End clap for Salto! Dropped by all its shareholders, including France Télévisions, and without a serious buyer, the streaming service is officially closing its doors. The end of the dream of a French-style Netflix, two years after its launch…
It was a matter of days before Salto, the French-style Netflix, officially closed its doors. This is now done. It was on its official website that the platform finally announced the sad news. “Unfortunately it is no longer possible to subscribe to Salto”, she indicates. “Thank you to all Salto subscribers for sharing with us their desire and enthusiasm for a Made in France streaming platform.” Current subscribers can continue to enjoy the programs available on the platform until it is permanently closed, but the offer has already been considerably reduced, such as early episodes of the TF1 group’s daily series, such as Here it all starts And tomorrow belongs to us.
It is not a surprise. As reported Telerama, the leader of France Télévisions, Delphine Ernotte, had convened a Social Economic Committee (CSE) on Friday January 20 in order to record the dissolution of the platform and the cessation of its activities and had announced that her group was disengaging from the platform. Regarding the dissolution of the platform, the management had explained to the staff representatives that “nothing is official yet as long as takeover offers can be examined, but we will not leave employees waiting for several months”. To save the platform, it would have been necessary a reliable shareholder to sell their shares to – an idea to which the various television groups were not closed – but, according to the informed, only a Spanish company, “Agile”, was interested in a takeover. Unfortunately, it had not really succeeded in convincing the three shareholders.
Salto: a streaming service that struggles to convince
The Salto platform was set up jointly by the TF1, M6 and France Télévisions groups in the fall of 2020, a period of pandemic and confinement favorable to the launch of a new video on demand service (SVOD) made in France. It offers to find the favorite French shows and series – like Scenes of households And HPI – and watch live TV. It also offers popular American series, such as And just like that – the reboot of Sex and the City –, Stargirl, Pretty Little Liars Or All-Americanas well as some great exclusives, such as the reunion episode of Friends And Harry Potter Return to Hogwarts, released the same day on HBO Max. We can also highlight the presence of “unreleased Salto” French productions, but they only represent a very small part of the catalog. A significant investment, but which is struggling to seduce the public, with less than a million subscribers in 2022 – for comparison, Netflix has 10 million French users.
To try to cover its costs, Salto was forced to increase the price of its subscriptions, by increasing its basic offer from 6.99 euros to 7.99 euros per month for three screens simultaneously, and by places an annual subscription at 69.99 euros. A dangerous technique because such a price can put off potential subscribers. This is more than the 6.99 euro Amazon Prime subscription which, as a bonus, offers many more services – in addition to the SVOD service, the user benefits from free and priority deliveries, from millions of music titles to listen offline, a selection of digital books and video games.
Salto: tough French and American competition
Salto suffered from heavyweight competition. Of course, the platform had to deal with the heavyweights of Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV and OCS, but also with newcomers who have a fairly extensive catalog: Paramount+ and Universal+ – the first arrived in France in December with fairly low rates, the second is expected soon. With the proliferation of platforms, the content is more and more scattered, and you have to pay more and more to access the desired programs. With widespread inflation, the public is forced to make choices. And as much to say that Salto was struggling to reach the top of the rankings…
But competition also came from Salto’s own shareholders! Indeed, TF1 had launched in November 2021 myTF1 Max, a paid formula presented as an extension of its classic free replay service. Ditto on the side of M6 with 6play max. It was therefore a safe bet that the two groups would favor their own SVOD services to the detriment of Salto. Moreover, Rodolphe Belmer, the brand new general manager of TF1, had declared in November 2022 in Letter A consider withdrawing from the Salto platform even if, officially “no decision is made” on the side of the group, as reported The world. Same story with M6, which had no “pre-established strategy.” At France TV, on the other hand, skepticism was in order. Delphine Ernotte, the president of the group, explained that she was looking for 45 million euros to complete the 2023 budget of France Télévisions, the exact sum that the public audiovisual group was to obtain for the purchase of its shares in Salto in the event of of a merger between TF1 and M6. So there was only one possible scenario left: pure and simple liquidation…