Driven by sport on the France 2 and L'Équipe side, and Cyril Hanouna on the C8 side, the audiences of the three channels took off in February, unlike France 3 which plummeted over a year, according to data published Monday by Médiamétrie.
Between the Six Nations Tournament, the French Football Cup and the Alpine Skiing World Championships, France 2 was full with an audience share (PDA) up 1 point over one year, to 15.9 %.
The wealth of sports news also benefited the L'Équipe channel (+0.5 points; 1.8%).
The second public channel also claims to have gathered 10.2 million viewers on February 16 for a special Ukraine evening.
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Conversely, France 3 recorded the biggest drop in audience for the month compared to last year (-1.3 points; 8.9%).
However, the channel remains the third in France ahead of M6 (-0.4 point; 8.4%) which has been struggling for more than a year to stem the erosion of its audiences, below 9% since November 2021.
Green lights, on the other hand, for C8 (Canal+ group), up 0.5 points to 3.3% of PDA: this hails a “
historic month
” for “
Touche pas à mon poste
”, its flagship program hosted by Cyril Hanouna, regularly at the origin of media controversies.
Its competitor TMC (TF1 group) nibbles 0.1 point to 3%, as does France 5 (+0.1 point; 3.7%).
TF1 retains its title as the leading channel, despite an audience share down 0.5 points over one year to 17.9%, one of its weakest performances.
Its news channel LCI continues to rise (+0.3 points; 1.8%) reducing the gap with its rival CNews of the Canal+ group (-0.1; 2.1%).
BFMTV remains the leading news channel despite a decline over one year (-0.3 point; 3.1%), while its public competitor FranceInfo is struggling to take off (-0.2 point; 0.7%).
The Franco-German public channel Arte is holding up (+0.1 point; 2.9%).
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Taken as a whole, the three major general-interest television groups -France Télévisions, TF1 and M6- fell by 0.4 points over one year with cumulative audience shares of 29.2%, 25.7% and 13.3% respectively. %.
Opposite, the Canal+ group (Canal+, C8, CNews, CStar) grew over one year (+0.5 points; 7.5%), while Altice (BFMTV, RMC Story, RMC Découverte) and NRJ (NRJ12, Darling 25) remain stable at 6.9% and 2.3% respectively.
Television viewing time continues to decline: the French watched 3 hours 29 minutes on average per day, 14 minutes less than in February 2022.