Noos

» see noos.fr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

French cable started as a state plan and ended as a private carve-up, and Noos is the name that sat across the middle of it. The company underneath was almost fifteen years older than the brand. Lyonnaise des Eaux created Paris Câble on 6 June 1985 and launched it on 25 November 1986, under the national cable plan that was supposed to wire the country and mostly did not.

The rename came on 3 May 2000. Libération ran the line the next morning: stop saying Lyonnaise Câble, say Noos. It was the full dot-com treatment, a four-letter word with no meaning in French bolted onto a cable network with real streets under it, and it held up for most of a decade. Noos went national, sold television and broadband down the same coaxial line, and by March 2004 had 1.1 million customers, 201,327 of them on internet subscriptions. That made it the largest cable operator in France.

Being largest did not make it solvent. In March 2004 Suez agreed to sell Lyonnaise Communications to UnitedGlobalCom, parent of UPC, in a deal that valued Noos at 615 million euros, around 7.25 times its estimated EBITDA for the year. UGC paid Suez 530 million and Suez kept 19.9 percent of the combined UPC Broadband France. Two years later Liberty Global sold the whole French operation on again, to Altice and the British fund Cinven, through a joint holding called Ypso.

By then Ypso already owned NC Numericable. French cable had spent twenty years split between operators who could not reach each other's streets, and in one year it was all in the same hands. One of the two consumer brands was going to have to go.

~ the dossier ~

~ the dot in the second o ~

The logo was a dark blue tile with noos in white lowercase, the two o's drawn as rings with a dot inside, which read as eyes if you looked at it for more than a second. It is a very 2000 mark, round and friendly, and it works hard at not reminding you of a utility company.

That was most of the point of the exercise. The thing being sold was coaxial cable laid under French streets by a water company, and the name had to stop sounding like that. French subscribers were less charmed than the branding implied: by 2006 the operator was in court over forced selling and over refusing to let customers cancel, charges that would look familiar to anyone who has dealt with a cable company in any country.

~ the man who was fourth ~

Patrick Drahi founded Médiaréseaux at Champs-sur-Marne in 1995 and connected the new town of Marne-la-Vallée, with money from UPC behind him. It was the first French cable operator to own its own networks. In June 1999 it ranked fourth in the country, and the operator in first place was Lyonnaise Câble.

Between 1999 and 2000, working for UPC, he spent 330 million euros buying up smaller French cable companies, and Médiaréseaux was valued at 800 million. Seven years after that his Altice, with Cinven, bought the company that had been first. Drahi did not stop there either: Numericable took SFR in 2014, and the Numericable name itself was dropped in favor of SFR two years after that.

~ a brand on two companies ~

The paperwork is worth following because it shows the name moving while the business stayed put. In October 2006 the legal entity UPC France SA was renamed Noos SA, and the merged operation began selling under a combined mark, Numericable Noos. So for roughly nine months the word Noos belonged to a different company than the one that had invented it, and sat beside the brand that was about to replace it.

On 12 July 2007, a year after the merger, L'Express ran it under the headline Noos devient Numericable. The press release went out the next day over the signature of Philippe Besnier, president of Numericable, saying the two brands were uniting into one. By August the whole French cable network was trading under a single name covering the old France Télécom Câble, TDF Câble, UPC and Noos footprints. Noos SA was renamed NC Numericable SA, and the archived homepage at noos.fr turns into a plain Apache 301 to numericable.fr, which is what it was still serving years later.

French cable stayed inside France in every form I could have seen from Turkey, where the cable network was a state project with its own problems, so this one comes off company filings rather than memory. What crosses borders is the pattern. A name gets invented to make buried infrastructure sound like a startup, and it stays alive for exactly as long as it is worth more than the savings from killing it.

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