Rendez-Vous

World Screen Weekly, September 27, 2007

Two hundred and twenty buyers from 39 countries gathered in the seaside town of Biarritz earlier this month for TV France International’s annual Rendez-Vous.

At this year’s event, acquisitions executives had the opportunity to screen shows from a digital library of 821 French programs and meet with representatives from 55 French distribution companies.

Mathieu Bejot, the managing director of TV France International, presented a mixed set of results and some interesting trends in French content exports. Overall sales of French programming in 2006 rose an encouraging 4.2 percent to 157 million euros ($218 million), with sales rising 2.3 percent and presales 10.1 percent.

French programming exports are dominated by three genres: documentaries, animation and fiction. Of these, only documentaries showed an increase over the previous year, up 9 percent for sales and presales combined, although in presales the jump was 35.5 percent as against just 2.1 percent for sales of completed programming.

Fiction was slightly down, showing a decrease of 1.6 percent from the 2005 figure. However, 2005, with total fiction sales of 31.3 million euros ($43.5 million) was itself a massive growth compared to 2004. In that context, the 2006 figure doesn’t look so bad.

Perhaps the worrying sector is animation, which fell 6.1 percent to 42.6 million euros ($59.2 million). Nor is this a one-off. In 2002 animation represented 42.4 percent of all French content sales, by 2005 it accounted for 40.3 percent and in 2006 just 37 percent of all content sales were claimed by the genre. Despite this decline, animation remains the biggest selling of the three main genres for French exports, but, as Bejot pointed out, it has suffered from greatly increased competition in general, and in particular, a fall of sales and presales to the U.K., down 37.6 percent following the 2006 ban on junk food advertising to children, which has seen a fall-off in British animation slots.

Against this, Bejot noted an opening up of the Middle East to Western animation, and in particular an increasing ability to sell a first window to pan-regional broadcasters and then a second window to local distributors who can then sell to individual territories within the region.

Other highlights noted by Bejot for French animation sales were Latin America, which experienced a rise of 21.6 percent, and Central and Eastern Europe, which saw a massive rise of over 300 percent from 800,000 euros ($1.1 million) in 2005 to 2.5 million euros ($3.45 million) in 2006.

Although documentaries saw a healthy increase in sales to North America, up 40.6 percent, Bejot noted that, “North American terrestrial channels hardly buy any French documentaries, almost all sales being to niche channels at much lower prices.” Bejot also noted that, “HD has become an essential condition for documentary sales to Japan and, to a lesser extent for the U.S. and Canada. However, the extra cost of HD is rarely factored into the license fees paid by broadcasters.”

Although showing a decline from an exceptional 2005, fiction sales still totaled 22.1 million euros ($30.7 million); the overwhelming bulk of which, 74.1 percent, were to Western European broadcasters. Although North America remains a very difficult area for French drama sales, French-speaking Canada, traditionally a reluctant buyer, has started to pick up some series, and the region as a whole accounted for 4.7 percent of fiction sales, well ahead of Asia which grabbed just 3 percent of French fiction sales in 2006.

A recent change in French tax laws, which now encourages the use of French talent and facilities, meant there was a noticeable drop in co-production, with foreign instigated co-productions down 24.8 percent and French led co-productions down 18.9 percent. However, the volume of co-productions rose 21.9 percent to a total of 1,292 hours in 2006, reflecting a trend toward smaller budgets.

—By Bob Jenkins