Broadcasters Not Happy With More Free News

Michael Hedges May 15, 2014 Follow on Twitter

The appetite for live news has never been greater. Drama in progress is an audience magnet. The news business is also a magnet, commercially attractive and highly competitive. The digital dividend has made this possible and very challenging.

A battle is being waged for the French news space. It is not, necessarily, about the best coverage of major events. In purely retail terms, French broadcasters are fighting over shelf space, in this case the digital dividend. Major broadcaster TF1 wants to take its all-news channel LCI off pay-TV platforms making it a free-to-air digital channel. Competitors aren’t pleased.

“For the first time, news on television in France is neither in the hands of the State nor a group dependent on the public order,” said NextRadioTV CEO Alain Weill to a convocation with media regulator CSA, quoted by Les Echos (May 13), not so vaguely referring to public broadcaster France Télévisions and, respectively, TF1 major shareholder Bouygues Group. Free-to-air digital news channel BFM TV took to the airwaves in 2005, an offshoot of national radio channel RMC, also owned by NextRadioTV. Construction and public works giant Bouygues Group holds a 43% stake in TF1, which operates several channels, and 89% of mobile operator Bouygues Télécom.

CSA officials have been listening to arguments for and against the LCI free-to-air move. Last week TF1 CEO Nonce Paolini told regulators LCI would be closed if forced to stay in the pay-TV “ghetto without a future,” reported Reuters (May 7). “Twenty years is not an age to die.” LCI as a free-to-air digital channel would not, he said, cannibalize the all-news TV market, which includes i-Tèlè, owned by Canal+. M6 Group has also requested the CSA allow pay-TV channel Paris Première to join free-to-air digital channels.

Canal+ chairman Bertrand Meheut said M. Paolini’s statements to the CSA showed “bad faith,” quoted by Le Figaro (May 9). The pay-TV market in France has been “weakened,” he said, by TF1 selling its stake in Eurosport to Discovery Communications and closing the TF6 joint venture with M6. “If LCI switches to free, i-Tèlè may lose 20% of its audience and 20% of its revenues.”

Major French broadcasters, of course, schedule morning, midday and evening daily news programs and less regular current affairs shows, a decades old paradigm with enduring benefit. Ninety percent of French people tune in to news at least once a day, reported media measurement institute Médiamétrie earlier this year, with just under two-thirds (63%) checking out what’s going on several times a day, more than a quarter (27%) once an hour. Most by far tune to radio channels in the morning for the news jolt. Evening news programs, before and after games shows and movies, remain a fixture.

“Martin Bouygues will not give up the channel he founded twenty years ago,” retorted M. Weill to reporters after the CSA meeting. “The closure of LCI is neither inevitable nor necessary.” The TF1 strategy in making LCI a free-to-air channel, he suggested, is “three free news channels on the air, but three small ones.” He also suggested, if LCI moves from the pay-TV world “in 18 months there will be a merger. And I do not want that.”

Bouygues Group has retaliated for the insolence, said M. Weill, by withdrawing all advertising on BFM TV and RMC for ten days, “which represented 6% of our turnover.” The CSA will make a decision on the pay-TV channels request before the August holidays. The French TV news saga continues. Stay tuned.

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