“I appeal to your sense of responsibility and the general interest to avoid depriving hundreds of thousands of households of the reception of all DTT channels”, urges Rima Abdul Malak, Minister of Culture, in a letter addressed to Maxime Saada, president of the executive board of Canal+, which AFP was able to consult, confirming information from “Parisian”.
This ministerial request is made after the decision of Canal+ to stop broadcasting the free channels of the TF1 group (TF1, TMC, TFX, TF1 Séries Films and LCI) during the renewal of the distribution contract between the two parties, due, in particular, to the requirement of a payment “of a very substantial remuneration”, had announced, Friday, Canal+.
“Guarantee full coverage of the territory by DTT”
“Without interfering in the commercial dispute between the two groups and a negotiation which is a matter of contractual freedom”, the Minister explains that she is “careful that negotiations between publishers and distributors do not lead to blockages likely to compromise access of all audiences to the free DTT offer”. However, “cutting off the signal of the TF1 group channels on the TNT Sat offer deprives people who can only receive DTT by satellite of any access to the five free channels of the TF1 group”.
And “this situation is not in accordance with the intention of the legislator, which was to guarantee full coverage of the territory by DTT by obliging DTT channels to make their signal available free of charge to a satellite distributor who makes it the ask,” she recalls.
“A feeling of omnipotence”
In the “Sunday Diary”, Maxime Saada for his part reaffirms that “free DTT channels – such as those of the TF1 group – are free for the general public and must remain so. Canal+ broadcasts more than 150 channels in France, including all the other DTT channels without exception. We do not encounter these difficulties with other DTT players, including the M6 group”.
“The TF1 group has a feeling of omnipotence due to its dominant position, even before a possible merger with M6,” he notes.
“A pure coincidence of timing”
Is Canal+’s decision linked to the hearings scheduled for Monday and Tuesday before the Competition Authority for the merger project between M6 and TF1 ? The president of the executive board of Canal+ assures that “it is a pure coincidence of the calendar”.
“The contract signed with the TF1 group in 2018 ended on August 31, 2022. However, in 2018, this merger project did not exist. At the time, we asked for a longer contract period, refused by TF1, ”he explains.
But, that year, the commercial negotiations between the two audiovisual groups around the distribution of the TF1 group’s channels had already generated this deadlock. The cut in the signal then caused an outcry among some viewers and led Françoise Nyssen, then Minister of Culture, to summon Canal+ to restore the broadcasting of TF1 channels on the TNT Sat offer.