Restrictive rules governing the distribution of content will kill off French fiction in the international market if they remain unchanged, according to Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada, who has blamed France’s competition regulator for a disastrous fall in subscriber numbers at the pay TV operator’s SVOD service CanalPlay. Saada, addressing a French senate committee last week, […]
The number of pay TV customers in Sub-Saharan Africa will almost double between 2016 and 2022, according to new research. A Digital TV Research report claims that the total will climb from 19.47 million pay TV subscribers across 35 countries at the end of 2016 to 36.72 million by 2022, with the proportion of pay […]
Formal antitrust proceedings to examine programming agreements between US studios and European pay TV broadcasters are underway and could ultimately be extended to include other distributors, the European Commission confirmed today. EU spokesman Antoine Colombani told TBI this morning that the focus of the rights probe is currently restricted to the Hollywood Studios and their dealings […]
Lagardère boss Arnaud Lagardère has said he could be prepared to buy the 80% of Canal Plus in France held by Vivendi if the latter “lacks optimism about the future” of the pay TV group. In an interview with Le Monde ahead of his company’s annual general meeting today, Lagardère said he was ready to […]
Channel 4 has picked up hit French-language drama Rebound. It marks the first time in over two decades that the UK free-to-air broadcaster will have shown a subtitled drama and follows the success of non-English language offerings on BBC Four such as Forbrydelsen and Prisoners of War on Sky Arts. The eight-part French drama follows […]
Greg Boardman, producer, Three Stones Media, talks about getting its hit show ready for international markets. Even though an international presale wasn’t part of the original funding plan, we were constantly aware of the needs of distribution pretty much from the start with our show Rastamouse. That said, whilst listening carefully to the wonderfully supportive […]
Canal+ chief Rodolphe Belmer has spoken out against any significant changes to the ordering of rules governing the window in which films are made available on-demand in France. Speaking at the Rencontres Cinématographiques event in Dijon on Friday, Belmer, who named last week as director-general of Canal+ Group, said that there was no need to […]
France’s constitutional court has rejected Canal+’s claims that the country’s competition regulator acted unconstitutionally when it imposed remedies on the pay TV operator relating to its 2007 merger with TPS. The case was referred to the court by the Conseil d’État following an appeal by Canal+ and Vivendi. The court however ruled that the competition […]
Canal Plus has finally secured a green light from the CSA for its takeover of Bolloré-owned free-to-air channels Direct 8 and Direct Star after agreeing to a wide-ranging series of new commitments laid out by the media regulator. The new commitments undertaken by the broadcaster are additional to those imposed by the French competition regulator […]
