HAMBURG (dpa-AFX) - The interest in the European Football Championship is also helping MagentaTV to achieve a ratings high, according to Telekom. According to the company, more than 43 million viewers watched the 36 matches of the preliminary round on the paid service. This means that "the results of the last World Cup have already been clearly surpassed", said Wolfgang Metze, Managing Director Private Customers at Telekom, in the press release on Friday.

MagentaTV will show all 51 European Championship matches live, four preliminary round matches and one round of 16 match exclusively. ARD and ZDF will be showing 34 matches on free TV and RTL twelve. The German group match between Hungary and Switzerland, which was broadcast live exclusively on MagentaTV, reached a record 2.3 million viewers. The majority of the preliminary round matches were each watched by well over one million viewers. According to Telekom, these figures are also well above those of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar./clu/DP/jha