A project which, according to the French Wikipedia article about France 24 originally started in 1987 already and which after a lot of changes in the way the project was organised finally was confirmed as a viable project in November 2005, is finally almost ready to start ...

Based on a wish of the French president Jacques Chirac and originally known under the name CFI for Canal France International and than as CFII for Chaîne Française d'Information Internationale France 24 (or shortly F24) will finally start broadcasting on December 6th, 2006. France 24 is a collaboration of the commercial Groupe TF1 and the public France Télévisions and is therefore partly being paid for by all French tax payers (including me ...). The première will take place on the Internet with live streams from 8.29 PM, followed by the first TV broadcasts one day later.
The Internet broadcasting will start with an interview with Jacques Chirac followed by a presentation of the future highlights of the channel.

The channel, which is supposed to compete with the American CNN, the British BBC World and the recently introduced English version of the Arabic channel Al Jazeera, will from its start broadcast both on the Internet as on TV and will be completely in French and English. During 2007 an Arabic version will be added and France 24 is already thinking about a Spanish version as well!!

The website will contain real-time nieuws, lots of videos and a 24 hour a day real-time stream of the channel (currently the website is quite empty and only contains a Flash animation). France 24 wants to make its website as interactive as possible by allowing visitors to provide feedback on all programs and topics, with blogs, a 'tag cloud' of the most important keywords and RSS feeds (I'm just wondering what's interactive about that?!).

Programs in 5 categories
The programs which will be broadcast by France 24 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year will emphasize on 5 categories:

• news
• economy
• culture
• sports
• weather

and will be composed of news programs (every 30 minutes on both the French and the English channel), analyses and in-depth special reports.
France 24 has two prime times: between 6 and 9 AM (while enjoying your breakfast :-) and between 7 and 11 PM (while enjoying dinner and during the rest of the night :-). In addition to those, France 24 can bring breaking news at any time of the day ...
Daily and weekly analyses programs will take a look under the tip of the iceberg as can also be seen in the advertising campaign of France 24:

The numbers
At the start of France 24 the channel has 380 employees (I actually know one of them :-) with different backgrounds (having worked at CNN, BBC World, ABC, CBS, Al Jazeera, ...) and education (such as Sciences Po, London University, Harvard, ...), 170 journalists, 160 technical employees who work with the digital images, 40 employees dedicated to distribution and support, 3 working languages (French, English and Arabic), 28 nationalities among its employees with an average age of 33.
According to information which can be found at several places on the Internet France 24 would have a budget of 80 million euros at its start, against a budget of 600 million euros for BBC World ...

Distribution
From its start France 24 will be available 24 hour s a day online at france24.com, but of course also on TV:

• In Europe
  • Free-to-air via the satellites Hot-Bird 7A, Astra 1KR and Eurobird
  • Via the different cable-, satellite- and TV over ADSL companies such as CanalDigitaal in The Netherlands, Noos/Numéricable, TPS and CanalSatellite in France, ...
• Africa
  • Free-to-air via the satellite NSS 7 C Band
  • CanalSatellite Horizons and Multichoice Africa
• Middle East and North Africa
  • Free-to-air via the satellites Arabsat (Badr 3A) and Nilesat
  • Yes and Hot in Israel, Orbit and Showtime in over 20 Arabic speaking countries and E-Vision in the United Arab Emirates
• USA: Comcast digital cable network and via a terrestrial signal in Washington and through the United Nations in New York

Nice to know
Apparently Issy-les-Moulineaux, the city where France 24 is located, decided to change the name of the street Rue Lagrange in Rue des Nations Unies where France 24 is now located on number 5. The mayor of Issy-les-Moulineaux, Santini, would have used this as one of the ways to attract a media company such as France 24 to his city (of course it looks better for a channel like France 24 to be located in the street of the United Nations ...). With this move Issy-les-Moulineaux once again confirms its status as medialand in France ...

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