how the encrypted channel reinvented itself to resist Netflix

«At 40 years old, Canal+ has never been so young or so powerful”says Gérald-Brice Viret, the general director of Canal+ France in charge of programs and channels. Inaugurated on November 4, 1984 by Havas and its boss André Rousselet, the small encrypted channel which wanted to please the executives of François Mitterrand's France has become a large international group. It has 26.8 million subscribers worldwide, including 10.6 million in France.

«There has been an acceleration over the last 10 and even 5 years,” explained Gérald Brice Viret. “In the collective imagination, Canal+ was still in 2014 the channel of Guignols, of Grand journal, of Ligue 1 and the cinema which was watched from the living room station, thanks to a decoder, recalls Christophe Pinard-Legry, the general director of Canal+ France in charge of business. At the time, when Netflix arrived on the French market, everyone wondered about Canal+'s ability to cope with this…