Canal France International

Mr. Webber from Jayapura, thank you for your letter to the Editor published in The Jakarta Post on November 21, 1994, about the "newly found satellite treasure," Canal France International (CFI).

Be sure that you are not the only viewer of CFI to wish that the programs could be dubbed or subtitled in a language they could understand, which of course does not necessarily mean French or English, as international as those languages appear to be.

But let's be honest and admit that broadcasting some programs in English would certainly increase the number of viewers of the channel.

Actually, some programs already are in English, like the France 2 daily news bulletin at 4:26 GMT, the AITV daily news items at 10:00 GMT and the magazine French Focus every Friday at 4:00 GMT. We have also just started broadcasting some sports events with English commentary. I do agree, we can do better...but we are working on it.

A bit of history first. CFI was created in 1989 to feed programs to televisions in French speaking Africa. Because of the general demand for an alternative to the usual powerful blockbuster US networks, CFI quickly spread to other areas and is now available all around the world, mostly in French, because it takes time and a lot of money to dub and broadcast foreign language versions of programs coming mainly from French TV channels and production houses. But some day soon, we will get there.

In 1995, specific funding should be available to develop daily Asian "windows" with programs mainly in English and to produce international news bulletins.

As for programs in Indonesian, it will have to wait a little longer, when we start broadcasting in digital compression which will then enable CFI to run different signals concurrently for specific target audiences. But it can happen.

As you see, we may be chauvinistic and proud of our country (and why not after all!), but we are nevertheless thinking of you and of all of people who do not speak French (yet !!), simply because we want you to make the most of our treasured CFI and give you an opportunity to savor the alternative voice of a television with a difference.

And by the way, CFI publishes a monthly (bilingual!) program you may wish to subscribe to. If so, just call on us, and I do wish you a great time with CFI. The channel may not be all in an language you can understand (what a challenge!), but it will remain free and, for sure, it will never get encrypted.

ALAIN MONTEIL

Cultural Attache

French Embassy

Jakarta