Culture Minister Rima Abdul-Malak invites herself into the war of nerves between TF1 and Canal + and tries to call Vincent Bolloré’s group to reason. In a letter sent this Friday, September 2 to Maxime Saada, the president of Canal +, of which Le Parisien had a copy, she calls on the management “to its sense of responsibility and of the general interest to avoid depriving hundreds thousands of homes to receive all DTT channels”.
This Friday morning, Canal + had decided to cut the broadcasting of the channels of the TF1 group (TF1, TMC, TFX, TF1 Series Films, LCI) as well as their replay services. A measure which penalizes the customers of the satellite offer, dependent on Canal to access the small screen, that is to say nearly 3 million people. And 12% of the TF 1 audience.
And even if 80% of Canal + subscribers who receive television via Internet boxes (Orange, Free, SFR, Bouygues) will continue to have normal access to the channels of the TF1 group, the decision shakes up the media landscape. From this Saturday morning, the audiences were scrutinized and the first effects did not fail to materialize with, for example, the news of France 2 which exceeds that of the One. A rarity…
Do not “compromise access to the free DTT offer”
This radical decision that TF1 said it “regrets” is justified by Canal by the failure of negotiations for a new distribution agreement with its competitor. The previous one, concluded in pain in 2018, expired on September 1 at midnight. Two months of negotiations failed to bring the two parties to an agreement. “We could have given ourselves a few days to find one,” we lament in the corridors of the front page.
While Rima Abdul Malak “refuses to interfere in this commercial dispute”, she specifies that as Minister of Culture, she remains “obviously attentive to ensuring that negotiations between publishers and distributors do not lead to blockages likely to jeopardize the access of all audiences to the free offer of digital terrestrial television”.
For her, the cut of the signal of the channels of the TF1 group on the TNT Sat offer is “not in conformity with the intention of the legislator which was to guarantee an integral coverage of the territory by the TNT by obliging the channels of the TNT to make their signal available free of charge to a satellite distributor who requests it”. Contacted, Maxime Saada, the boss of Canal +, refused to comment.