November 7, 2016

France

General Information:

28.8 million households (December 2020, Euromonitor)
88% of French homes are equipped with a connected TV; about half are connected to the internet and the other half are ISP STBs (source: ARCOM, July 2023, Observatoire de l’équipement audiovisuel des foyers de France métropolitaine – Résultats des 3e et 4e trimestres 2022 pour la télévision et la radio)

HbbTV Key Facts:

HbbTV penetration is 21% of households (source: ARCOM, July 2023, Observatoire de l’équipement audiovisuel des foyers de France métropolitaine – Résultats des 3e et 4e trimestres 2022 pour la télévision et la radio)

Addressable TV Market Status (source Dataxis, April 2023):

If HbbTV stood out as the optimum solution for German, Spanish and Italian ad sales houses, it’s a whole different story in neighboring countries where pay TV offers and telco operators dominate the TV distribution landscape. In France, telcos are also the ones in charge of implementing the addressable ecosystem, and they do so across their set-top boxes parc. IPTV in France reaches 60% of the overall number of households. It was thus self-evident that operators would have to be strongly involved if addressable advertising was to ever launch in the country. And early on, all 4 telcos came together to discuss the market potential with local TV publishers. Industry actors had to wait until the summer of 2020 for authorities to adopt a decree that legalized targeting and personalization for ad campaigns on TV, before they could finally kick off the first test campaigns at the end of the same year. Since then, every broadcaster and operator has seemingly agreed to get on board, but the whole market is still struggling to scale. Orange and Bouygues cover the biggest chunk of addressable households on their combined footprint, but SFR and Free also have to be involved to really expand the market to its full potential. Yet as of end 2022, Free is still missing the mark. At this time, the AF2M, the national association of ISPs, announced that only 6.6 million households were addressable, instead of the 7.5 they were counting on a year prior. Canal+ DTH platform is also yet to be included in the project as the operator reviews whether the game is worth it (source: Dataxis, ”Addressable TV in Europe: where do we stand one decade after AdSmart?”, April 2023).