04 October 2022
12:43
After the failure of the merger between TF1 and M6, RTL Group decided not to sell the latter to another operator. It is an affront to his boss, Thomas Rabe, who dreams of building national champions.
Checkmate for Thomas Rabe. The number one television company in Europe, RTL Group, which he heads, has decided to do so maintain its majority stake in the French audiovisual group M6. That was the dream of this Francophile leader build national media giants to counter the omnipotence of Netflix, Disney and other YouTube. This happens in Belgium with the acquisition of RTL Belgium by the duo Rossel-DPG last year. It was also to be in France by merging its subsidiary M6 with the TF1 group.
This dream vanished following the intransigence of the French competition authorities. The merger would in fact have sold birth of a group that controls over 35% of the audience and, above all, 70% of the television advertising marketthe room. Too much for the antitrust, which was asking for important concessions. These were so important that the two betrothed gave up sealing their nuptials having failed to convince regulators that the market needed to be examined not only under the traditional television prism, but had to be expanded to include competition from the network giants in the audiovisual. market.