“I appeal to your sense of responsibility and the general interest to avoid depriving hundreds of thousands of households of the reception of all DTT channels”, urges Rima Abdul Malak in a letter sent Friday to the president of the Canal+ group Maxime Saada, confirming information from the Parisian. This ministerial request came after Canal+’s decision to stop broadcasting the free channels of the TF1 group (TF1, TMC, TFX, TF1 Séries Films and LCI) during the renewal of the distribution contract between the two parties, due in particular to the requirement of a payment “of a very substantial remuneration”, announced Friday the group held by Vivendi. Non-compliant situation “Without interfering in the commercial dispute which opposes the two groups and a negotiation which falls under contractual freedom ” , the Minister explains that she is “careful that negotiations between publishers and distributors do not lead to blockages likely to compromise access for all audiences to the free supply of digital terrestrial television” (DTT). However, “cutting off the signal from the TF1 group’s channels on the TNT Sat offer deprives people who can only receive DTT by satellite of any access to the five free channels of the TF1 group”, emphasizes Rima Abdul Malak. And “this situation is not in accordance with the intention of the legislator, which was to guarantee full coverage of the territory by DTT by obliging DTT channels to make their signal available free of charge to a satellite distributor who makes it the request”, she recalls. Four years earlier, commercial negotiations between the two audiovisual groups around the distribution of the free channels of the TF1 group generated this same situation of blockage. The cut in the signal from TF1 channels then caused an outcry among some viewers and led the Minister of Culture at the time, Françoise Nyssen, to summon Canal+ to restore the broadcasting of TF1 channels on the TNT Sat offer.