About sixx Austria

sixx Austria

sixx Austria is the Austrian offshoot of sixx, the German women's entertainment channel of ProSiebenSat.1 Media. It launched at 20:15 on 3 July 2012, replacing the generalist channel Austria 9 on its existing capacity, and it has since served Austrian women viewers with a schedule of series, films, documentaries, true stories and Austrian programmes made or adapted for the local market. Its programme is created in cooperation with sixx in Germany and Puls 4 in Austria, and it sits inside the ProSiebenSat.1 Austria group alongside Puls 4, ATV and the Austrian windows of the group's German channels. Bernhard Albrecht became the channel's head at its launch.

Unlike most of the channels in this batch, sixx Austria is a continuing service rather than a closed one, and this profile is written in the present tense about the channel as it operates, and in the past tense about its launch. Its founding facts are unusually well documented, because its start was a public relaunch covered by the group's own launch announcements as well as by the reference record: a named predecessor, a precise start time, a first film, and a stated household reach of 82 percent of Austrian households from day one.

Origins: the purchase of Austria 9

sixx Austria exists because ProSiebenSat.1 wanted an Austrian version of sixx and bought the platform for it. At the beginning of 2012, SevenOne Media Austria, the ProSiebenSat.1 subsidiary responsible for the group's Austrian business, announced its intention to take over the private channel Austria 9 TV. The purchase was completed in the spring of 2012 — launch reporting dates the closing of the purchase to March and the integration into the ProSiebenSat.1 Austria group from April — and the stated aim of the acquisition was to build and market an offshoot of the German channel sixx.

Austria 9 was an attractive vehicle for that purpose despite its small audience. It held nationwide capacity, established cable and satellite carriage, and a household reach that the group could transfer wholesale to the new brand. Rather than applying for a new licence and building distribution from nothing, ProSiebenSat.1 exchanged the content and identity on a slot that Austrian households already received. That substitution model — buying reach, then rebranding it — is a recurring pattern in European channel launches, and sixx Austria is a clean Austrian example of it.

Launch evening, 3 July 2012

The changeover was choreographed to the hour. On 3 July 2012 the Austria 9 programme was discontinued at 11:59, the new channel logo was exchanged, and a countdown ran to the start of sixx Austria. At 20:15, the prime-time hour, sixx Austria began broadcasting with the romantic comedy 27 Dresses, starring Katherine Heigl — a deliberate first statement of the channel's promise of romantic, female-skewing entertainment. The group's launch announcement billed the new service as the broadcaster for, in its phrase, the most beautiful target group in the world, and promised series, excellent films, true stories and gripping documentaries around the clock.

The channel's first head, Bernhard Albrecht, said at the launch that he was pleased to offer the group's female audience still more attractive programming, with the medium-term goal of becoming the number one entertainment channel of the new generation. The relaunch initially broadcast from the Rosenhügel Studios in Vienna, Austria 9's home, with the group's Austrian channels expected to move to the Media Quarter Marx at the end of 2012 — a reminder that, behind the new brand, the operation was at first physically the same Vienna television plant its predecessor had used.

The sixx idea: a channel for women

sixx Austria is the Austrian expression of a brand ProSiebenSat.1 created in Germany, where sixx had been launched as the group's channel for women, growing out of the group's earlier female-oriented online network. The Austrian service applies that positioning to the local market: entertainment programming addressed to women, built from international series and films, documentaries and real-life stories, with Austrian content inserted to give the channel a domestic accent that a pure relay of the German feed would lack.

The positioning matters commercially. A defined demographic channel can be sold to advertisers as a route to a defined audience, which is precisely the discipline Austria 9, as a broad generalist with a 1 percent share, could not offer. Within the ProSiebenSat.1 Austria portfolio, sixx Austria complements the broader entertainment of Puls 4 and ATV and the Austrian advertising windows of ProSieben, Sat.1 and kabel eins, rather than competing head-on with any of them.

Austrian programming: Koch mit! Oliver and Austria's Next Topmodel

The Austrian content was present from the first schedule. The successful cooking show Koch mit! Oliver, with Puls 4 chef Oliver Hoffinger, was shown on sixx Austria from Monday to Friday at 18:10 to 18:45, giving the channel a locally produced early-evening appointment built around a face Austrian viewers already knew from its sister channel. Cooking is a natural anchor for a women's lifestyle-entertainment channel, and placing a Puls 4 format on sixx Austria demonstrated the intra-group cooperation on which the channel's programme model depends.

The second documented launch strand was a repeat run: the first four seasons of Austria's Next Topmodel were repeated on sixx Austria on Sundays at 23:35. Austria's Next Topmodel, the Austrian adaptation of the Next Top Model format, had premiered on Puls 4 in 2009 and was one of the group's best-known Austrian productions. Repeating it on sixx Austria gave the new channel proven local reality content in a late slot, and the group's launch announcement promised that further formats would follow. This profile names only the Austrian programmes documented in the launch record; it does not attempt a full current programme list, which changes season by season.

How the programme is made: sixx and Puls 4 cooperation

The reference record describes sixx Austria's programme model in one sentence: the programme of sixx Austria is designed in cooperation with sixx and Puls 4 for the Austrian market. That formula distinguishes the channel from two simpler models. It is not a fully independent Austrian channel commissioning an entire schedule of its own, and it is not merely the German sixx feed with Austrian advertisements. It is a hybrid: a German brand and programme pipeline, an Austrian schedule assembled with the group's Austrian flagship, and local programmes and scheduling decisions for Austrian viewers.

That hybridity is the economic key to the channel. The expensive elements — the brand, the acquired series and film library, the channel design — are shared with Germany, Europe's largest German-language market. The differentiating elements — Austrian formats, Austrian scheduling, Austrian advertising sales through the group's local organisation — are supplied from Vienna. A market of Austria's size can sustain such a channel on that basis, where a wholly original women's channel would struggle to fund a full schedule.

Distribution and reach

sixx Austria was receivable in 82 percent of Austrian households from the start of broadcasting, because it used Austria 9's existing capacity. It could be received throughout Europe unencrypted via satellite, and in the Austrian cable network; its recorded reception routes are antenna, cable and satellite, and its picture formats are standard-definition 576i and high-definition 1080i. Free-to-air satellite carriage across Europe is a wider footprint than the channel's Austrian target market, a common consequence of using an established unencrypted satellite slot.

The channel's official web presence is at sixx.at, within the group's Austrian online portfolio. No independently verified current audience share for sixx Austria is quoted in this profile: the channel is not separately listed among Austria's most-watched channels in the published 2024 market table consulted for this batch, which is dominated by ORF and the larger private channels, and inventing or estimating a share would breach the verification standard applied to these profiles. Its significance is as a targeted portfolio channel, not as a mass-audience service.

Position in the ProSiebenSat.1 family

ProSiebenSat.1's Austrian free-to-air family, as the group itself lists it, comprises kabel eins Austria, kabel eins Doku Austria, ProSieben Austria, ProSieben Maxx Austria, Sat.1 Österreich, Sat.1 Gold Österreich, sixx Austria, Puls 4, Puls 24 and ATV with ATV2. Within that line-up, sixx Austria is the only service built specifically for women, and the only one that began life as a converted Austrian generalist rather than as an Austrian window of a German channel or an originally Austrian brand like Puls 4.

That position has protected it. Portfolio channels survive changes of fashion when they deliver a distinct audience to the group's sales house, and sixx Austria's distinctness is its demographic. The channel the group bought in 2012 as an underperforming generalist became, under a new name and a narrower promise, a durable niche service — a more successful use of the same transmitters, cable slots and satellite capacity.

Relationship to the German sixx

The Austrian channel's parent brand, sixx in Germany, is one of ProSiebenSat.1's established free-to-air channels, listed in the group's German line-up alongside Sat.1, ProSieben, kabel eins, Sat.1 Gold, ProSieben Maxx and kabel eins Doku. The group operates sixx offshoots or windows in all three German-speaking markets — Germany, Austria and Switzerland — although the Swiss presence takes the form of a sixx window within the group's Swiss channel portfolio rather than a standalone converted channel.

For an Austrian viewer, the practical consequence is a channel that feels both familiar and local: the sixx identity, design and much of the series and film pipeline are shared with the German service, while the schedule around them — Koch mit! Oliver in early evening, Austria's Next Topmodel repeats, Austrian advertising — is assembled in Vienna. Profiles of the channel in directories sometimes misstate it as a mere advertising opt-out; the documented cooperation with Puls 4 and the documented Austrian formats show a more substantive local operation than that description suggests.

Continuity since 2012

sixx Austria has operated continuously since 3 July 2012. In a batch of Austrian channels that includes several closures — its own predecessor among them — that continuity is itself the finding: the conversion of Austria 9 into sixx Austria worked, in the limited but real sense that the service it created has endured for well over a decade inside the same group portfolio, on the same basic model of German-Austrian cooperation with which it launched. The batch research records the channel as an active service with its official site at sixx.at, and the group's current channel listings continue to include sixx Austria among its Austrian free-to-air services.

This profile does not narrate year-by-year schedule changes, seasonal campaigns or individual series acquisitions for the years after the launch, because no reliable continuous chronicle of them has been verified in the sources consulted, and a programme guide is a snapshot rather than a history. The channel's history, on the verified evidence, is a launch story with a stable sequel: conceived in early 2012, bought as Austria 9 in the spring, launched on 3 July 2012, and sustained since as the women's entertainment channel of the ProSiebenSat.1 Austria group.

What the record supports — and a correction of common errors

The verified core of the sixx Austria story is: acquisition of Austria 9 by ProSiebenSat.1, completed in spring 2012; launch at 20:15 on 3 July 2012 with 27 Dresses; first channel head Bernhard Albrecht; 82 percent household reach at launch using Austria 9's capacity; free-to-air satellite reception across Europe plus Austrian cable; programme made in cooperation with sixx and Puls 4; and launch-period Austrian content including Koch mit! Oliver on weekday early evenings and repeats of the first four seasons of Austria's Next Topmodel. Each of those points appears in the group's launch material or the reference record, or both.

Two circulating errors should be corrected. First, some low-quality streaming-directory pages claim sixx Austria was launched in 2006 and carries news and live football including the Austrian Bundesliga and the UEFA Champions League; neither claim is supported by the launch record or the reference history, and both contradict the documented 2012 conversion from Austria 9 — this profile rejects them. Second, the purchase is sometimes dated loosely to May 2012; the German reference entry says the channel was taken over in May in its summary line, but its own history section and the launch press material date the completed purchase to March and the integration to April 2012, which is the chronology this profile follows, noting the summary discrepancy openly.