Top of the morning everyone! I promised you a proper walkthrough once I’d played with the integration myself. Here it is live from the 7:23am train back to Amsterdam.
TF1 went live inside Netflix France yesterday. 5 channels: TF1, TMC, TFX, TF1 Séries Films, LCI. Up to 40,000 titles. I scrolled the entire TF1+ hub shelf by shelf this morning inside the Netflix mobile and CTV apps.
When you open the Netflix mobile app, a full-screen pop-up greets you straight away: “Discover TF1+ on Netflix. Experience more series and variety on Netflix.” Two buttons, OK or Explore TF1+. Tap Explore and you land directly in the hub.
If you dismiss the pop-up instead, TF1+ isn’t gone. It’s sitting further down the home feed as its own row, the 6th one down, labelled “TF1+ on Netflix.”
Once you’re inside the hub, here are the genre rows top to bottom: TF1+ Essentials, TV Dramas, Entertainment, Soap Operas, Summer Movies, Competition Shows, Reality TV, Police Series, New episodes every day, Family Watch Together, TV Comedies, Action Movies, Comedy Movies, Documentaries, Romantic movies, Thriller Movies, TV Movies, Sports, News & Current Affairs.
I don’t get Sports and News & Current Affairs sitting dead last especially with several programs with Mbappé front and center (did you see his two amazing goals on Tuesday night?!). I wasn’t able to test on a second account to see if the row order differs (here I used a brand new account as I hold a Dutch Netflix account so couldn’t see TF1 at all). This could change as the Presidential Election coverage ramps up. TF1 has also invested in new sports rights with the Rugby Nations Championship (1st game between France - New Zealand on July 4th), the Rugby World Cup, Euro & World Cup Basketball tournaments, France football friendly matches until the Euro, and the Champions League’s finales coming to TF1 for the 2028-2031 cycle.
Now onto the live component which is the biggest change for a platform like Netflix. There’s no live channel tiles anywhere on mobile. Every single row is on-demand only.
This is where the TV experience differs. On TV, TF1+ shows up as a genre filter pill at the start of the genre row. Tap into TF1+ on TV and the first row you hit is “En direct,” 5 live channels playing simultaneously: each tile showing the current programme, its time slot, and what’s coming up next. Right below that: “TF1+ Essentials” the curated row mixing tentpole titles, then the rest of the 18 genre rows I described above.
Sure Live TV makes more sense on a television, where someone might land on the big screen wanting something to just play, the way they’d flip a remote. On a phone, nobody’s settling in for 3 hours of linear viewing. The on-demand depth on mobile and the live-first layout on TV both match how people actually use each device but could this change? TF1 does offer live channels in its mobile app.
Search treats TF1+ as a real entity too. Type “TF1” into Netflix’s own search bar and the first result is a dedicated TF1+ branded banner, not a generic title card. Below it sits a results grid from the TF1+ catalogue.
What about the program tiles? The TF1+ wordmark only appears in the surrounding UI text, never on the artwork itself. Open any title page and the key art runs logo-free, no TF1+ branding burned into the image the way Netflix watermarks its own Originals on some thumbnails. Could this hurt TF1 long-term with viewers attributing all its content to Netflix?
Switch to a Kids profile on the same account and the TF1+ row disappears entirely, hub and all, not filtered down to age-appropriate titles, just gone. As far as I can see, there’s not even kids titles from TF1 inside Netflix. That tracks because Netflix doesn’t allow ads inside Kids profiles while TF1 does inside TF1+ (for an ad-free experience, Tfou Max is TF1’s standalone kids SVOD).
Speaking of SVOD, TF1+ Premium, TF1’s paid ad-free tier, doesn’t carry over into this integration either. Netflix subscribers get TF1 content with ads (even if they are on a Netflix ad-free plan). I wonder how ad-free viewers will react to seeing ads inside Netflix (the pair must have tested this with focus groups) and whether TF1 will bring the same ad load as it does in streaming (I had crossed the Belgian border by the time I could test watching a full episode).
I’m not going to debate here whether TF1 made the right call doing this deal. That argument needs real data so I’ll wait for the first Netflix weekly Top 10s and the Médiamétrie numbers before I say anything about whether this was the right move. What I will say is this. You can’t blame them for trying.
Last night also reminded me that French Media can put on a show « à l’américaine » when it wants to. The evening deserved its upfront name with stars, Ambre (winner of the Star Academy) singing two songs, Dancing with the stars grooving on the Kpop Demon Hunters’s hit song.
Now if I’m honest, the thing that actually got my heart racing was watching Larry Tanz take his seat in the audience, hearing Greg Peters work through a few lines of French and Japanese on stage. How crazy am I? 😆
That’s the part of this job that still gets me. Media, at its best, is genuinely fun to cover.
Today’s edition is free for everyone as this launch is a big deal for our industry. But if you want to keep getting editions like this one, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to Streaming Mase Easy (even just for a month). It’s what keeps me going.
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Happy Friday,
Marion
