John de Mol turns 68 this year and hoped to celebrate with the sale of Talpa. After that he would work considerably less, to about thirty hours a week. And now? “Now he has a handicapped company.”
It is a black day for John de Mol: the sale of his company Talpa to the larger RTL Netherlands is cancelled. It should have been the last big deal of his professional life. A deal that he will never be able to make again: he would receive no less than 30 percent (!) of the shares in RTL, a company that is future-proof.
Handicapped company
And that’s where Talpa struggles, says media entrepreneur Ruud Hendriks in it AD. “Talpa is the biggest loser. It won’t be very cozy in the corridors there now. John de Mol will have to come up with something else. I don’t think he can go on like this. Talpa’s Achilles heel is the lack of a streaming service.”
Where RTL is future-proof with Videoland, Talpa only has the viewing service KIJK. “But no Videoland, no Netflix-like branch. They have completely missed that market, which I find unimaginable. Talpa simply does not participate in this. That means that De Mol actually has a handicapped media company.”
Big problem
And a disabled media company does not sell well, explains TV expert Kirsten Jan van Nieuwenhuijzen The Telegraph. “De Mol had negotiated a very favorable deal for himself. Talpa does not own Videoland. They have not made that investment in the future there. That is a real problem in the long run.”
John is also no longer interested in trying something with streaming at this stage. “We think you can’t really win that, so our choice is to just stick to the platforms we know”, said one of his bosses, Paul Römer, more than two years ago.
‘John is very disappointed’
Private boss Evert Santegoeds knows that John is terribly disappointed. “John de Mol will find this very bad. He was very much looking forward to it, because it would give him a lot of free time. The daily hassle of running such a complete package of channels takes up a lot of time.”
He continues in the podcast Strictly Private: “Recently he said: ‘It would save me thirty hours a week if this went ahead’, so you can imagine that the mood is a bit down there today. The advertisers won. They think: then it will become much too powerful and the competition authority has gone along with that.”
Shoulders below
Evert does not expect John to lose heart now. “I assume, knowing De Mol, that he will put his shoulders under it and will make the best of it at SBS 6. There have been very successful evenings in between by now, you know. The mood is not very bad, but I think this could have brought both parties a lot of profit and savings.”
He concludes: “I think they will shake their heads and look: what are we going to do now?”
