2023-09-18 13:00:05
A man watches President Emmanuel Macron on TF1, from a smartphone, in Rennes, October 15, 2017. DAMIEN MEYER / AFP
It’s the quest for the Holy Grail of TV decision-makers: obsessive and endless. Shaken by the appearance of digital technology and its new uses since the 2010s, the classic, so-called “linear” television sector has, after all this time, not found the miracle recipe to renew itself and continue to exist. While the decline in viewing time continues (three hours twenty-six minutes on average per day in 2022, compared to three hours forty-one minutes in 2021), most players in the sector are still looking for the ideal model.
“No one in the industry has yet found the balance point because it changes all the time, uses evolve very quickly”, recognizes Henri de Fontaines, head of strategy and development at the management of the M6 group. The general problem is known: maintaining a strong identity within an entertainment industry flooded by video, while not losing track of new uses, particularly among young people.
The challenge now is to take into account all viewing modes, from design and production. In this range, programs with a strong brand and consumable in episodes are favored (the audience for “Beijing Express”, for example, is divided into two thirds linear and one third on demand). This is what convinced M6 to invest 30 million euros annually to join its competitors in the production of a daily fiction series (like TF1 with “Tomorrow belongs to us” or France Télévisions and “Un si grand soleil” ), expected on screens in 2024.
“Multichannel strategy”
The RMC group, whose RMC BFM Play platform is the third in the private sector, is also seeking to improve its linear/non-linear ratio to follow “a younger generation who overconsume television content but do not want to make an appointment with a linear channel”, according to Stéphane Sallé de Chou, general director of the entertainment division. With Sylvain Lévy and Pierre Chabrier, from the Vilebrequin YouTube channelRMC Découverte is bringing on-the-go video professionals this year to present the automotive info and entertainment program “Top Gear”, one of its flagship shows.
TF1, for its part, is relying on the same principle of serialization: while a documentary on the Notre-Dame construction site must be shown on the channel by the end of the year, these are five twenty-six minute episodes which will be posted online on the site and management is already talking about a possible “season 2”. Information, although the queen of direct and continuous flow, is also rethought in cutting; the channel is considering offering daily videos of four to five minutes in digital exclusivity by 2024, by repackaging rushes not used in television news or on LCI.
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