Canal Plus will now be obliged to submit a new application to the authority within the next month, following which the regulator will assess and review the market situation.

The broadcaster has indicated that it feels that the move from the authority is unnecessary and that a challenge after five years is 'not possible'. It has also indicated that it views the decision as a way to force the Canal Plus group into taking on board new commitments beyond those indicated in the original authorisation, and that the conditions of competition of 2006 have changed completely, with telcos now taking a major role in the modern TV landscape.

For its part, the regulator stated that it has found a number of instances in which Canal Plus has failed to uphold the commitments it agreed to following the acquisition in 2006, including delaying the availability of premium channels to third parties and setting high pricing for wholesale TV channel access.

While the regulator will likely have concrete examples of what it feels are violations of the conditions which Canal Plus committed to adhere to, Canal Plus is at least justified in saying that the TV market has changed since 2006. At a pay TV platform level, the combined CanalSat and TPS satellite services ended 2006 with a 40 per cent share of pay TV households in France; however by end 2011, we expect CanalSat's share to have dropped to just 27 per cent. The rise of telco IPTV services has been the main driver behind this, with France one of the leading markets internationally in terms of IPTV distribution.

Nonetheless, Canal Plus remains the key premium brand in France. France Telecom's termination of its own ventures into premium content places the group in a broadly similar position to that in which it found itself at the end of 2006, with near total control of premium TV content, and a larger premium channel subscription base, albeit widely distributed across multiple TV platforms. Consequently, while much has changed since 2006 in how consumers are accessing their TV services, Canal Plus remains in a strong market position, and this is why the regulator continues to pay close attention to its business practices.