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French SVoD Salto confirms launch date

France Télévisions, TF1 and M6’s forthcoming French SVoD service Salto will not launch until June 3, general director Thomas Follin has confirmed.

Thomas Follin

The launch will be nearly three months later than the original date announced in September, when Follin left the executive committee of M6 to help set up Salto.

It will also be close to three months after the arrival of Disney+ in France, at the end of March.

In an interview with French newspaper Le Figaro, Follin said the subscription fee will be between €5 (US$5.50) and €10. Apart from direct online subscriptions, the platform could also be co-financed by selling the service through third-party providers, such as Orange, Altice and Bouygues.

At launch, it will offer 15,000 hours of programming, including series, docs, movies, reality TV, news, entertainment and shows for young audiences. After a test period during the summer, the complete launch campaign will begin in the autumn, supported by the three broadcasters involved.

The OTT project was conceived by the three leading terrestrial broadcasters in France in 2018 and secured approval from competition authorities last summer.

Soon after, Gilles Pélisson, chairman and CEO of Groupe TF1, was elected chairman of Salto’s supervisory board for a two-year term at the same time that Follin took over as general director. The service reportedly plans to invest €250m in content within the first three years.

According to the latest barometer for the penetration of VoD in France, published by the Centre National du Cinéma et de L’image Animée, the market saw 43% growth in the first 11 months of 2019.

So far, international streamers are leading local subscriptions, with 58.9% of VoD consumers having viewed at least one programme on Netflix during the month of November (a 6.5 percentage point increase on November 2018), followed by Amazon Prime Video (23.1%) and local service Orange (20.5%).

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