France Télévisions is making its entire france.tv service, with five national channels, preview and replay programmes, available through Amazon Prime Video in France, with a dedicated presence on the Prime Video home screen. Described as an unprecedented distribution agreement, it follows the announcement that TF1 will make its programming available on Netflix. France Télévisions already provides its five national channels online through france.tv, which had 42.9 million unique visitors in June.

Delphine Ernotte Cunci, the president and chief executive of France Télévisions, announced the news. “With this unprecedented distribution method, our group is taking a historic step to strengthen the visibility of its public service offer, and thus allow all audiences to find and discover the unique richness of france.tv in new environments.”

Christophe Deguine, the general manager of Prime Video in France, said: “We are delighted to have concluded this agreement and to be able to make the vast catalog of France Télévisions available to all our Prime customers in France. We are constantly looking for new ways to expand the offer of quality content offered to our customers and to confirm Prime Video as the number 1 entertainment destination.”

France Télévisions is the French national public television broadcaster. It is a state-owned company formed from the integration of the public television channels France 2 (formerly Antenne 2) and France 3 (formerly France Régions 3), later joined by the legally independent channels France 4 (formerly Festival), France 5 (formerly La Cinquième) and the news channel France Info. France Télévisions is currently funded by the French Treasury and the revenue from commercial advertising.

News of the distribution deal with Amazon comes less than a month after TF1 announced that it would be making its channels and on-demand programmes available on Netflix. That will not happen until the summer of 2026, so the France Télévisions deal with Prime Video will be well established by then.

France Télévisions and TF1, alongside fellow French broadcaster M6, had previously planned to take on the Netflix and Amazon through a joint platform Salto. That was scrapped in 2022 after the collapse of a merger between TF1 and M6.

www.france.tv
www.primevideo.com

Amazon has confirmed that its Freevee online video service and app will close by August. Most of the programming is migrating to Amazon Prime Video where it remains free to view. Amazon had previously announced that it was phasing out the Freevee brand to streamline its streaming offering. That followed the introduction of advertising to the Prime Video platform.

Users of the Freevee app have been greeted with a message saying that “Prime Video is the new exclusive home for Freevee TV shows, movies and live TV.” The Freevee app will be accessible until August 2025.

Most of the programming will be available through Prime Video without a subscription, although it will require a free Amazon account.

Originally launched as Freedive in the United States in 2019 by the Amazon-owned online movie database IMDb, it was later renamed IMDb TV, before becoming Freevee in 2022.

The proposition was basically an advertising supported service without a subscription. The service expanded from the United States to the United Kingdom, then Germany and Austria, but went no further. Its purpose became less clear once Amazon introduced advertising to its Prime Video platform.

Freeview notably picked up production of the long-running Australian serial drama Neighbours in a deal with Fremantle in November 2022 after it was dropped by Channel 5 in the United Kingdom, only to cancel it again in February 2025.

www.primevideo.com

The recommendation of a 5% levy on streaming platforms has been formally rejected by the United Kingdom government in favour of a mixed ecology that welcomes both international investment and local production. A cross-party parliamentary committee had proposed a 5% streaming levy to support high-end national production, initially on a voluntary basis, with provision for this to be made statutory. That was rejected by the culture secretary and has now been formally dismissed in a government response.

Production spending on film and high-end television reached £5.6 billion in 2024, a 31% increase since 2023, with £4.8bn of this total coming from inward investment and co-productions.

The government said that it wants a mixed ecology and welcomes inward investment, including from online video subscription services. It said this allows producers to strike deals with streamers, which typically involve higher upfront fees, and with public service broadcasters, whose terms of trade mean that secondary rights normally remain with the producer.

In its response, the government said: “We are mindful, therefore, of the importance of enabling strong inward investment given the benefits it provides for our domestic industry and wider economy, and we have no plans to introduce a levy on SVoD services.”

The government also declined several other recommendations. It ruled out a return to the European Union’s Creative Europe, writing: “Whilst we do not have any plans to rejoin Creative Europe, we recognize these sectors’ unique and valuable contributions to Europe’s diverse cultural landscape and the economic benefits that relationship brings.”

The full response is published as British film and high-end television: Government Response in an appendix to the report by the cross-party Culture, Media and Sport Committee.

parliament.uk