France — Loudness of Television Programmes and Commercials

Almost every loudness figure in this reference is a recommendation. A broadcaster adopts it, a delivery spec cites it, and a file that misses it is rejected commercially rather than unlawfully. France is different: deliberation 2011-29 of 19 July 2011 is a legal instrument.

And the number that matters is not the one it shares with everyone else. EBU R 128 s1 caps short-term loudness on short-form content at −18.0 LUFS. France caps commercials at −20 LUFS — two units tighter. A spot built to the European supplement is not automatically compliant in France.

A ±7 LU constraint on dialogue dynamics has no equivalent in the EBU recommendations, and it is a mix instruction rather than a delivery measurement. It says the spread of dialogue loudness across a programme must stay inside a window, which is a statement about how the dialogue was ridden and edited, not about the final integrated figure.

Together with the Loudness Range ceiling of 20 LU it makes France the most prescriptive of the territories in this reference about what happens INSIDE a programme, rather than only what it measures overall.

⚠️ No true-peak limit appears in this deliberation. That is a statement about this document, not a statement that French delivery has no peak ceiling — a broadcaster's own technical specification may impose one, and most do.

The deliberation also carries earlier transitional values for 2012, when commercials were permitted at −22 LUFS average and −18 LUFS short-term. Those are superseded and are noted here only so a reader who finds them elsewhere knows what they are looking at.