France’s CNC aids legal video viewing

France’s Centre Nationale du Cinéma et de L’Image Animée (CNC) has created a search engine to enable French citizens to search for and find movies available legally on video-on-demand services.

The government backed body has created a portal whose services will be distributed via major French cinema-related websites such as Allociné, Première, Télérama and SensCritique.

The CNC has created a large database of over 25,000 film titles, of which 10,000 are available on-demand via 12 sites – Arte VOD, CanalPlay, FilmoTV, FranceTV Pluzz, Imineo, MontparnasseVOD, MyTF1VOD, Orange à la demande, OCS, UniversCiné, Vidéofutur and Wuaki.

However, the portal will not provide links to major on-demand providers Apple iTunes or Netflix on the grounds that they do not respect French rules on investment in domestic content creation and visibility of French-produced works.

For now the database will only list movies, but plans are afoot to include series and other video content in the future.