Free says no to Netflix for now

French service provider Free will not follow its peers amongst the country’s ISPs and give carriage to Netflix immediately, according to the company’s CEO, Maxime Lombardini.

Lombardini, speaking at a colloquium organized by telecom regulator ARCEP, said that to accept the conditions offered by the US subscription video-on-demand provider, as the country’s other operators have done, did not “seem to us to be a good idea”.

Netflix is believed to have offered a 10% cut of its revenues to French operators ahead of its launch in the country, considerably less than the 30% average for such deals in France. The terms of the actual deals struck between Netflix and SFR, Orange and Bouygues Telecom have not been revealed.

Lombardini also said that adoption of the Android operating system by French ISPs – already in train with the new generation of boxes deployed by SFR and Bouygues Telecom – threatened to hand over control by operators of access to their platforms to Google.