Having watched the channel for the past few days i have to say i love it. Bite size news updates from a refreshing perspective. Love the studios and stings. The fast moving weather forecast is growing on me. Would be good to see some classic UK presenters... I know Owen Thomas speaks French, he would be good!
I love the feature programmes and interviews, the french do this all very well.
The biggest pro about France 24 is the great online streaming and website.
Watched the DSat launch on Sky 515. Not impressed.
Very cheap loooking, tiny news set (looking at the grabs of the studio earlier in the thread it IS very basic)
The dropping in of random wideshots between VTs and MCUs is bizarre - and the quality of the location reports is pretty low. (A lot just seem to be edit-suite voicers)
Unlike many I did like the weather - though the English translation ("there will be some inclemency") was a bit unusual...
The random wide shots do look a bit strange. I suspect they're trying to replicate a fairly recent innovation on the French network news programmes where, just before a report, the camera cuts to a wide shot of the presenter and a big screen - which displays either the first few frames of the report, or a map showing where the story happened.
Obviously there's no such big screen on France 24, so it doesn't really work. I haven't seen that kind of shot used like this before.
I don't like these 10 minute-bulletins every half hour. They're so short I don't feel like I'm really gettiing the whole world news. And in fact I'm not, as they only show 3-5
reportages
.
The 30 minute bulletin every hour format (BBC World style) works much better IMO.