2023-06-28 14:53:47
Going more towards free streaming and young people without abandoning good old TV: faced with this complicated equation, TF1 is betting next season on fiction and major events like the Rugby World Cup.
“A great media is the meeting between a technological project, a cultural project and an editorial project”, affirmed the new CEO of the group, Rodolphe Belmer, on Wednesday during his first presentation conference of a season.
This requires ‘accelerating in streaming’ with the free MyTF1 platform, in the face of paying competitors like Netflix, and ‘developing an offer of large family franchises, events’ to retain the public.
This strategy involves fiction, which is already a “pillar of TF1 programs” and is also “the most popular genre” on digital, according to Fabrice Bailly, director of programs and acquisitions for the group.
“We have worked in recent years to renew, enrich and upgrade our offer,” he said.
Le ‘soft power’ HPI
Emblem of this phenomenon, the box of ‘HPI’, the series with Audrey Fleurot, launched in 2021: it regularly attracts some nine million viewers, has been sold in a hundred countries and will have an American version.
It’s an example of French ‘soft power’, smiled Ara Aprikian, the group’s deputy general manager, as filming for the season begins this summer.
To ride this trend, TF1 will offer among the new releases for 2023-2024 a filmed adaptation of the cult Japanese animated series from the 1980s ‘Cat’s eyes’, in collaboration with Prime Video, Amazon’s streaming platform. Filming will start this fall.
In addition, Muriel Robin will be one of the main faces of the next fictions of the channel. She will appear in ‘The eyes wide closed’, a TV movie on incest (within a big party on this theme), and in the new detective series ‘Master Crime’.
Always in the news section, the series ‘Brocéliande’ (thriller with the singer Nolwenn Leroy), ‘Le daron’ (comedy with the ex-Inconnu Didier Bourdon) or ‘Mademoiselle Holmes’ (where Lola Dewaere, Patrick’s daughter, plays great-granddaughter of Sherlock Holmes).
In the series ‘Panda’, the singer Julien Doré will play a cool baba ex-cop and, in ‘Mercato’, Arnaud Ducret will be a Parisian policeman transferred to Marseille.
As for foreign series, TF1 co-produced with the BBC (United Kingdom) and ZDF (Germany) the adaptation of the children’s books ‘Le club des cinq’, led by Nicolas Winding Refn, director of the action film ‘Drive’.
In addition to shows and an evening devoted to singer Florent Pagny, the ‘major events’ offer will be dominated by the Rugby World Cup, from September 8 to October 28 in France.
‘It’s the Grail!’, rejoiced journalist Isabelle Ithurburu, former oval ball specialist on Canal + and new face of TF1 next season.
Then, in the summer of 2024, it will be the Euro football.
trendy vintage
Finally, on the entertainment side, TF1 will notably program the second season of the new ‘Star Academy’ this fall.
In addition to its flagship TF1, the group includes the news channel LCI, TMC (with the program ‘Quotidien’), TFX and TF1 Séries Films.
For Mr. Aprikian, TF1 ‘brings together all generations, social classes and territories’.
‘It is this DNA that will allow us to succeed in the free streaming strategy driven by Rodolphe Belmer: you have to have the big events; you have to have a young audience,” he said.
Former of Canal+ and Netflix, Mr. Belmer took the reins of the group in February and immediately made streaming a priority.
A strategy made all the more necessary by the failure of the merger with M6, which was supposed to give birth to a French giant capable of competing with Netflix and others.
To build a bridge between generations, the group announced an original marketing initiative this week: it is launching an ephemeral line of trendy clothing featuring the vintage logos of TF1 from the 1970s and 1980s.
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