About

A pioneering company in its field, HD Plus provides customers with the option to watch a broad range of HD channels for a regular subscription fee. Michael Zeck, general counsel and data protection officer for this leading entertainment enterprise, considers his support of the company’s establishment as a personal career highlight. ‘To charge customers for free TV programmes via satellite was completely new and has consequently been marked by complex antitrust and media law issues’, he explains. ‘The development of the HD Plus business with regard to modern manner of watching content where and whenever our customers want to as well as the advancement of HD Plus to a Pay TV platform offering attractive premium content was also something I am particularly proud of having been part of achieving’. This, along with his highly successful role in supporting his former employer Premiere (now Sky Deutschland) in a turnaround role from ‘impending insolvency to IPO‘, has had a significant effect on moulding him into the highly skilled in-house counsel he is. He states: ‘I’ve learned that, while of course legal expertise is absolutely essential for our job, you also need diligence, endurance and especially creativity and business orientation to succeed as an in-house lawyer. As an in-house lawyer you are very close to business; thus you should be open-minded, flexible, creative, pragmatic and decisive’.