The Court of Appeal in Paris has confirmed a decision of the Court of first instance, in which the M6 Group was ordered to pay SBDS Active, which operates the online video portal TV replay.fr, a total of €35,000 in damages.
The M6 Group contested the right of the online video portal TV replay.fr to place deep links to the various catch-up TV sites of M6 and W9, thus bypassing the home page of the broadcaster.
“This decision reinforces the strategy of TVreplay.fr, which was launched in April 2009 with the aim of facilitating access to the legal online on-demand offer of TV programmes on the web,” said SBDS Active in a press statement.
The website has become very successful since its launch with 2.2 million registered unique visitors in March 2011. TV replay.fr offers a complete and up-to-date overview of all available on-demand programming from French broadcasters, indexed by genre. This creates a de facto EPG for online videos with direct deep links to the actual videos.
TV replay.fr said it is now in the process of making the service available to connected TVs, as well as to smartphones and tablets.