The main criterion will be “the public interest”, assured Roch-Olivier Maistre, outgoing president of Arcom, in December. The audiovisual regulator must rule very soon on the numbering, after having carried out consultations with the channels. Eleven TNT (digital terrestrial television) frequencies were reallocated in December. Arcom removed two current licensees, C8 and NRJ12, and selected two new channels: one launched by the CMI France group, Réels TV, by Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky, the other, OF TV, by Ouest-France. From March, numbers 8 and 12 will therefore be free. The 19th is already there: it was that of France Ô, a channel stopped in 2020. The 4th of Canal+ will be in June, the date on which the pay channel will leave TNT. The 4, the 8 and the 12 attract envy because being in the first numbers is considered an advantage for the audience: the lower a number is, the better we memorize it and the quicker we come across it when scrolling through the channels on the remote. In recent months, several channels have carried out intense lobbying to advance in the schedule.
Such a change would be unprecedented since the creation of TNT in 2005 because, until then, the latest arrivals took the latest numbers. But it was “a use”, which can therefore evolve, underlined Mr. Maistre. In this great goose game, the public channels LCP and Public Sénat, which share channel 13, could jump to number 8, Les Echos and Le Figaro understand. And, according to Saturday’s Figaro, France 4, the youth and cultural channel of the public group France Télévisions, could leave number 14 to replace Canal+ on 4 in June. But this lottery is a headache. “As soon as we start moving a number, obviously this has cascading consequences,” admitted Mr. Maistre. The toughest battle is taking place among the four news channels. LCI (channel 26) and franceinfo (27, last number of free national channels) would like to get closer to the leaders BFMTV (15) and CNews (16). “The very distant numbering of LCI is a handicap,” assured Le Figaro at the end of August Thierry Thuillier, head of information for the TF1 group, to which LCI belongs.
In October, Mr. Maistre indicated that Arcom was considering forming “a block of information channels” to group the four in neighboring numbers. A prospect that does not delight BFMTV. “In the name of shaking up the habits of the French?”, declared to AFP Fabien Namias, new general director of this channel, present on TNT from its first months. Himself a defector from LCI, the boss of BFMTV contests this “categorical demand exerted by certain news channels which are disadvantaged because they arrived late on the market”. franceinfo has existed since 2016, when LCI became free. Central in the equation, the fate of the news channels is not the only one at stake. “Gulli’s natural place is in the top 10”, Philippe Bony, president of the group’s youth channel, argued Monday in Le Figaro M6, currently at number 18. Another unknown is the place that the two new channels will occupy, knowing that Ouest-France will not broadcast until September. “The demand that we both make is to be as high as possible, 8 and 12, or at least in the first half of the numbering,” pleaded Fabrice Bakhouche, general director of the group Sipa Ouest-France, at the end of November during a conference organized by the consulting firm NPA.
