The story
TV5 was formed on 2 January 1984, under the guidance of Claude Cheysson, the French Minister for Foreign Affairs, and TV5 President Serge Adda, by five public television channels: TF1, Antenne 2 and FR3 from France, the Swiss Télévision Suisse Romande and the Belgian RTBF. The "5" from the name TV5 comes from the five public broadcasters. On 18 December 1985, TV5 was amongst the first four channels carried by cable television in France, inaugurated in Cergy-Pontoise. As of 1987, the channel broadcast eight hours a day; the first original programme produced for the channel was the game show Le juste mot, co-financed by the French Foreign Ministry, followed in January 1987 by Le club de l'Europe, produced by TV5 members FR3 and RTBF and with the support of the European Commission, a programme about European news, whose first invitee was Jacques Delors.
Following its privatisation in 1987, TF1 retired from the TV5 consortium but continued to supply its programmes to the channel until 1995. On 1 September 1988, TV5 Québec Canada was created, followed by TV5 Afrique in 1991. The following year, TV5 transmitted using digital compression towards Latin America and the Caribbean. Its coverage was expanded in 1996 with the launch of its Asian-Pacific signal with TV5 Asie-Pacifique and the subscription channel TV5 États-Unis in the United States. Two years later, the Middle East feed was launched with TV5 Moyen-Orient in 1998.
In 1997, TV5Monde had an "insufficient" three-hour content agreement with The International Channel. Since October 1996, plans were made to launch a dedicated feed of the channel for the United States and Latin America, to be delivered using the Panamsat 3 satellite.
In early 1999, TV5 split its European signal into two, with the launch of TV5 France Belgique Suisse, a signal specific to Francophone Europe (France, Belgium, Switzerland, Monaco, Luxembourg). TV5 Europe continued to serve the wider continental audience.
A consortium formed by public channels Arte and La Cinquième entered into the capital of the channel, which brought with it new sources of programming. A new schedule was constructed, centred on news programmes such as news flashes on the hour, two TV5 bulletins and rebroadcasts of its partners' main news programmes (20 Heures from France 2, Soir 3 from France 3, Le Journal from TSR/RTS and 13 Heures from RTBF).
A meeting with ministers from TV5 in Vevey, Switzerland, gave a mandate to the channel's council of co-operation to reform the structure of the channel in the view of creating a unique worldwide channel. The national governments in charge of the five participants gave an agreement to turn management of TV5 États-Unis and TV5 Amérique Latine over to TV5 Monde, the new name for the channel's head operations in Paris.
From the September 11 attacks in 2001 to the 2003 Iraq War, the media coverage put the spotlight on TV5's particular way of broadcasting news bulletins from its member public broadcasters. International conflicts arising from the decision to go to war by the United States and the United Kingdom in which France notably refused to participate had relaunched the debate over whether to create an international news channel from a French perspective, resulting in the 2006 launch of France 24.
With the creation of France 24 placing TV5's own existence in doubt, its new CEO, Jean-Jacques Aillagon decided from 1 January 2006 to rename the channel to TV5Monde to underline its status better as the only international Francophone channel available on-air (France 24 was then available only in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the United States cities of New York and Washington, DC, in French). Aillagon stepped down from his post on 3 March 2006.
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The name TV5Monde applies only to its eight different signals, broadcast from its Paris headquarters. In Canada, such as in French-speaking Quebec, TV5 Quebec Canada is managed from Montreal, which keeps the original name "TV5", as it is operated by an independent company that is distinct from TV5Monde. As well as being part of the TV5 family, TV5 Quebec Canada has its own management and its schedule is made with the Canadian viewer in mind and to conform to Canadian broadcast regulations, which, sets domestic production quotas and limits foreign investors to a minority stake.
In 2007, a new programme schedule saw the reduction of programming from France Télévisions (France 2, 3 and 5), for example, ti one daily news bulletin from France 2 by abandoning France 3's midday news programme. In 2008, TV5Monde became part of holding company France Monde.
In 2009, TV5Monde split its Asia-Pacific signal into two, one of them being TV5Monde Asie, a feed for territories located between GMT+8 (Hong Kong) and GMT+12 (New Zealand). TV5Monde's Pacific signal is an adaptation of its existing Asian signal that has been adopted to its time zones to serve its viewers better. It currently broadcasts in Oceania and, despite the signal's name, in Japan, South Korea and South East Asia.
On 25 February 2015, the new signal TV5Monde Brésil was launched broadcasting its programming with Portuguese subtitles.
Monaco was announced to be joining the service with its public service broadcaster, TVMonaco (formerly called Monte-Carlo Riviera TV before its launch), from 1 September 2023.
On 8 May 2026, the National Communication Observatory in Niger suspended TV5Monde due to its "repeated dissemination of content likely to seriously undermine public order, national unity, social cohesion, and the stability of republican institutions". The decision was criticised by the Committee to Protect Journalists as "censorship".
April 2015 cyberattack and resulting disruption
On the evening of 8 April 2015, TV5Monde was the victim of a cyberattack by a hacker group known as "CyberCaliphate", which claimed to have ties to the terrorist organization Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The hackers breached the broadcaster's internal systems in what Director Yves Bigot described as an "unprecedented" attack, overriding TV5Monde's broadcast programming for over three hours, with service only partially restored in the early hours of the following morning. Normal broadcasting services were still disrupted late into 9 April. Various computerised internal administrative and support systems including e-mail were also still shut down or otherwise inaccessible because of the attack. The hackers also hijacked TV5Monde's Facebook and Twitter pages to post the personal information of relatives of French soldiers participating in actions against the organization, along with messages critical of President François Hollande arguing that the January 2015 terrorist attacks were "gifts" for his "unforgivable mistake" of partaking in conflicts that "[serve] no purpose".
As part of the official response to the attack, the French Minister of Culture and Communications, Fleur Pellerin, called for an emergency meeting of the heads of various major media outlets and groups. The meeting took place on 10 April at an undisclosed location. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls called the attack "an unacceptable insult to freedom of information and expression". A colleague in his cabinet, the Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, attempted to allay public concern by stating that France "had already increased its anti-hacking measures to protect against cyber-attacks" since the aforementioned terrorist attacks on January earlier that year, which had left a total of 20 people dead.
French investigators later discounted the theory that the attack was connected to ISIL but instead suspected the APT28 or Pawn Storm, a hacking group with alleged links to the Russian government. Investigators concluded that the attack was a test of the same sorts of cyberweaponry that were used to switch off a power station in Ukraine.
As a result, Airbus Defence and Space implemented the Keelback Net cybersensor.
From Wikipedia’s article on TV5Monde, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5