TV5MONDE’s Yves Bigot

For Francophones and Francophiles around the globe, French-language content and culture are available 24/7 thanks to TV5MONDE. The pay-TV channel, distributed in Europe, the U.S., Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, offers news, feature films, lifestyle, documentary, animation and sports programming provided by a group of public-broadcast partners: France Télévisions, France Médias Monde, ARTE France, RTBF, RTS, Radio-Canada, Télé-Québec and TV5 Québec Canada. TV5MONDE CEO Yves Bigot has overseen the channel’s growth in several regions. In the U.S., the one general-entertainment service that launched in 1998 has expanded to four additional thematic channels: cinema, children’s, news and lifestyle; and the whole bouquet is available on Sling. By riding the growth of pay-TV markets in emerging countries, along with developments in IPTV and smartphone penetration, TV5MONDE sees opportunities in the Asia-Pacific region. And in Latin America, the company plans to participate in the new linear and nonlinear offerings from telcos. Bigot talks to World Screen about the channel’s popularity around the globe.

WS: How has TV5MONDE’s news been received?
BIGOT: TV5MONDE is not just a French channel, it is subsidized by Belgium, Switzerland and the province of Quebec in Canada. We always give a French-speaking-world perspective but not from just from one country. Our news programs are most watched in Africa and it’s very important that in Africa we are not just French or just Belgian because we offer viewers a worldview that is different from the one offered by national TV networks. Unfortunately, in a certain number of countries in Africa, TV is [controlled by the] state, and it’s the official news. For example, when there was the electoral crisis in Gabon less than a year ago, we were the only international channel that had reporters in Libreville and other cities. The whole population was watching our news to know what was actually happening in their country because the national television was telling them that there had been killings and other unrest. We have a very important role for that reason, especially since French-speaking African people just love politics. Particularly in this era of fake news, it is very important that our journalists offer to the world news that has been vetted and verified.

WS: TV5MONDE also has a good presence in Asia.
BIGOT: Yes, just to give you an example, the country in the world where we have the most households connected to one of our channels is India—60 million households in India. Obviously, most of them don’t speak French, but they watch our programs through our English subtitles. All our programs are in French but they are subtitled in 14 different languages.

WS: TV5MONDE recently broadcast a 25-hour live event, Le Tour du Monde de la Francophonie. How did that come about?
BIGOT: About 18 months ago, I had lunch with [Annick Girardin, state secretary of development for the Francophonie] and during the whole lunch she kept saying we have to work on something that gives a high profile to Francophonie. In the cab ride back to the office, I had the idea of doing something that I had already done when I was the head of the French public broadcaster France 2. Do you remember Y2K in the year 2000? On that occasion, we did a world tour beginning with the Tonga islands in the Pacific and moving west.

WS: To show that there had been computer-related calamities and that life continued.
BIGOT: Exactly. It was fun and I thought we should do that again, but this time not to show that planet Earth had survived but to showcase the fact that the French language and French-speaking cultures are, along with the English-language cultures, the only ones that are spread out across the 24 times zones. We also wanted to show the diversity of the French-speaking cultures, which are very different whether they are in Brussels or New Orleans or Montreal or Beijing or Kinshasa or Abidjan or Beirut. I added a 25th hour because I wanted to end in the same time zone where we started, which includes the biggest French-speaking city in the world, Paris, in the biggest French-speaking country in the world, France, as well as the city and country where we are the most watched, which is Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The country has 80 million French-speaking people. They also speak their own languages, Lingala or Swahili, but they all speak and understand French. That’s why there was the 25th hour. We decided to do all that live, and because it’s expensive, we could only do that with the public-service channels that are part of TV5MONDE: France Télévisions, Radio-Canada, RTBF Belgium and RTS Switzerland. We also had partnerships with channels like RTI in Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, CCTV in Beijing and TV stations in Kinshasa, Beirut and Madagascar. And in the countries where we had no TV partnerships, like New Zealand or Korea or India, I sent my presenters and they worked with production companies there. That was a big event.

Le Tour du Monde de la Francophonie was incredibly well received, and it was interesting to see the diversity of French culture. We started out in Paris with French writers and philosophers and then we went to Abidjan in the Ivory Coast and they had university professors and teachers talking about how they created their own kind of slang stemming from the French. In New Orleans, you have Cajun music and Creole cooking as well as the cinema industry. Obviously, Beijing and Mumbai are totally different, so there weren’t two programs that were alike.

WS: What does it take for a linear channel to continue to be relevant in today’s multiscreen world?
BIGOT: The same thing as always: you have to be unique and you have to be attractive. We are unique because we are French-speaking, we are cultural and we’re not just about France. Then we have to keep on being attractive. For example, in the U.S. we are attractive because we have very recent French or Canadian or Belgian movies, and because we have a lot of lifestyle programs whether they are fashion or cooking. For French expats, we have French football. It’s important to have from time to time huge events like the one we just did because it shows what television can still do that nobody else can do.

WS: Because you have a global view, is there more that unites us or divides us?
BIGOT: Both, of course. But the thing with television is that when there is a huge event like football, or sports generally, you can bring people together. We broadcast the Rio Summer Olympics in Africa last year. That was a huge success, mostly because every African country was showing the Olympic Games on its national channel, but their commentators weren’t familiar with many sports disciplines. So everybody was watching our broadcast. We had journalists with the expertise to provide commentary for football games, cycling, track and field and all the other disciplines.

There are still a lot of TV occasions that bring people and families together even in this digital era when everyone is on a different screen. When nothing happens everyone is on a smartphone but, when something happens, all of a sudden you watch TV wherever you watch it and sometimes you watch it communally because you want to share the passion or emotion of football games or political shows or music or the Olympic Games. You want to share the experience; you don’t want to just be on your own because the event is bigger than you.