© 2010 Rapid TV News
Pascale Paoli Lebailly ©RapidTVNews | 23-11-2009
Cable and satellite channel BFM TV says it will formally mount complaints to the French competition authority, France's Trade Court and the CSA official regulatory body, and is citing Canal Plus's alleged "audience manipulation" data.
Alain Weil, CEO of group NextRadio TV accuses Canal's satellite platform CanalSat, which automatically opening up its screen when switched on, with NextRadio TV's competitor I>Télé. Alain Weil argues that CanalSat's five million or so subscribers also represent 20% of Médiamétrie's audience measurement panel. The BFM TV boss also notes that up until recently, CanalSat's system used to open up on the last channel watched before the TV set was switched off.
According to Weil, the "harm done is extremely serious" for both TF1's news channel LCI and BFM TV. "Since October 22nd, I>Télé's ratings have exploded. It's less about a channels' war than about the domination of a group for which the end justifies the means," Alain Weil added.
In October, BFM TV was watched by 24.6m viewers vs 27.1m for I>Télé. But, as people watched BFM longer, the channel's audience share was 0 .1 % above that of I>Télé, at 0.6 %.
Besides sending letters to Canal+ CEO Bertrand Méheut and Canal+ Distribution President Guy Lafarge, NextRadio TV also alerted Médiamétrie requesting that all of I>Télé's October rating figures be recalculated as well as completely cancelling the November results. According to Médiamétrie, this is not conceivable without a judicial decision.
Declaring itself "surprised" by such what it described as a "denigration campaign" CanalSat responded by explaining that the platform is currently leading an experimental and limited marketing operation focusing on a limited number of subscribers. 50% of I<Télé's audience comes from DTT and 50% from other broadcasting platforms, IPTV, cable and satellite.
"This [experimental] operation, without any consequence on the ad market, is limited to dish subscribers who regularly switch off their set-top box," Canal+ argues. According to the broadcaster, most of the satellite subscribers switch-off their TV set but not the set-top box. "This represents about 1.8m subs out of the 48.6 million viewers who receive both I>Télé and BFM TV [via a variety of broadcast methods]. This can't be considered as audience manipulation or question information pluralism," said CanalSat.
Canal+ adds that other channels have already benefited from such promotional activity and delivers viewers to a pre-determined channel when they switch-on their TV sets. "As a commercial operator, CanalSat is free to lead the marketing strategy it wants," Canal+ Group concludes, ending by describing the complaints as a "bad quarrel".
© Rapid TV News 2009
