Television. Hours of nature and animal images: why is "slow TV" so exciting?

Over four hours of videos of a walk through a Canadian forest or in the heart of the ocean, watched by millions of viewers. This "slow TV" content is gradually winning over audiences. No commentary, no narration, no music, just raw noise for several hours, the complete opposite of our hectic digital daily lives. Content that invites you to slow down and contemplate the images, to be immersed somewhere, even when nothing is happening.

The concept of slow TV has exploded in Norway since Norwegian public broadcaster NRK broadcast the seven-hour train journey between Bergen and Oslo in 2009, captivating 1.2 million viewers—nearly a quarter of the country's population. In Sweden, the "Great Elk Migration" has been broadcast on a streaming platform since 2019. More than nine million viewers followed the elk's migration to summer pastures for three weeks, filmed 24/7.

In France, the experiment was attempted by France 24, which broadcast Tokyo Reverse , a boy's 9-hour stroll through Tokyo. While the program attracted only 29,000 viewers in 2014, more than ten years later, the trend could well be reversed. Faced with the abundance of content and digital over-solicitation, these soothing but captivating programs are attracting more and more people. "I love being able to immerse myself in nature from home, hearing the rustle of the leaves and the birds singing, it's so relaxing," writes one Internet user under a video of a walk in the forest.

France Télévisions will also try this experiment by offering a new program: starting Monday, September 8, for three weeks, viewers will be able to follow the roar of the deer, which announces the mating season, night and day, from the forest of Rambouillet, in Yvelines, thanks to a system of seven autonomous cameras equipped with infrared installed to film without disturbing the animals and to be in total immersion.

Pierre Singer, director of the Rambouillet space, participated in the development of this system. "I would almost say that it is the culmination of 40 years dedicated to this animal. I am extremely happy and extremely proud because we must reconnect our fellow citizens with nature. It is very important to understand what is happening in nature and here, we are going to do it, but with safeguards. This natural event, very spectacular, is above all the reproduction of a species," explains the man who spent more than thirty years at the head of the Sainte-Croix animal park, in Moselle. These 504 hours of live coverage of the deer's rut ​​will be broadcast on France.tv and on France 3 Paris Île-de-France.

The roar of the deer, starting this Monday, September 8, on france.tv and France 3 Paris Île-de-France.