According to Unifrance’s annual French TV Export report, published this afternoon at the body’s Biarritz Rendez-Vous, international expenditure on French TV increased by 38.8% last year to €678M, with a significant increase in studios taking advantage of the country’s tax refund.
Investment in projects that took advantage of the Tax Rebate for International Production (TRIP) more than quadrupled to €302.7 million (the euro and dollar are about equivalent at the moment), while sales and pre-financing of French shows increased by 6% to €375.9 million. Historically, this latter statistic has been significantly greater than the TRIP figure.
The record results reflected a year in which things began to return to normal following the devastation caused by the Covid epidemic, while also displaying a thriving French TV creative community.
Foreign pre-sales in French content crossed the €100M mark for the first time, another record, while pre-sales of drama rose sharply to €45.5M and foreign contribution to co-productions hit its highest number for two decades.
The likes of TF1/RTS 1’s High Intellectual Potential and Canal+’s Paris Police 1900 were flagged as success stories.
“The figures show French production is attractive for all genres and we can be proud of it,” said Emmanuelle Jouanole, the President of SEDPA, France’s union of TV distribution companies.
Delivering the figures in a press conference in the past hour, Jouanole said they are testament to major changes in buyer activity, with more streamers taking worldwide rights to shows.
“These platforms really do breath life into this market,” she added. “Moving rights worldwide has big international scope and tends to have a strong impact on distribution. We are working more and more upstream, which is good for producers and good for distributors.”
And the major U.S. studios’ move to bring content back to their own platforms gifted a further opportunity for French distributors to sell French shows abroad, according to Unifrance Director of Audiovisual Sarah Hemar. “Buyers are seeing that what works well in France, works abroad,” she added.
Around 1.5% of shows in the streamer’s back catalogues were French in 2021, according to the report.
Pure sales of French TV shows fell slightly from the prior year to €186.1M and this was mostly put down to a worrying decline in documentary sales, which fell by 20% to €36.8M, a drop Unifrance blamed on “exports hit particularly hard by delivery delays due to the pandemic and bottlenecks in post-production.”
