Lagardère Active TV and Switchover Media enter cooperation agreement

Antoine Villeneuve

, CEO TV channels of Lagardère Active, and Francesco Nespega, Managing Partner of Italian broadcaster Switchover Media, have announced today that Lagardère Active TV channels, French leading TV broadcaster for youth and family audiences along with Gulli, CANAL J and TiJi and Switchover Media, leading kids broadcaster in Italy with its free DTT and Satellite channels K2 and Frisbee, have finalized a cooperation agreement to enter into a strategic alliance.

This agreement will open the way for the acquisition of exclusive free and pay TV broadcasting rights as well as licensing and homevideo rights and create a strong European distribution platform available to independent kids content owners.

The deal, which becomes operative at the Cannes MipTV international market, will cover France, Russia, where Gulli and TiJi operate, and Italy, where K2 and Frisbee are distributed.

The combined full national population coverage of the French and Italian DTT platforms to over 40 million households will bring a strong competitive advantage and will open the way to new business agreements with all the major content producers-distributors.

As a second step, the alliance could be enlarged to other independent European DTT leaders in their respective markets.

“We are delighted to enter into this strategic alliance with Switchover Media. The similarity of our brands which both target youth and family audiences (we already jointly broadcast Pokémon and soon Scan 2 Go) and their respective attractiveness in France and Italy, two major European markets, to which we can add Russia (TiJi and Gulli) will give us the opportunity to acquire the rights of high profile properties” said Antoine Villeneuve.

Francesco Nespega commented: “DTT has rapidly changed the distribution side of the kids TV business and we are extremely satisfied that our two independently managed channels, K2 and Frisbee, have been able to take a leadership position in the Italian market in only 2 years. We strongly believe that our content alliance with a strong player like Lagardère Active is only a first step towards the build-up of a wider European network of local broadcasters able to give full population coverage to independently produced kids content.”