Salto

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

~ the eulogy ~

Salto was France-only at the licensing layer, so from Ankara it was a name in trade press and nothing else. i am writing it because of the shape rather than the shows. This is what happens when incumbent broadcasters decide to build the thing that is eating them, and do it as a committee.

The announcement came on 15 June 2018. France Televisions, the public broadcaster, would build a streaming platform together with TF1 and M6, the two commercial groups it spends every evening competing against for the same audience. One catalog, with live access to their channels and some shows released ahead of broadcast. The reasoning was sound on paper. Separately none of them could fund a service worth subscribing to, and together they held most of what French viewers watched.

The Autorite de la concurrence spent a year on it and cleared the deal on 12 August 2019 with commitments attached. Salto was not allowed exclusive distribution of the owners' free over-the-air channels, and the owners were not allowed to cross-promote it on their own airtime in ways that hurt rival platforms. Both conditions are reasonable if your job is protecting competition. Both removed the two advantages that made the venture worth doing in the first place.

It launched on 20 October 2020, into a country where Netflix had already been established for six years and Disney had arrived that spring.

~ the dossier ~

~ why it never moved ~

About 135 million euros were committed across three years, split between the shareholders. That sounds like a lot until you set it next to what a single season of anything costs at Netflix scale, and it has to cover the platform engineering as well as the content.

The distribution problem turned out to be worse than the budget. French viewers get their television through internet service provider set-top boxes, and the providers largely declined to carry Salto in the way they carry the American services. So a platform built by the country's own broadcasters was harder to find on a French living room television than the foreign competition, which is close to the exact opposite of the intended outcome.

The owners' own statement at the end named the governance as a cause. Complex and constraining arrangements, they called it, which is the polite corporate phrasing for three companies with a veto each. Every decision about what to put on Salto was a decision about which shareholder's programming got promoted over the other two, taken by people whose day jobs were beating each other in the ratings.

So the venture spent thirty months clearing internal approvals in a market where the competitor ships changes weekly. TF1 and M6 had also spent 2021 trying to merge with each other, a deal that collapsed in September 2022, which is not the background against which a shared project gets anyone's full attention.

~ the long tail ~

France Televisions signaled its exit in January 2023 and no buyer appeared. The three groups confirmed the closure on 16 February and a liquidator was appointed. The service ran until 27 March 2023 and then stopped, with something under a million subscribers, having held about 3 percent of French streaming at its best.

Each owner went back to its own app afterward, which is where they had all started. The lesson generalizes past France, and every country with a strong national broadcasting sector has now watched some version of it: a joint venture is the correct answer to scale and the wrong structure for a product, because products need somebody who can decide alone.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »