Announced two years ago, the French competitor to Netflix was due to land in public beta on June 3, with a commercial launch intended for the general public in September. Unfortunately, the current situation facing the country forces TF1, France Télévisions and M6 to postpone their joint project.
The opening of the Salto beta in June could be maintained, but in the form of a private beta. As for its public launch, it could be done in early autumn, without elaborating, reports Les Echos.
The reason for this delay is obviously linked to the coronavirus epidemic. The confinement in force in France put an end to audiovisual production. The vast majority of filming has simply been stopped. Salto cannot therefore count on the original programs he had ordered for its launch.
This exclusive content is crucial to be able to hope to impose itself on the streaming market, even if the Disney juggernaut offered only one exclusive series at its launch. The French streaming service can always count on the content of the participating channels, but this is obviously not enough to attract subscribers, or to provide minimal shade to Netflix, the leader in a market reinforced by containment.
Missed opportunity
If the coronavirus also has an impact on the productions of other streaming services - the production of many programs has been stopped - they often have been established for several years and have in stock a lot of content that will allow them to entertain their subscribers until production resumes.
Even postponing its launch, Salto could end up with far fewer programs than expected. Its leaders could try to seduce subscribers by offering particularly low rates, says Les Echos , but this could be expensive for the platform in the long term. The director general of the platform, Thomas Follin, mentioned a subscription "between 5 and less than 10 euros", but it could be revised down to remedy the poverty of the catalog.
The lack of original content available is a big blow for Salto, because technically everything seemed ready. The streaming platform could have taken advantage of the confinement to launch itself and take advantage of the particularly increased consumption of streaming programs to attract many subscribers, as Disney + hopes, just launched in France.
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