & Co. KG, out of Grünwald near Munich, was trying to keep the next generation of its audience inside its own brand at the moment that generation stopped watching linear television at all.

The premise was sound enough that half of European broadcasting was working on some version of it in 2016. The execution had a problem that nobody at the time wanted to name out loud: the audience had not left television for a different kind of television.

~ the case file ~

~ what was on it ~

The schedule was exclusive in-house productions plus anime, with American series filling out the rest of it. News and weather segments were lifted from the main channel, and some of the programming was made with YouTubers. The anime is the part with history behind it. RTL II is where a whole German generation met Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball in the 1990s, and the free-to-air anime block is a large part of why German anime fandom looks the way it does.

So the plan had a logic to it: go back to the people who already associated the brand with anime, and meet them where they now were. What the plan could not account for is that the same people had spent the intervening decade learning to find anime themselves, through services that carried far more of it than a broadcaster's side project ever would.

~ the actual end ~

RTL II announced the end in late June 2017 and shut the service on the 30th. The reason given was that establishing the brand had fallen short of expectations, which in the German trade press came out as the plainer version: it had not managed to establish itself in the viewer market or in the advertising market. Those are the only two markets an ad-funded channel has.

No subscriber or viewer figure was ever published, before or after. What is left is a stub in a German encyclopedia and an entry in an anime news archive. The subdomain it lived on still exists, and today it answers with a 503.

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