The French team-up with Netflix is already paying off.
French commercial broadcaster TF1 says it has seen record streaming figures just three weeks into a new carriage deal with Netflix. The deal, which came into effect last month, sees Netflix in France carry live broadcasts and on-demand content from TF1 and its on-demand platform TF1+.
TF1 said it posted a 8.3 million unique daily streams for the finale of Koh-Lanta, a Survivor-style reality game show, on June 25, a new record, and saw significant audience boosts for its new reality show Secret Story and Good American Family, the Hulu limited series it licenses in France.
In the first week of the TF1-Netflix collaboration, the number of unique daily streams for TF1 shows jumped 16 percent, the company said, noting that several of the network’s titles were appearing in Netflix’s most-watched lists for the territory.
“We achieved our audience targets [for the Netflix deal], originally set for an 18-month timeframe, in less than three weeks,” TF1 CEO Rodolphe Belmer said in a statement. “This strong start confirms the value of this unprecedented partnership and the public’s appetite for our content.”
TF1 said its ad sales on its shows on Netflix were “excellent” and comparable to those on TF1+, but did not give detailed figures.
The TF1 deal is the first time Netflix has teamed up with a free-to-air national broadcaster. The collaboration is being looked at as a possible model for other territories and other streamers. Amazon’s prime video has signed similar carriage deals in France with public broadcaster France Télévisions and commercial group M6, and in Spain with national public broadcaster RTVE.
The TF1 model, joining forces with a global streamer instead of trying to compete with them head-on, is being touted as an alternative to the wave of broadcast consolidation sweeping Europe, most notably Comcast-subsidiary Sky’s $2.1 billion deal to acquire British broadcaster ITV, announced on Monday.