His future was hanging by a thread that had just broken. After weeks of agony, the paid video-on-demand platform, supposed for a time to be a “French Netflix”, saw its official shutdown on Wednesday February 15 by the groups France Télévisions, M6 and TF1, which held equally.
“The France Télévisions, M6 and TF1 groups announce their decision to stop the Salto platform”, they said in a statement. The legal representative in charge of its liquidation will specify “shortly the timetable for stopping the platform and subscriptions”.
Launched in October 2020, the platform announced on its home page on Monday that it was no longer taking new subscribers, a harbinger of its imminent demise. “A specific communication will be sent very soon to Salto subscribers to inform them of the consequences on their current subscription”, sued the public group and the two private groups. According to them, Salto “to date has nearly a million subscribers”.
This judgment is not a surprise: the future of the platform had been compromised for months and the failure at the end of September of the merger between TF1 and M6, to which France Télévisions had to resell its share to complete its budget. “This project stopped, the shareholders of Salto judged that the conditions were not met for the continuation of Salto in its current shareholding”underlined France Télévisions, M6 and TF1.
Refusal to distribute
They point “the complex and constrained governance of this alliance and (the) refusal of most Internet service provider operators to distribute the platform like American platforms”. “In addition, the expressions of interest received from several players for the takeover of Salto could not lead to a concretization”they assure. “The France Télévisions, M6 and TF1 groups are committed to doing their best to offer new opportunities to Salto employees” after their collective redundancy, they continue. Salto employed mid-January forty-two people on permanent contracts and eight on fixed-term contracts. The subscription cost 7.99 euros per month (or 5.80 euros monthly for a subscription taken over one year).
By publishing their annual results on Monday and Tuesday, M6 and TF1 had indicated that Salto had cost them in 2022 some 46 million euros each (including provisions for liquidation charges).
Beyond the failure of the TF1/M6 merger, Salto suffered from a confused strategy and multiple obstacles, in a market dominated by American giants like Netflix, Disney+ or Amazon Prime Video. On the catalog side, the platform supposed to promote the “radiance of French and European audiovisual creation” had distinguished itself by some pretty exclusives coming straight from America, with in particular the program “Friends, the reunions” or the sequel to Sex and the City.
Launch postponed
It also offered many repeat broadcasts or previews of programs produced by its shareholders, such as the daily soap operas of TF1 (Here it all starts, tomorrow belongs to us) and France 2 (such a big sun).
But TF1, M6 and France Télévisions have also developed their own online platforms, which have competed with Salto by offering some of its programs free of charge and by offering more and more previews online. Similarly, TF1 and M6 have each launched a paid subscription streaming service without advertising, for 2.99 euros per month the first year, then 3.99 euros per month, cheaper than Salto.
The latter also suffered from a delay in ignition: while it had been announced in 2018, it took more than a year for this unprecedented project bringing together private channels and public service to receive the green light from the ‘Competition Authority, the case having passed through the hands of the European authorities. The launch, scheduled for the first quarter of 2020, had been postponed to the fall, therefore after the rise of Netflix and the arrival of Disney + during confinement.
Finally, Salto could hardly compete in terms of financing, with 135 million euros invested by its shareholders, far from the billions disbursed by Netflix and others.