PLAY Radio
Play Radio obtained the national frequency in 2015 from Radio B92, the famous independent radio station founded by Veran Matić in 1989. The shutdown of the B92 radio program caused strong reactions among former journalists of this company, and some radio employees stated that they only found out about the termination of employment when a text message arrived from the bank informing them that severance pay had been paid to their accounts. Play radio introduced a new program concept with exclusively musical content with low-quality short news every hour. Playing commercial music (mostly MTV hits), Play radio quickly found itself among the three most listened to radio stations in the country. According to their data, in the first three months they became the most listened to radio with over 100,000 downloaded applications. Fans of the old B92 radio were very disappointed and struck that their favourite station from the 1990s had been turned into a commercial Play radio. This shift came with the then new owners, Antenna Media Group, whose business goals are mostly focused on profit. It remains unclear how the station managed to keep the national frequency B92, since it was a completely new legal entity. The commercialization and decline in the quality of the program continued after the takeover of the media outlet by Kopernicus in December 2018.
Audience Share
4.92%
Ownership Type
Private
Geographic Coverage
National
Content Type
Free content
Media Companies / Groups
Kopernikus Corporation
Ownership Structure
The publisher of Radio Play is the company Play Radio, which is 100% owned by Radio Broadcasting Company B92. which is 100% owned by the company Astonko doo, which is further 100% owned by Astonko Holdings from Cyprus. The Decision on television broadcasting, adopted by Regulatory Authority for Electronic Media in 2022, states that the founders of the Cyprus-based company are companies Lake bade holdings from Cyprus with 66,67% of shares and Kopernikus corporation, also from Cyprus, with 33,33% of shares. The owner of 100% of shares in Lake bade holdings is Kopernikus Stream TV. The owner of this company is Netherland-based Kopernikus Serbia that is further owned by Kopernikus Corporation from Cyprus. The Cypriot-based company is owned by Srđan Milovanović and Kopernikus Corporation from the Netherlands. The owner of this company is Srđan Milovanović.
Individual Owner
General Information
Founding Year
2015
Affiliated Interests Founder
Also known as ANT1 Group, is the largest media company in Greece. It started operating in 1988 with the radio station ANT1 97.2 FM, founded by the Greek-Cypriot freight forwarding magnate and businessman Minos Kiryaku. The Greek company founded the Serbian Play Radio in 2015.
Affiliated Interests Ceo
the owner of the Kopernikus Corporation and the brother of Zvezdan Milovanović, until recently a longtime trustee of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party for the city of Niš. The owner of local and cable TV Kopernikus, Milovanović became the owner of TV stations with a national frequency in December 2018, when he bought the media owned by the Antenna Group - TV Prva and O2, as TV B92, Prva TV Montenegro, Play radio, six cable channels and three portals Prva.rs, O2tv.rs and B92.net were called at that time. About a month earlier, he sold the company Kopernikus Technology, a cable operator, to Telekom Srbija for about EUR 195 million. Media experts then assessed that with this purchase, the ruling Serbian Progressive Party monopolised the media market. Previously, he was in the media spotlight several times. During the 2012 election campaign, he sold eight hours of programming from one Kopernikus channel to Sens marketing, a close Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), which broadcast its own program. The Republic Broadcasting Agency announced that the parties, however, could not lease the program in that way. Milovanović was also reported in 2016 when the controversial businessman Predrag Ranković Peconi was wounded at the Hotel Prague in Belgrade. He was sitting at the table when Peconi was shot, and the media wrote that the reason for the gathering of the society was precisely the celebration organised by Srđan Milovanović for the purchase of the Prague Hotel. The Milovanović brothers are the owners of several offshore companies. According to business documentation, Srđan Milovanović has been operating through offshore companies for years. Among other things, Milovanović is the owner of the record label KCN Records, founded in 2009. The first album released by this house was an album by folk singer Jovana Tipšin, Milovanović's then girlfriend. At a public tender, Milovanović bought land in New Belgrade at the Directorate for Construction Land and Construction of Belgrade, where there was a market known as a flea market, for about 20.2 million euros, as Nova.rs reported. The Kopernikus Company should build Kopernikus Tower on this site, "the most modern and largest office complex in the country and the region" of 100,000 square metres. Data from the Business Registers Agency show that Srđan Milovanović is the owner, director or representative of 15 companies, including hotels and restaurants, such as the Belgrade Hotel Prague, companies engaged in construction, real estate sales, road freight transport and trade in tobacco products. KCN televisions with local frequency are owned by his brother Zvezdan.
the director of several companies operating within Kopernikus – in addition to B92 TV, she is the director of Prva Television, Radio Play, as well as the company Nova Broadcasting and Astonko, the company owned by B92 TV. Before she started working for Srđan Milovanović, the owner of Kopernikus, she had an entrepreneurial shop Auditor from Kragujevac that worked between 2003 and 2014. According to her LinkedIn profile, she graduated from the Faculty of Economics in Kragujevac and worked as the accountant for several companies in this city in the 1990s. Since 2007, she worked for Triglav Osiguranje (Insurance) in Belgrade, and since 2017, she has been the head of accounting at Kopernikus Technology, which was sold to Telekom Srbija a year later by Srđan Milovanović.
Affiliated Interests Editor-In-Chief
worked at Play Radio since 2015 and currently, according to the data from the website of this media, runs a show called Playlist. Guberinić is a singer who performed with the group Tap 011, and with her colleague Una Senić she participated in 2019 in Beovizija, a competition for the position of Serbia's representative at the Eurovision Song Contest.
Contact
Financial Information
Revenue (in Mill. $)
Missing data
Operating Profit (in Mill. $)
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Advertising (in % of total funding)
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Market Share
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Further Information
Headlines
Meta Data
Missing data on market share and advertising revenue. Financial data is available only for the company that publishes the media, but not for the media itself.
