Plans by Orange, TF1, M6 and France Télévisions to launch a French Netflix-type service have been scrapped.
According to Les Echos, the three parties held discussions for a number of months but failed to reach an agreement.
Had this been attained, they would have polled their existing offers to create a service that would compete directly with Netflix, which launched in France in September last year.
Significantly, Orange would not have thrown its movie channel OCS, which includes Game of Thrones and True Blood in its offer, into the “mix’, instead contributing its sales force and distribution capacity to the project.
The reasons the parties failed to reach an agreement were economic. While it is unlikely they will return to the project, they will seek other ways to cooperate with each other.
Canal+, which operates the SVOD service Canal Play, did not participate in the discussions.
