It smells of fir for Salto! Dropped by all its shareholders, including France Télévision, and without a serious buyer, the streaming service should close in a few weeks. The end of the dream of a French-style Netflix…
Salto, the French Netflix, is sealing its coffin a little more and should soon give up the ghost – it’s only a matter of weeks. Indeed, the paid video-on-demand service hardly compares to its giant competitors such as Netflix, Disney + or Amazon Prime Video, and the coup de grace finally came from its own shareholders. As a reminder, he had already experienced some tensions at the time of the attempted merger between TF1 and M6 – a project which has since aborted – because France Télévisions had expressed its wish to leave the boat. To make matters worse, TF1 and M6 have in turn launched their paid subscriptions for their own services and have clearly indicated that they want to get out of the project.
As reported Telerama, the leader of France Télévision, Delphine Ernotte, convened a Social Economic Committee (CSE) on Friday January 20 to record the dissolution of the platform and the cessation of its activities and announced that her group was disengaging from the platform. Regarding the dissolution of the platform, the management 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”. In other words, Salto will be definitively buried within a few weeks, unless a mysterious savior appears. Ideally, he would find a reliable shareholder to sell their shares to – an idea to which they are not closed – but, according to the informed, only a Spanish company, “Agile”, was interested in a takeover, but it did not really succeed in convincing the three shareholders. Two scenarios are now possible: a dissolution with the sale of assets to several French or European players – which seems unlikely – or a pure and simple disappearance of SVOD…
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 Where 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 suffers from weight competition. Of course, the platform has to deal with the heavyweights of Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV and OCS, but also 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 multiplication of platforms, the content will be more and more scattered, and it will be necessary to pay more and more to access the desired programs. With widespread inflation, the public will be forced to make choices. And as much to say that Salto will have a hard time getting to the top of the rankings…
But competition also comes from Salto’s own shareholders! Indeed, in November 2021 TF1 launched 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 is therefore a safe bet that the two groups favor their own SVOD services to the detriment of Salto, which will then have to be satisfied with the crumbs. 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. Two outcomes are possible: a redemption of all the shares by a single shareholder – an unlikely scenario – or an outright liquidation…