Do you know plein ecran? featuring Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet

If you don´t speak French, you probably never saw the TV-show: Plein Ecran.

Hosted by LCI, a French cable news channel (CNN-like) owned by TF1 (first TV channel in France), Plein Ecran is kind of an UFO on the French TV market.  An UFO in a really positive way.

Last week,  Cedric Ingrand (Plein Ecran presentator) invited Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, French Minister for numerical development, also know as @nk_m on Twitter. While the right and left wings are fighting in a useless politic argument about the already-outdated Hadopi law, this young minister, also known as the sister of Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet, is starting several interesting reforms to put France on the right path again. I will write several articles during the coming week about these projects, ranging from new economic models for the entertainment industry to e-education for kids, seniors and Internet non-users.

But before that, I wanted to tell you a bit more about this TV-show: Plein Ecran. There are several things I really like about this program:

- First, its presentator: Cedric Ingrand started this weekly TV show several years ago. He came from being a “regular” journalist to being the most connected journalist I know in his field in France. By journalist I mean a “real” journalist, not a professional blogger like Techcrunch or ReadWriteWeb for instance (don’t take me wrong, all are really good, they just don’t do the same job). He is regularly using Twitter, traveling all over the world for events like the E3, trying to blog,  and moreover, he became the most famous french IT TV journalist in the start-up universe. He already received on stage Jérome Archambeaud (Skype director for France), Jef Bezos (American founder, president, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of  Amazon.com), Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet, founder of Priceminster.com… just to name a few.

- Second, the way PLein Ecran is featured: The first half on Television and the second half, called Plein Ecran 2.0, in streaming and podcast. Living abroad, I simply grab the podcast version but this iniative has to be pointed out as it is a really good interconnection of two different medias (I will write an article, about the possibilities of such connections, later on). I only regret that the possible interactions are really low after arriving on the online version… It seems, however, that Loic Le Meur has finally convinced Cedric to use Seesmic for preparing his latest edition by allowing Internet users to ask questions to Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet. Or is it maybe the advance taken by UK and USA medias?!

- Third, the way Cedric Ingrand is learning: When I started watching this TV-show, the subjects were quite basic and the used language quite generic. Since then, I really saw an evolution in Cedric’s expertise and the subjects’ quality. It went from being the same as you could read in any other general newspaper or TV channel, with basic interviews, to real discussions where Cedric does not hesitate to give his point of view and use really well documented arguments. There is of course a certain limit due to the pressure coming from motherland, TF1, but he does invite persons from all backgrounds with completely different points of view.

- And as a final point: Being a pure product of the Internet generation, I stopped watching television on a regular basis a long time ago. Plein Ecran is the only “classic” TV-show I’m still watching being related to new technologies and I had to point it out. Thank you Cedric, and Guillaume for your video games industry reviews. Keep on the good work!

See you next week for a serie of articles about the evolution of the French government attitude towards Internet.