Rakuten TV adds Euronews as its first live offering
Rakuten TV adds Euronews as its first live offering
By Mike Wheatley - 4 June 2020

Rakuten TV has just added Euronews as the first ever live TV channel on its video-on-demand platform. 

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Euronews is a familiar service that provides informative news content 24/7. It will be available in all European countries where Rakuten operates, as part of a progressive roll-out, the company said. It will launch in the U.K. on June 8.

Euronews provides news from a European perspective, and covers topics such as business, culture, current affairs, lifestyle and sci-tech. The live feed will be available on Rakuten in six different languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. 

Rakuten said the channel can be accessed via the Rakuten TV app, which is available on both Samsung and LG Electronics TVs from 2019 and later. 

Rakuten TV was previously only available as a paid option for consumers in five European countries via Samsung TV Plus, only to revamp itself earlier this year as a free, advertisement-based service. 

The company said the launch of Euronews is part of a wider strategy, in which the company plans to evolve its free-to-view video-on-demand service to a much more comprehensive platform. Rakuten TV currently offers a selection of movies, kids content and also some original content such as Matchday – Inside Barcelona FC, which is the official TV series of the Spanish football giant. 

“We are very excited about the launch of our first live channel, which allows us to enrich our current proposition providing an always more varied and extensive content in the platform,” said Rakuten’s European content director Teresa López. “Rakuten TV is eager to continue expanding its content offer in order to provide a complete experience just on a click.”

Meanwhile, Euronews’ director of worldwide distribution Maxime Carboni said the partnership with Rakuten would help it to reach new audiences via more innovative digital formats. 

“We are honored to be the first live content provider to join Rakuten TV’s AVOD service, allowing viewers to watch multiple Euronews versions on the platform,” Carboni said. “We were able to build along with Rakuten TV a great news content proposition and model which fits our common values: content localisation, great user experience and a focus on quality.”