France: Enforcer dismisses Canal Plus’ abuse claim

France’s Competition Authority (the Autorité) has allowed incumbent television broadcasters to include the rights of first and last refusal in contracts to finance French-language films. The Canal Plus Group (GCP) was claiming that the historic incumbent channels were locking access to French-language films

In its submissions, GCP claimed there was an anti-competitive arrangement between the so-called free-to-air historic incumbent channels (TF1, France 2, France 3, and M6) and the producers of French-language films.

According to GCP, the groups to which these historical channels belong restrict access to the French-language catalogue films of the free DTT channels which are not backed by them, including the GCP, D8, and D17 channels, by including priority and pre-emption clauses in all the pre-financing contracts they concluded with film producers. It claimed that those clauses would allow them to reserve the broadcast of the films concerned for their benefit and that of the channels which are affiliated to them (for example TMC for TF1 or W9 for M6), without any time limit, to the detriment of the competitor channels.

After examination, it appears that the pool of catalogue films on which the free DTT channels can draw to fill their program schedules and comply with their obligations to broadcast French-language films is particularly abundant (over 8000 films).

Furthermore, it is not possible for such priority and pre-emption rights to be exercised on any more than 20% of the films in that pool. Indeed, they were only brought in by the free-to-air channels as from the 1990s on the films to which they contributed funding. In practice, the Autorité noted that less than 8% of the films subjected to be governed by a pre-emption right were indeed pre-empted by the channels holding such rights.

The Autorité thus concluded, in view of all the elements of the investigation, that the agreements signed between the channels and the producers are not liable to prevent the competitor channels from procuring rights to broadcast catalogue French-language films.

In the light of the above, the Autorité dismissed the case. Global Competition Review