France Televisions

BBC News - French TV bans advertising

I'm quite surprised this hasn't been mentioned already. But yesterday saw President Sarkozy's plan of making France Televisions completely advertisement free by 2011. So far all adverts have been banned from 8pm to 6am on France2, France3, France4, France5 and FranceÓ.

Apparnetly it has had impact on the schedules, Prime time on France2 usually starts at 8.50pm, but it now starts at 8.35pm because the 15 minute block of adverts and promotions have been removed.

Sarkozy's critics have accused him of giving a leg up to TF1 which is owned a close friend of the president. It has also been reported that TF1, M6 and Canal+ have also been given the go ahead to increase the amount of advertising they have on their channels.

I can see Sarkozy's plan of wanting a "French BBC" and a strong public service broadcaster, but on the same level they amount of funding France Televisions recieve without advertising may drop and damage the quality of the programmes.

Although it has little or no effect in Britain, it must be the first time in a while that the government in a European country has signifcantally altered the shape of Television.

Yep - though Sarkozy appears to be a bit selective in his modelling of FT on the BBC. He's ditching the commercials (starting with the 2030 block) but has not quite realised that the reason the BBC has any credibility is that the DG is NOT appointed by the government... In contrast, Sarkozy has altered the FT set-up so that the cabinet now appoints the head of FT. Hardly a great idea for editorial independence...

I don't understand why France 2 & 3 had this 'block of advertising' for 20 mins after their main evening news at 20:00 (from 20:35-20:55). Surely that was fairly easy for people to avoid if they didn't like it; yet it provided considerable income for the network.

They have now removed it, as a prelude to removing all advertising from France Télévision's channels, yet imposed a tax on the commercial channels to cover the cost.

It sounds like the antipathy of what many UK licence fee payers are hankering for to fund the BBC, yet France still had a TV licence which wasn't far short of what we pay and isn't set to reduce in light of this change.

I still think we have a good deal for £135 a year without commercials.

I don't when it's techinically there to provide us with 2 out of 5 channels... and then the comparison on digital is even worse! If the licence covered all terrestrial channels, then I'd agree... but for it to only be the Beeb, who provides us with classics such as Hole in the Wall and Comic Relief Does Fame Academy... I personally have to disagree on it being a "good deal"

The only things that show the money really being spent are big productions such as Doctor Who and Merlin. Other then that, I don't really see it being spent on Eastenders or any other ratings winners.

Really need to start proving that the licence provides as much as it does, rather than just showing us pie charts on websites to try and convince us.

Does seem a strange idea having a block of ads - I wonder now the ban kicks in at 8pm whether they've just moved it to run from 7.45pm?

But it's not. If you just want to take an arbitrary selection of what the Beeb does, and then declare it to be poor value for money against the whole cost of the license, that's patently absurd.

It's the same schedule over on TF1, apparently the reason being is that quite a large number of French households still have their Tea whilst watching the 8pm News (whether on TF1 or France2) and that time in between is breather between washing up and watching the main Prime time programming, although AIUI no adverts are shown during the programmes, hence the long break. It's something of a French TV tradition.

The 8.50pm starter is still staying on TF1, so it's interesting to see what impact that will have.

Primetime seems to be quite a bit later in alot of Europe, and they don't seem too bothered about starting on the hour too.

French housemates I used to have found it very unusual that we have ad-breaks in the middle of programmes, but that the breaks were noticably shorter than theirs.

From reading the Forums on DS the last couple of days that seems to be the case. In Germany it's usually 8.15pm, after the Tagesschau has ended on ARD and in Spain it's around 10pm usually. In Ireland it's about 7pm like the UK.

I think it depends what time the main evening News is on, here 6pm/6.30pm is normal and 8pm seems to be the norm in France and Germany.

In Spain their main meal starts at about 9-10pm - many continental countries have their main meal later than ours. That will be what their schedules are based on.

Instinctively, I would say that France Televisions would have the ratings leg up, after all they are starting 15 minutes earlier.