LCI

Boulogne-Billancourt, Tuesday 23 September 2014

Staff representatives and management from e-TF1, LCI and TF1 SA met today to be informed of the decisions and plans regarding the future of LCI.

LCI announced that it is making an appeal to overturn the decision of the Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel (CSA – the French audiovisual media watchdog) to the Conseil d’Etat (Council of State), accompanied by a request to have this decision suspended as part of an emergency procedure, in view of the impending termination of the distribution agreements on 31 December 2014.

The TF1 Group considers that the future of LCI in its current format can only be envisaged on free DTT and that it has strong grounds for its appeal.

At the same meeting, LCI presented an alternative plan to continue its operations in a format different from that of a conventional non-stop news channel.

This plan, which will be submitted to the social authorities and to the works council for information and consultation purposes, would turn LCI into a new medium, offering a pay TV channel with several hours of new programmes every day, news flashes and on-demand content on all terminals.

This could represent an alternative to the existing offer in the news sector and would harness both the company’s editorial know-how and its expertise in new technologies.

This transformation plan would result in 58 job losses at LCI,  81 at TF1 and 9 at e-TF1. The Group, which currently employs 2,730 people, made it clear that it would move as many employees to new jobs inside the Group as possible. The measures to save jobs would include a plan for voluntary departures, in order to minimise the number of redundancies.

Finally, TF1 repeated that its course of action regarding LCI remains unchanged: to guarantee the channel’s future and to save jobs by lodging an appeal to allow LCI to broadcast on free, unencrypted DTT.