Orange and HBO launch new French channel

Orange in France is launching a new channel next month in partnership with HBO, called OCS City, ‘génération HBO’.

The channel, which joins Orange’s suite of OCS-branded movie networks, comes on the back of the firm’s content renewal deal with HBO back in January, which gave OCS first-broadcast rights to HBO shows in France.

In its new home, HBO series will air on a linear basis on OCS City on Monday nights at 20:40.

At the same time OCS announced the launch of OCS Go, a “delinearised” on-demand channel. This will offer new HBO series episodes from shows such as Boardwalk Empire 24 hours after they appear in the US, as well as older HBO shows including The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under and Bored to Death.

As part of its overhaul of its OCS offering, Orange said that it is also merging its OCS Max and OCS Happy channels and discontinuing OCS Novo.

Some of the latter channels’ programming will instead find a new home on OCS City, Orange said.

OCS City will launch on October 10. As of this date, the OCS service will consist of: TV series channel OCS City; adrenaline channel OCS Choc; classic film channel OCS OCS Géants; an ‘event channel’ for the whole family OCS Max; and on-demand channel OCS Go.

HBO CEO, Richard Plepler said: “We have worked closely with OCS for many years now and are thrilled by this significant step in the creation of the official French “home of HBO” channel… génération HBO is where our programming will first be seen in France.”