Sam Barnett took over as CEO of Central European Media Enterprises (CME) in May 2025 after more than two decades at MBC Group, where he transformed the Middle East broadcaster into a regional media powerhouse and oversaw the rise of Shahid, now the Arab world’s largest streaming platform. With extensive experience spanning broadcast television, digital media and streaming, Barnett arrived in Prague at a pivotal moment as CME accelerates its digital transformation while protecting the strength of its market-leading local broadcasters across Central and Eastern Europe.

In this exclusive interview with Yako Molhov for CEETV, Barnett reflects on his first year at the helm of CME, discussing the balance between local creative autonomy and regional scale, the future of streaming and advertising, the battle against piracy, the rollout of the Oneplay ecosystem beyond the Czech Republic, and the evolving role of broadcasters in an increasingly fragmented media landscape. He also shares his vision for CME’s future and explains why local storytelling remains the company’s most powerful competitive advantage.


Sam, you took the helm of CME in mid-2025 after a highly successful tenure leading MBC Group in the Middle East, where you scaled the Shahid streaming platform. Now that you are a year into your role at CME, what are the goals you have set for yourself and the company you are heading?

When I joined CME, I deliberately spent the first months listening - six markets, hundreds of conversations. What I saw at CME was a portfolio that does the hardest thing in our industry well: it makes premium local content that people love in their own language, in their own culture. I want CME to be the proof case in Europe that a regional group where local relevance and modern streaming economics reinforce each other and can win long-term in the digital era.


The stated goal of recent reorganization was to streamline cross-operational collaboration across your markets. As you centralize more functions at the Prague headquarters, how do you safeguard the local creative autonomy that makes stations like PRO TV, TV Nova, or bTV successful in their respective countries?

This is crucial to our model, so let me be very precise. We do not centralize local creative autonomy, on the contrary, it is the asset we are in business to protect. The examples such as PRO TV's news being the most trusted brand in Romania, the reason TV Nova has a thirty-year emotional relationship with the Czech audience, the reason bTV can start the country election campaign with emotional 3D building mapping in Sofia – all of this comes from local teams who deeply understand their viewers and they lead in terms of creativity and execution.

What we do at the center is everything that empowers those teams - technology, data, platforms, AI - and share learnings from one country that can travel to another.


Advertisers across Central and Eastern Europe are facing fragmented audiences and rapidly shifting digital ad spends. How are CME’s linear television networks holding up against digital alternatives, and are you planning a hybrid, ad-supported tier for your streaming ecosystem to capture these shifting budgets? What are your forecasts for your markets in CEE?

Our linear business is holding up far better than the global narrative suggests, because we own the moments the country watches together – evening news, primetime fiction, live sport, big entertainment finales, current affairs debates, etc.

Where the genuine shift is happening is in how we layer digital on top. The ad-supported tier is part of that thinking - we believe a hybrid model is the right answer for our markets. Forecast-wise, we expect digital ad share in our markets to keep growing while the linear premium inventory stays remarkably resilient.


CME recently doubled down on intellectual property protection by joining both the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance (AAPA) and the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE). How severely is digital piracy denting your premium revenue in territories like Slovakia and Romania, and what concrete enforcement actions can we expect next?

Piracy is one of the biggest taxes on local creative investment, and as we heavily invest in premium local fiction and exclusive sports rights, the cost of inaction goes up. We tackle piracy collectively as a group and in all our markets.

Joining ACE and AAPA in the same year was deliberate. ACE gives us access to the most sophisticated global enforcement network in entertainment - shared intelligence, civil and criminal capability, and legal precedent across jurisdictions. AAPA gives us partnership with key players across EMEA to tackle all aspects of digital piracy and to facilitate the discussion with key stakeholders across the spectrum, including regulators and intermediaries. Together they let us act with much more leverage than CME could ever generate alone.


There have been reports regarding advanced talks and a due diligence phase with Czech businessman Michal Strnad regarding the potential sale of TV Markíza in Slovakia. While PPF has called this market speculation, from where you sit, is CME fully committed to maintaining its current regional footprint?

PPF has already addressed this directly, so I’m not going to comment on what are speculative rumors.

Continues with Part 2.