France Télévisions chief outlines digital news channel plan

Delphine Ernotte Cunci

France Télévisions plans to launch a digital news channel on the web initially that will have a distinctive remit and content from existing commercial news channels, according to the pubcaster’s new director-general, Delphine Ernotte-Cunci.

In an interview with Le Monde, Ernotte-Cunci said that the new channel would do more than “provide information”, providing a space to “give voice to different points of view, to clarify and decode” the issues of the day.

The channel is expected to launch in September next year, and will be distributed via a number of digital channels, according to Ernotte-Cunci.

She said she was studying “several possibilities” for more traditional distribution of the service. Broadcast distribution would require the approval of media regulator the CSA, which previously rejected commercial broadcaster TF1’s move to migrate its own LCI news service from pay to free on the country’s digital-terrestrial platform.

Elsewhere in her interview with Le Monde, Ernotte-Cunci said that her ambition at France Télévisions is to create “a real digital group” and to tackle the challenges created by the internet. She said that the abolition of boundaries brought about by the internet was “a real issue” for the broadcaster, which ran the risks associated with being confined to a relatively small national territory compared with the US internet giants which can amortise their content investment across millions of viewers.