France’s CSA makes scripted reality ruling

French media regulator the CSA has said that ‘scripted reality’ shows can in principle be considered to qualify towards French channels’ local content creation obligations.

Following a consultation on the topic, the CSA said that it will consider such shows on case-by-case basis.

It said there was no automatic link between its opinion on whether a show would qualify and that of the Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC), which is responsible for administering the Cosip fund to support domestic content creation.

However, the CSA observed that as the cost of creating such shows was relatively low in any case this was unlikely to be an obstacle to investment by channel providers.

The CSA said that as scripted reality shows in general resembled fictional works and qualified towards content creation objectives, the remuneration of writers and other professionals involved in their creation should follow established collective agreements.

The regulator welcomed moves towards a general agreement between producers authors and editors to create an accepted framework for practices and agreement to work towards improving the quality of programmes.