International Sales Of French TV Programs Crash To A Ten-Year Low
The latest French TV export numbers make for tough reading for Gallic program-sellers with sales collapsing to a ten-year low. International sales of French shows for 2025 fell to €164.2M ($190.7M), down 21.6% on the €209.6M recorded in 2024. The sales for last year were just above those for 2015.
French distributors are enduring a brutal perfect storm. TV ad revenue declines mean the legacy players have less money to commission or buy programs and acquisition execs are in full risk-avoidance mode at a moment of uncertainty. Worse, the SVOD and AVOD markets are not offsetting the decline.
With the biggest value deals going away, the sales houses need to focus on making a larger number of sales, which, of course, is more resource-intensive. Unifrance, the org that promotes French TV and cinema, could not sugar coat matters. It said that in the face of difficulty and uncertainty, the distribs need more resources to market and sell their wares.
The figures were broken out at the Unifrance Rendez-Vous in Le Havre, on the north west coast of France. It is the largest market of the year given over to French programs.
The figures come from Unifrance and French cinema body and regulator the CNC. They land in the same week that French President Emmanuel Macron co-chaired the international Lumière Summit in France, talking up the power and importance of TV and cinema.
Unifrance President Gilles Pélisson had hotfooted it from Lumière in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the South of France to Le Havre.
He noted the figures do not factor in streamer numbers, which the SVODs do not share, and called for transparency.
“Data is essential — as we were already saying here last year. In 2025, as you will hear in a few moments, audiovisual sales are down. But we should not forget that we do not have access to all the data, particularly data from platforms — Astérix by Chabat, for example. And yet platforms now play a major role in both the creation and circulation of works.”
He added: “Without greater transparency, allowing us to gain a full and comprehensive understanding of the value of our works, producers will not be able to finance the inventive, independent and high-quality creation that matters so much to all of us — both to the French Presidency and to the other nations represented here.”
Getting into detail of the export figures shows co-production investment was down 18.7% year-on-year, taking the total to €87.7M. The co-pro figures mostly affect drama. International pre-sales were €30.7M, a whopping 59.3% decline on 2024.
By genre, international sales of French drama were down 27% year-on-year, a double-digit decline for the first time since 2018, taking the total to €54.9M. Animation, once an international stalwart of the French biz, has been in decline since 2020. In 2025, animation sales collapsed, with a 30.3% decline in sales of €32.2M.
The nearest thing to a bright spot was the factual business. Documentary sales only slipped 2.7% and came in at €43.1M in 2025.
Looking at where deals are getting done, almost half of sales of French shows are to buyers in Western Europe. North America is some way behind, but the second biggest buyer of French content. Sales to Asia and LatAm hit all-time lows.
One interesting wrinkle in the report was the drop in streamers cutting global or multi-territory deals as they increasingly look to tune up each country service on an individual basis, with ‘local-for-local’ acquisitions.
There was also a punchy presentation following the sales figures that showed French shows are highly visible on platforms and broadcasters around the world, with a wide global presence. The main takeaway, however, was how tough the market is for French distributors amid ongoing market shifts.
