Paris--"Game of Thrones" may finally bring a change in Europe that various wars and EU bureaucracy have failed to bring about: making English a common language -- on TV screens, at least.
Ambitions to rival US television superproductions are forcing European companies to put aside national pride and linguistic defences to jointly make their own expensive co-productions, and that means necessarily using the world's most widely understood tongue, according to executives at an international TV content fair in the French Riviera city of Cannes.
"In each European country, TV networks finance series to the tune of 800,000 to 1.2 million euros per hour, compared to three million euros an hour on American networks," Romain Bessi, the operating director for the StudioCanal production subsidiary of French channel Canal+, told AFP.
"European networks are now seeking to team up to finance productions for three to four million per hour," he said.
AFP
